✳️ Is Golden Trail Working For Salomon?

A Trailmix of news about the business of Trail Running

Hey Pals,

As i’ve gotten older Christmas has become more of a logistical puzzle.

When you’re younger it’s simply get some pressies for parents and friends and you’re set for the season. Now lt’s planning where you’re travelling on what day to see friends and family you’ve only seen a couple times this year, then spending inordinate amount of time trawling the internet scavenging for presents before finally executing on said plan and hoping it all comes together without a hitch. I haven’t even got kids or a house yet. I hear it only gets more manic.

In spite of all this, I love Christmas. Hence, this will be my final post of 2024 so i can revel in all the festivities.

Today we’re talking about the revamped Golden Trail Series and what it suggests about Salomon’s use of the event series moving forward.

In the words of Greg Lake, I wish you a hopeful Christmas and brave New Year.

Matt

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Is Golden Trail Working For Salomon?

What: The Golden Trail Series has announced wide-reaching changes to its World and National series races for the 2025 season.

The changes: After the Mont Blanc Marathon cut its relationship with Salomon, and consequently GTS, the 2025 races are a more international mix of traditional and new races.

Broken Arrow in Olympic Valley, US, moves up from a national series final to the World Series. Tepec Trail in Mexico and Salomon Pitz Alpine Glacier Trail in Austria have also moved into the World Series spots.

Meanwhile, the GTS has removed the National series support from most European and US markets, leaving only Australia, China, Japan and South Korea.

Race directors were informed of this change a few weeks before the announcement. According to XC-Run, GTS sent this email out to RDs in Germany a couple of weeks ago:

“Dear Trail Community,

Over the past three years, we have experienced fantastic sporting achievements, hard battles for podium places and great sportsmanship as part of the Golden Trail National Series DACH powered by Salomon.
Unfortunately, the national offshoot of the Golden Trail Series will no longer continue next year.
In the future, we will devote all our attention and commitment to the Golden Trail World Series powered by Salomon, which is also expected to include two races in the DACH region.

Thank you for the unique moments together in the National Series and we hope to see you again as part of the World Series!

Your team of GTNS-DACH”

Shane Ohly, CEO of Ourea Races which runs the Buttermere Skyline, the 2024 UK Golden Trail National Series Final, confirmed that Salomon Global had decided to pull support from most national series to reinvest in the world series.

GTS declined to comment on the announcement.

Matt’s Opinion: This feels like a change in strategy, but not a change in objective.

The original intention of the Golden Trail Series was to grow the number of trail runners in the market by investing in the marketing of core iconic events across Europe.

The scope of this has changed over time to more events in different markets, slowly encompassing all major markets in trail running with a National Series level of support, but maintaining the focus on a core World Series. Salomon, the primary backer of the event series, used their marketing budgets to fund the livestreaming and documentary series coverage of the World Series (side note: it seems past sponsors of GTS have backed out this year too as their Partners page is empty with a plea for help in its place). The thesis was that if Salomon maintained their market leading position, more media would equal more runners and in turn more shoe sales.

Over the past few years, GTS was the first trail running event series that struck a broadcasting deal with Eurosport bringing their livestreams to the big screen (that’s what we call TV’s now right?) across 60 different European markets. Greg Vollet in interviews was keen to stress that Eurosport has seen these live events as a success, even though Salomon made no money from the broadcasting deal. With the strict demands of live TV broadcasting, Salomon’s live-streaming operation and investment has needed to keep up, fuelled by their commitment to the underlying philosophy – more media = more money.

Last year when I asked how Salomon were measuring the ROI of their investment in GTS, Greg was uncertain, but the withdrawal of support for the National Series’ suggests to me their underlying investment thesis was beginning to turn out to not entirely add up.

The premise of Salomon’s GTS expenditure relies on Salomon maintaining the highest market share, so when the number of trail runners grows in their target markets, their sales will increase in proportion to their slice of the pie. Sure, they’d inadvertently grant competitors sales, but when they received the most money they weren’t bothered. However, this thesis was made in 2015 when Salomon was the top dog, but much has changed since then. With Hoka rapidly eating away Salomon’s market share across most global markets (and seeking to invest more in global markets next year), and with the trail running market becoming a lot more cluttered, Salomon’s position at the top has been challenged.

Salomon in recent years has tried to leverage the brand kudos of GTS by bringing Asian and now US markets into the World Series, wielding the series like a trojan horse in a bid to de-risk their investment and likely appease their Chinese owners, Anta. Now with the National Series staying only in Australia and Asian markets with no explanation as to why, what once might have seemed like a noble trail running crusade has been reduced to a mere marketing exercise, its expansive vision now compressed into a series of calculated regional beachheads.

The aim is the same, but how they get there is different.

With a revised blend of old and new races, It’s a very different proposition to what it has been before. Let’s just hope it’s a change in the right direction for the event series.

If we had a Group Chat, we’d talk about:

• Altra’s PR around their new contract with Tara Dower got a bit of airtime from Outside and Singletrack for it’s six figure number between $100K and $250K. Chunky. It’s a sizeable figure considering most athlete’s contracts aren’t enough to making a living from. It’s a step-forward for the sport on multiple fronts; income equality, pay transparency and journalism interest. For Altra it’s an stake in the ground of trail running to remind people that they still exist. This as well as their new ROA collaboration and move away from zero drop suggests Altra are trying to make some moves to reclaim the territory they lost.

• This interview of Robin Green, Hoka’s President, in Footwear News was revealing for how obvious it all sounds. When talking about next year’s plans Robin emphasised they will be striving to maintain authenticity, grow distribution thoughtfully, and expand internationally - a very textbook approach to scaling a brand. It’s a ‘cover-all-bases’ approach that won’t rock the investors boat. The caveat to this approach is the lack of focus that comes from a balanced approach. As Nike found over the past decade a lack of focused efforts leads a brand to be a ‘brand for everyone and a brand for no one’, losing it’s authenticity in the process. However with Robin’s history at Nike and Hoka’s history of being relatively conservative in their growth efforts it’s likely that Hoka won’t fall into the same pitfalls that befall many brands in running. Hoka's leadership likely recognises that the brand is at a critical juncture. Rapid growth has raised expectations from stakeholders (e.g., Deckers shareholders), and a balanced approach may feel like the safest way to maintain this momentum without alienating any customer base.

• Nike dropped it’s NFT shoe trading company RTFKT. As much as i tried, I never understood the value of NFT’s, but i admire Nike for investing in the frontier of digital artifacts. I saw a tweet somewhere that said something like “Nike shouldn’t be surprised that their investment in a company called ‘rat fucked’ failed”. Understandable when you put it like that.