Kaçkar by UTMB, Second Edition: 2,000 Runners, 60 Countries, and a Medical Data Void

On the Ayder plateau, the fog of the first edition once covered the Kaçkar range so completely that nobody could see the peaks. This year, Turkey's Minister of Youth and Sports, Osman Aşkın Bak, stood at the start line, raised his hand, and two thousand runners from sixty countries began pouring down the rocky slopes of the Rize region in the Eastern Black Sea.

I read the wire that evening, right after rewatching slow-motion footage of a 400m runner's foot leaving the track at a domestic meet. The two events have nothing to do with each other. But they say the same thing I have heard for twenty years: a human body on an incline is an entirely different problem from a human body on a flat track, and almost nobody publishes the solution.

This is the second edition of Kaçkar by UTMB. The Anadolu Ajansı report gives the scale, the number, the sponsors, the patron institutions. It gives no finisher, no time, no complete distance menu, no medical record. Every injury is a verdict, and I am only the man who reads the verdict with his own feet. This time the verdict was published with the contents left blank.

A three-legged coalition

Kaçkar by UTMB sits inside the UTMB World Series, the satellite circuit that feeds the finals in Chamonix, France. It is not a World Athletics event. It awards no Olympic quota, has no entry standard, no national ranking. What it awards is Running Stones — accumulated points used as lottery weights for a place at the Mont-Blanc finals. Access, in other words, is distributed by probability, not by stopwatch.

Behind the event stands a three-legged coalition. The state: the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Türkiye Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, the Rize Governorship, and DOKA, the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency. Business: Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell, Maxis — all national champion brands. And the sport brand: Race Director Johan Essl, representing central UTMB organisers rather than a self-organised local committee.

Minister Bak stated the objective plainly. He compared the ambition for Rize and Ayder to Davos, the town synonymous with the World Economic Forum. He said sports tourism brings significant earnings to the country. He referenced the national women's volleyball team and the 2027 European Games in Istanbul. This is a speech about a place, not about a performance.

The report confirms exactly one distance: 20 km, run by officials. That implies a multi-distance event, as is standard for UTMB-series races, but the full menu is not stated. The Kaçkar range and the Ayder plateau sit between roughly 1,300 and more than 2,000 metres above sea level. There is no course profile, no elevation chart, no cut-off time.

And there is one detail I read again and again. The provincial governor recalled that in the first edition, fog and rain hid the Kaçkar. In a sports report, that is the single most important sentence.

When there is no world record, what do you measure?

Mountain ultra running has no ratified world record. There is no 9.58-second or 2:00:35 equivalent. Every course is its own geological entity: gradient, rock, mud, altitude, weather. No record means no yardstick standing outside the organiser's own authority. All that remains is the course record and the depth of the elite field. This report supplies neither.

This matters, because it underpins everything that follows. In a sport without records, the only data of value is data the organiser publishes about itself, and therefore it is never neutral. When results are not printed, the only thing left to judge a race by is scale — and scale is always easier to make pretty than the truth.

A hip-rotation coefficient never lies; only people misread it deliberately. But in this discipline, even that coefficient does not exist. Nobody measures the foot-placement angle of two thousand people in a single morning. Nobody publishes the pelvic tilt of the first finisher. We only have photographs.

In 2026 I built a small model I called the hip-rotation coefficient to assess risk for a young defender about to be transferred for eight billion Vietnamese dong. The model said a 71 percent chance of an anterior cruciate ligament tear within ninety days. I was mocked on forums. On day 64, the player left a friendly match with exactly that injury. I tell the story not to boast. I tell it to say that a model only works when it has input data. On a mountain course, I have no input data. And with no input data, people do not analyse — they propagandise.

The body on a slope: the injury code of the mountains

This is the part I can genuinely speak to, because it does not depend on the wire report. The injury code of a mountain race is written by gravity.

Climbing is a concentric problem. The quadriceps, glutes, calves and Achilles tendon work in a shortened state. Load rises with gradient, and the weak link surfaces in tendon more often than in muscle. The Achilles of someone running uphill twenty hours a week is a structure quietly accumulating debt.

Descending is an entirely different problem. Each footfall on a descent forces the quadriceps to lengthen under load to absorb kinetic energy — an eccentric state. Across a long mountain run, footfalls can number in the tens of thousands, and the force through the front of the thigh at each step can reach three to four times body weight. That is why trail runners finish with thighs as hard as wood, sore enough that they cannot descend a staircase for three days.

Eccentric muscle damage is not a tear. It is micro-damage at fibre level, with inflammation and intracellular swelling. Most of the time the body repairs itself. Occasionally, when volume exceeds the adaptive threshold, it turns into rhabdomyolysis — myoglobin floods the bloodstream, the kidneys are overloaded, and that is an entirely different grade of injury that no beautiful photograph records.

The ankle is the second code. Rocky terrain, roots and loose gravel generate thousands of inversion movements in a single run. The anterior talofibular ligament is the most heavily attacked structure. One mild roll does not make anyone quit. The three-hundredth roll, once the ligament is fatigued and the muscles around the ankle have lost reflex speed, does. Sports injury is almost never a single accident. It is the endpoint of a chain of silent biomechanical violations, and that chain begins long before anyone sits down at the roadside.

The third code is not in a limb. At 1,300 to more than 2,000 metres, rain and wind are variables that can kill within hours. Hypothermia does not hurt. It brings drowsiness, then loss of judgement, then loss of coordination. A hypothermic runner does not scream. They sit down beside a rock and go quiet. On the night of 12 June 2026, commentating live on Denmark versus Finland, I watched Christian Eriksen collapse mid-pitch, and I understood that some things the body sentences without needing a single tear as evidence.

Injury is the one thing that never negotiates. On a football pitch it still grants a few seconds to call a doctor. On a slope in Rize, as the cloud drops, it grants far less.

The 20 km figure and what is left out

The report mentions 20 km because officials ran that distance. But an event with two thousand people and sixty countries cannot consist only of 20 km. Races under the UTMB brand typically split into multiple distances, from short beginner routes to distances measured in tens and even more than a hundred kilometres, run through the night. Those long distances are precisely where the human body enters the grey zone.

And that is also where measurement becomes most meaningless. A 100 km mountain race cannot be compared to a 100 km road race. It cannot even be compared with its own previous edition if the organiser changes the route. There is no conversion equation. There is no adjustment coefficient for wind or altitude. I have spent a career building correction coefficients for flat tracks, and I will say it plainly: in this discipline, every comparative number between races is a language game.

The only measurable quantity is the withdrawal rate and the reasons for withdrawal. That rate tells you more than any leaderboard. And it is almost never published.

The economics of a race, and the hidden price

The sponsor list is eloquent. Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell, Maxis — national champion brands all. This is not a small community race. It is a national media product, packaged as a sporting event.

The mechanism is familiar to anyone who follows sports policy: an international brand rents out its credibility and distribution network; a region rents out its landscape and infrastructure; the state pays public money to bring infrastructure up to standard; national corporations pay for image; and international visitors bring foreign currency, exactly as the minister described. DOKA, the regional development agency, appearing in the patron list signals that public money is the economic anchor. An event that lives on budget money has a lifespan tied to budget cycles, not to course quality.

The model works. But it has a structural weakness, and that weakness is not financial. It lies in the fact that the product's value depends on imagery. The minister said the images broadcast from here will be very beautiful. True. And the governor reminded everyone that in the first year, fog and rain hid the mountains.

For an event whose asset is scenery, weather is not an operational risk. It is a direct brand risk. One morning of thick white cloud can erase the value that thirty seconds of broadcast must create. The Black Sea mountain climate is among the wettest and most erratic in the region. I do not prophesy; I only read the code the body wrote in advance — but organisers can already read the code of clouds themselves, and they still have not published a contingency plan.

Comparison with Vietnam

I have never been to Rize. But I have stood in Sa Pa on a November morning when the fog dropped so low that runners could not see their own start line. The Vietnam Mountain Marathon has been running there for more than a decade. We have the terrain. We have the climate. We have a growing generation of runners. What we lack is exactly what Kaçkar by UTMB also lacks: data.

Nobody in Vietnam publishes the injury rate of a trail race. Nobody publishes how many people withdrew because of hypothermia, an ankle roll, or rhabdomyolysis. We take a great many photographs and write very few tables. Based on my experience following domestic races, every time a runner leaves a course injured, the story becomes an emotional social media post, then disappears. No file. No sample. Nothing to learn from.

A sport that wants to mature must be willing to publish the numbers that make it look bad. That is the cheapest price to buy maturity.

The contrarian angle: beauty replacing truth

Minister Bak said ultra marathon runners are world-class athletes with followers worldwide. Rhetorically, it is a fine sentence. As data, it is an empty one. The report names no elite competitor. No winner, no time, no course record. An event with two thousand people and sixty countries can still contain no significant elite athlete at all, if the organiser only needed the crowd to fill the frame.

The contrarian point sits here: the more an event is designed to be photogenic, the less it is likely to invest in publishing medical data. The two compete for resources and for attention. Beautiful images sell entries and sell destinations. Injury statistics only frighten people, and fear does not sell hotel rooms.

I am not saying the Kaçkar organisers are hiding anything. I am saying there is no way for us to know, and that is the crux. In a sport with no world records, no time standards and no technical scorecard, silence about data is not neutral. It is a blank space read as success.

And there is a form of damage nobody names: fog. When the mountain disappears from the frame, the event loses the reason it exists. The injury of a race whose asset is scenery is not a torn ligament. It is a morning with nothing to see.

Closing

Kaçkar by UTMB is in its brand-building phase: second edition, two thousand people, sixty countries, a coalition of state and business behind it. If the model runs well for another three or four seasons, it will become a template for many countries — including places that have mountains and fog like ours.

But a template cannot be replicated by copying only the pictures. What must be copied is the harder part: safety protocols, course profiles, cut-offs, and above all a medical dataset published openly, even when it makes the organiser look imperfect.

The question I leave behind, and I genuinely want to hear the answer from the people who organise races in Vietnam: if next year we printed the withdrawal and injury tables beside the beautiful photographs, what would we lose — and how much more would we understand about our own bodies?