✳️ From vitriol to ambivalence: UTMB’s 2024

How athlete’s sentiment towards UTMB became lukewarm

Hey pals,

It’s that time of year again. UTMB week is here and once again i will be there - but for only two days. If you’re around from Sunday 25th to Tuesday 27th, let’s chat! I would love to meet as many of you as possible. Whether you work for a brand, media outlet, race director or just a fan, reply to this email and let’s set something up :)

This year has been an odd one for UTMB - growing wildly, but having most of the internet hating your guts. For athletes, the year began with calls for UTMB boycotts but all gradually went quiet. Today i explore how that sentiment changed.

Hope you have a great week!

Matt

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Since last year’s race, UTMB’s relationship with athletes became increasingly fractured following a series of unfortunate events. There was the public spat over WAM, the dismissal of Corinne Malcolm (and the unsavoury comments after the fact), Killian and Zach’s leaked proposal for a boycott, Camille Heron’s live-tweeting of a PTRA meeting with UTMB, and many more .

It was looking like UTMB was losing touch with the athletes that made the race the icon it is in a death-by-a-thousand-cuts style. Then, on 13th March, the line-ups for all UTMB races were announced with some of the deepest fields the event has ever seen.

As the year progressed, the silence from once very vocal athletes grew. We’re now entering a race week that at the start of the year looked like it could be without some of the world’s top athletes.

So, what happened? How did athlete’s once vitriolic perception of UTMB change?

Over the past couple of week’s I’ve posited this question to many athletes and media personalities, most who only spoke off the record, and the response was mixed.

On the one hand, a few claimed that UTMB is still the public pariah in in their casual conversations with other athletes and that the attitude predominantly hasn’t changed since the start of the year. Their primary reasoning for competing is that their brand told them too and that it’s the biggest pay day. Hard to argue with that.

Simultaneously they appreciate the progress UTMB has made over the year but know that the only way to change the status quo is through ongoing collaboration and conversations through the work PTRA are doing.

So, in summary, TLDR, the attitude towards UTMB is 🤷.

Hardly the strongest foundation for what is meant to be the apex event for ultrarunning.

Underpinning this ambivalence is a bigger question that has yet to be settled – how much does ultrarunning want versus need UTMB?

This was a super interesting framing was posed by Corrine Malcolm, so I’m taking no credit for this. From an athlete’s perspective, Corrine referenced how currently there isn’t a controlling governing body where you have to compete in their events to be deemed the best in that sport. Think UCI, World Athletics etc. but in ultrarunning, the winner of UTMB is not officially the best at 100M races. It’s not an objective measure. It’s a strong case, but since athletes don’t need to go there to prove they’re the best, it’s hard to judge.

From a brand perspective, there is a desire to have a big annual event to capture the attention of the largest audience in one location without having to spread their budget thinly across multiple events. Additionally, headline events put a spotlight on the credibility of their sponsored athlete’s skill, and by association the products they use. However, capturing the ROI of these events is difficult, filled with solutions that give spurious conclusions and are hard to attribute directly back to the event itself. Hence UTMB is a nice to have, but you can achieve the same results without it. (I’d argue Hoka’s sponsorship into UTMB is slightly different due to the significance of their investment, allowing them benefits beyond UTMB week, but that’s an entirely different article).

Neither athletes nor brands strongly need UTMB yet, and the incentives are not decisive enough to sway feelings towards the event. As such, going to UTMB feels like an obligation, rather than a necessity.

UTMB knows this and has been on a strong athlete’s relations push since the start of this year. Alongside the public work with PTRA on policies such as the doping controls, prize purse, and pregnancy deferrals policies, Catherine Poletti and other members of UTMB have been on a North American tour, speaking to athletes and media personalities, such as Dylan Bowman, on what they can do to rebuild trust in the North American community. Some left those conversations positive and hopeful for the future of UTMB, but some left it unsure about whether UTMB has a plan for the future of the sport or knows what they’re doing.

Oddly, this fluidity is an opportunity for athletes and the PTRA to mould the future of UTMB, and the sport, to have a say in the direction they go. The conversations between the UTMB team and athletes are not always successful, and there is still a lot the PTRA and UTMB disagree on, but like all ongoing negotiations there is some give and take. As long as both parties feel they’re winning enough ground without losing their dignity or control, the tension between UTMB and athletes will continue to cool.

Ambivalence is a move in the right direction for UTMB - better than vitriol, worse than advocacy. Yet with a plethora of other races, no central governing body and the World Trail Majors finding its footing, there is no guarantee for UTMB that the same athletes will return year after year. If it weren’t for the invisible hand of brand sponsorship dollars influencing where athletes competed, the racing landscape would look a lot different.