✳️ Camille and Satisfy Take Flight

A Trailmix of news and opinions on the trail running industry

Hey pals 👋 Finally ran my first 50miler of the year yesterday. Refreshing, rewarding, knackering - just how it should be. Thanks to Stef, Tom and Luke at the Peak Divide for a quality route.

Marley Dickinson’s story this week about Camille Herron’s alleged Wikipedia shenanigans was baffling, but what a testament to the ability of journalism to enrapture an entire sport. We have more about what the story says about our sport below and another piece on the start of niche running brands finding their wings.

Hope you have a great week,

Matt

Photo: Howie Stern

The Camille Herron story takes flight

What? The revelations about Camille Herron and her husband, Conor Holt’s, various edits on Wikipedia discrediting other runners has taken the ultrarunning community by storm.

Context: On Tuesday Journalist Marley Dickinson published an article in Canadian Running Magazine claiming that both Camille Herron and Conor Holt had been editing Camille and other athlete’s (such as Courtney Dauwalter and Killian Jornet’s) Wikipedia pages.

The edits removed phrases such as ‘widely regarded as one of the best trail runners ever’ from both athlete’s page’s due to ‘puffery’ and instead edited Camille’s page to include the phrase “widely regarded as one of the greatest ultramarathon runners of all time.”

For the full context, read Marley’s piece here.

I was going to write about the background to the piece, but Trailrunner beat me to it - read here

There’s more…This comes off the back of recent news this year where Camille has repeatedly alleged Stine Rex, an ultrarunner who has beaten both of Camille’s 48hr and 6 day records this year, cheated in both events. Trishul Chens, the president of GOMU, the global organisation of multi-day ultramarathoners, wrote in a Danish article that

“Camille Herron is a good athlete, there is no doubt about that. But she uses unsportsmanlike methods when she tries to create rumours, accuse and confuse, and thus cast doubt on Stine's performance”

The storm: After the story came out, it racked up over 300,000 unique visitors in 3 days and the ultrarunning community was filled with everything from meme’s to vitriol. Two days after the news broke, Lululemon dropped their sponsorship of Camille Herron. According to Albert Jorquera, the General Secretary of the Pro Trail Runners Association where Camille is on two athletes groups focused on Anti-Doping and Women’s Equality, the association is discussing the situation internally.

Matt’s opinion: Okay, let’s take a breather here. We don’t know the full story yet. Marley’s digital sleuthing was exceptional, and it’s great to see a reminder of what journalism in running can look like, but we still don’t really know why Conor or Camille did this. So let’s pause on the event for now and step back.

Herron’s actions highlight a deeper issue within sports, especially in niche communities like trail running. Unlike mainstream athletes, whose records are carefully tracked and preserved by major organizations, trail runners often rely on passionate volunteers to update their Wikipedia profiles. This makes the site a crucial but fragile archive of their achievements. For someone like Herron, whose name is intertwined with ultrarunning’s greatest achievements, the stakes are high. Wikipedia, despite its promise of neutrality, has become a place where an athlete’s legacy can be built or undone, not by the athlete themselves, but by anonymous strangers, amateur historians, and sometimes, as we’ve seen, by the athletes’ partners.

But by editing the pages of her rivals, Camille and Conor have stepped into ethically murky waters. What started as a fight to preserve her own legacy turned into a public struggle for dominance, one played out not on the trail but on the world’s most-read encyclopedia. This battle over perception reveals the competitive nature of athletes—not just in races but in how their stories are told.

Ultimately, Camille Herron’s Wikipedia saga serves as a reminder of how powerful the platform has become. It’s not just a neutral record; it’s a battleground for legacy, where even the best athletes in the world can feel vulnerable to how they’re remembered. In an era where a quick Google search can shape public opinion, the struggle to control one’s narrative has become as important as any race.

Trail running is an arena where the brutal honesty of the sport—the sheer, naked exhaustion of it—seems to stand apart from the manufactured rivalries of mainstream athletics. The dirt, the solitude, the way the mountains strip you down to nothing but willpower and breath. And yet, here we are, seeing one of its brightest stars caught in a quiet, behind-the-scenes struggle over the one thing she can’t completely control: her legacy.

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Satisfy Begins it’s expansion into Shoes and the US

What? Satisfy are expanding their business into footwear and the US.

Recent hire Jean-Marc Djian, previous formative VP of product marketing at Salomon and oversaw the transformation of North Face’s shoe portfolio, marks Satisfy’s move into footwear. This would not be Satisfy’s first foray into footwear after two sold out collaborations with Hoka where was able to demonstrate demand for a ‘Satisfy’ shoe.

Additionally Satisfy have hired Bill Sterling in a newly created position of Head of Wholesale Distribution for the United States and are looking to hire 60+ sales force employees in the US, according to a Freetrail podcast with Jean-Marc on Wednesday this week. This marks the first public usage of the VC investment Satisfy received in 2021 from BPIFrance to expand their footprint in the US and Asia.

Matt’s opinion: last year at UTMB the question multiple brand managers asked me was what i thought about Satisfy and their chances of success in the sport. My answer was fumbled since it was so early in Satisfy’s life and they hadn’t really showed their hand. They have a distinctive brand, hungry audience and likely huge margins so my response was that they’d do just fine. Not the most fuego of takes, but it’s a recipe for sustainable success if they kept their innovative edge and cult-like status.

Now that they have begun to invest in brand campaigns, multiple ‘Satisfy style’ activations at races across the world and the human firepower to boot, this is likely the beginning of the ascendancy of Satisfy from boutique brand to scale-up running brand.

They’re not the only running brand to reach this stage. If you look at Tracksmith or Janji, both emerged in the 2010s, before the COVID-era running boom, and each has taken a different approach to scaling. Tracksmith has invested in its own branded physical retail spaces and "community hubs" to control the brand experience and provide a central gathering spot for loyal customers. While both brands are primarily DTC-focused, Janji has explored more wholesale partnerships to support their international expansion and strengthen ties within the community. Tracksmith, meanwhile, has developed its own shoe, the Eliot, to test its capacity for innovation in footwear, while Janji has opted for partnerships with La Sportiva to gain insights into the sector without overcommitting to design, staffing, and production.

The point is that Satisfy, like other brands that have thrived since the 2010s, is searching for its next big move—the transition from being a small player to a brand that commands greater attention. How they achieve this depends on what aligns best with their brand and business strategy. For Satisfy, maybe that’s shoes.

What we’d chat about if we had a water cooler

• Nike have rehired Elliot Hill as their CEO after John Donahoe got the boot for years of decline. There’s enough commentary across LinkedIn that you don’t need anymore hot takes on the matter, but I’ll say this - is this a return to the recognition of the significance of long term brand building in sports brands? We saw North Face come out with their new positioning ‘We play different’ and Brook’s ‘Let’s run there’ and Hoka have really doubled down on their ‘Fly Human Fly’ in recent years. These are likely examples of brands reacting to a changing market, but focusing on brand-building also helps counter the narrative of younger brand-first upstarts and boosts the company perception in those that aren’t current customers. The one big ol’ caveat on this is that Nike is still beholden to short term financial targets for their shareholders, so the biggest task is reorienting the internal culture and managing the external expectations to allow room for short term slow-down in sales and margin that proper brand investment always comes with.

• After 20+ years together, Mont Blanc Marathon is parting ways with Salomon as their title sponsor, and with it, their spot on the Golden Trail World Series.

• As the UTMB World Series Mauritius event shuts after one year, UTMB announced two more events in China. I remember the year (2022) when UTMB claimed they hoped to have 40 events… now at 51 there’s no stopping them.

• Tour Des Geants snuck in a sponsorship deal with Ford days before the event without any press release, much to the Green Runner’s chagrin when co-founder Damian Hall was running TDG a few days later.