35// The Remarkable Rise of Trail Running in China

And UTMB’s impact on it…

Hey pals,

A different one today, but significant to the growth of trail running - the rise of trail running in China.

Despite having only 10 years of trail running history in China, the rate of growth is astounding. But recent economic and cultural events is taking the nation on a different trajectory.

I have undoubtedly missed tonnes (e.g. the pro side of the sport) but i didn’t want to send you a 15 minute long 2000 word essay, so take this as a taster to their recent past.

Regardless, this was a fascinating area to research that touched on the involvement of politics, geography and commerce in trail running.

Hope you enjoy and do share this newsletter if you find it interesting - its the fastest way this newsletter grows!

Matt

Over the past three weeks UTMB has announced three new races in China, Mauritius and Ecuador, bringing their World Series race total to 39 in 2024. The pace of growth is relentless.

UTMB are seeking to capitalise on markets where there is disorganised competition and growing trail running populations by either creating new events or buying new ones.

One market is a particular focus for UTMB - China. With a fast growing appetite for trail running and historical success in the nation, China is an ideal market to cement UTMB’s ambition to be the global ultramarathon organisation. In a conversation a few weeks ago, Florian Lamblin said they could grow their footprint up to 5 races in China by 2025.

However, UTMB’s moves in the market come at a time when the community is recovering from the Gansu tragedy, where 21 people died from hypothermia, and recurring lockdowns, limiting runner’s access to trails. Whereas most markets have recovered in ultrarunning events, China still lags far behind the number of races it held 2019 races.

Additionally, international brands such as Nike are starting to see a slowdown in sales as younger population start to invest in local Chinese brands, in a trend called ‘GuoChao’.

It’s a community in transition but one set to make a significant impact economically and culturally.

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Trail running has had a short history in China. Without a storied history of running or mountain endurance events, China up until 2010’s hadn’t taken up running on scale, let alone trail running.

Yet following the decline communism and rise of capitalism, China began to take up running as an individualist middle class hobby at first, before discovering its social and communal benefits. Shortly after running took off in 2010 so too did trail running around 2013. Numbers vary between sources, but according to ITRA between 2013 and 2019 the number of trail running races went from roughly 10 to 500 and the number of participants went up to 150,000, the fastest growth rate of any country over the same time period.

The scene was rustic at the start with many learning how to run trails all at the same time. “No one really knew what they were doing.” Pavel Toropov, a race organiser in China stated in an interview “The organizers did not really know how to trace routes, the runners, including me, did not know how to manage such long races, they did not know how to train, "

Races companies sprung up to ride the tide of growing appetite for trail running competitions. The majority were held across regions with higher levels of development and history in running, Beijing and Zhenjiang for instance, but areas that had a richer tapestry of mountains, terrain and existing hiking paths, such as Yunnan, also saw a rise in races.

As much as grassroots involvement helped spark the growth of the trail running culture, government support sent trail running race and company development into overdrive.

As part of the 13th 5-year-plan of the State General Administration of Sports, sports tourism became a pillar to China’s growth, seen as a way to stimulate economic growth in hinterlands. As such, local governments saw opportunities to stimulate economic growth in their regions through the subsidisation of trail running events.

According to a survey in Outdoors Magazine, the average trail runner could spend roughly $305 around each race they attended including transport and accommodation. When scaled to the peak of runners in 2019, that equates to $228M of spend in local economies in a year.

Yunnan, with it’s practically alpine natural environment, in particular found itself at the center of this growth. By the end of 2019, almost 50% of it’s GDP came from tourism and it was the fifth largest host of trail running races. It was here in Yunnan that UTMB entered the picture.

Yunnan, China

In 2017 UTMB group and OC Sport (the sports marketing group who owned 40% of UTMB Group at the time) started their global expansion plans by creating “UTMB International” with Rémi Duchemin at the helm. The first development of their newfound partnership was in Yunnan when they struck a 4 year deal with Exploring Xingzhi Group (EXG) to make the ‘Gaoligong by UTMB’ race series with 160km, 125km and 55km races.

UTMB’s Chinese test in Gaoligong premiered in March 2018 capturing 1,815 runners according to a press kit, and moved to over 4000 by 2019.

OC Sport already had a partnership with EXG through their multi-day cycling series, Haute Route. This relationship came up again when UTMB launched their second race in 2018, the Panda Trail, in Dujiangyan with EXG.

In a statement at the launch of their partnership of EXG, Duchemin mentioned that the partnership with EXG was a “win-win”. “Exploring Xingzhi brings its knowledge and networks to help grow and structure trail running in Asia, while UTMB® International will support their marketing, commercial and operational actions.” In a separate article in Reuters however EXG stated in 2018 that trail running events in China “rarely made money” but that they hoped the growing population of trail runners would make up for it in the long run.

That hope was quickly dashed once the pandemic began, but even before then the trail running race scene was started to see cracks. The number of new race organisations reached its peak in 2016 at 120, but quickly dropped to 41 by 2019 and 23 in 2020.

UTMB International was also struggling in China, after they cancelled Gaoligong in 2020 and Panda Trail in 2021. When viewed with historical hindsight, this didn’t matter for as we know Ironman bought out OC Sport’s shares in 2021, bringing UTMB International to an end.

Even though UTMB had an opportunity to renew their contract with the contract with EXG in 2021, they went another route - they acquired Asia Sports Connection (ASC) for €360,000, a trail running events company who were distributors of LiveTrail and ran the TransLantau and TransJeju, both of which are now part of the UTMB World Series.

(In a quirk of ultrarunning history, TransLantau 2021 was announced as part of Spartan World Tour in January, months before UTMB acquired ASC. The event did not run due to government imposed travel restrictions, but I’m sure UTMB wouldn’t want one of their races to be part of their competitor’s world tour.)

When i asked Florian Lamblin why UTMB didn’t renew the contract with EXG, he stated that whilst there was a strong mutual desire to rekindle their partnership many ‘interlocutors’ at a institutional level had changed over COVID. They are confident that one of Gaoligong or Panda Trail will be back in 2 to 3 years.

Since 2022 the trail running scene has picked back up again with 92 races being run and 6,350 amount of people racing according to DUV. As running returns so does the economic retail engine behind it, but that hasn’t recovered as swiftly as many had expected.

As running became more mainstream, international brands such as Nike quickly became the running apparel and shoe brand of choice for Chinese runners. Local sports brands did spring up such as sports conglomerate Anta Sports, current owners of Amer Sports which houses Salomon and Arcteryx, but for a long time they never were able to sway the mainstream Chinese audience away from Nike. As such China became a reliable income stream for Nike taking up almost 40% of their annual revenue by 2020.

After China left its many stay-in-place orders, there was global expectation that retail sales would quickly return back to pre-pandemic figures. But that didn’t happen. On top of this, the younger Chinese population have begun to change their perspective on local products, no longer seeing them as inferior quality to international competitors, kickstarting the ‘Guochao’ trend. This has seen Nike’s sales not only slow down in China, but their sportswear market share also decline from 25% in 2021 to 22% in 2022.

Additionally Nike’s newest competitors, Hoka and On, have also established themselves strongly in the market. Both companies have taken a different approach to distribution than their typical online DTC lean having opened up 13 “offline” stores respectively in China, whilst maintaining an online DTC presence. Despite this physical presence, neither company comes anywhere near Nike’s mammoth $1.74bn revenue they achieved in Q1 2023 alone, but the competition is growing.

This week Nike reported in their Q1 that sales have bounced 5%, below analyst expectations, but shows promise that the retail sector is slowly returning, mimicking the same return of running.

Driven by a grassroots uprising and catalysed by government subsidies, trail running in China has rapidly progressed from burgeoning sub-culture to mass participation events.

If China keeps growing at its current rate, it may soon surpass the United States as the country with the most trail runners, pouring millions into trail running companies and perhaps even influencing trail running culture internationally.