✳️ UTMB’s Broadcasting Pipedream

Hey pals,

Last week marked the end of Ourea Events, the owners of iconic races that put the UK on the ultrarunning map: Dragons Back, Cape Wrath, and the Northern Traverse.

Shane Ohly, founder of Ourea, is someone who was always a great booster of our sport in the UK, so it’s gutting to see the company’s downfall. Over the past week the news has echoed across the sport’s media, influencers, LinkedIn posts as well as the BBC. Most coverage has rightly focused on the runners who’s race fees have been lost with Ourea’s downfall, but a lot of what has been said about Shane and Ourea is a mischaracterisation of the situation and who he is.

I want to give Shane the chance to explain his perspective on what went wrong and address the criticism, but obviously the past week he’s been busy dealing with the fallout, so expect an article on Ourea and ultrarunning in the UK landscapeshortly.

For now we go to UTMB’s broadcast ambitions and why I think they’re chasing clout, an unlikely monetary windfall,and not embracing the possibilities of what livestreaming in ultrarunning could be.

Hope you have a great week,

Matt

(All written from my phone this week, excuse the lack of pictures and any typos)

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UTMB’s latest broadcast announcement reads like a sport trying to convince itself it’s something it isn’t.

If you missed it, UTMB released it’s list of broadcast partners and races that it will livestream in 2026.

2026 Broadcast Partners:

- Le Groupe L’Équipe (France)

- DAZN (Global, excluding Canada, France and the United States

- Eurovision Sport (Europe)

- iQIYI (China)

- FloSports (new - US)

- Tencent Sports (new -China)

- (You can also watch all livestreams on YouTube)

(Outside TV got the boot, but they’re still an Ironman partner, so I expect their return.)

Calendar:

On paper, it all sounds suitably grand. Deals with DAZN, FloSports, regional splits, a sense of global scale. The kind of language that places UTMB alongside established sports leagues rather than a loose collection of mountain races. You can almost hear the pitch decks humming in the background. And yes, brands like Hoka will look at that list and feel reassured. Distribution equals legitimacy. Or at least, it used to.

The problem is that ultra running isn’t built for this model and pretending otherwise risks eroding the one advantage it actually has.

This is not football, or tennis, or even Formula 1. It is a 20-hour narrative scattered across mountains, forests, and tarpaulin aid stations. The gaps between athletes can stretch into hours. The moments that matter can often happen off-camera due to poor signal. Even at its best, a live broadcast requires heavy interpretation from a commentator to feel coherent. That doesn’t make it bad, It just makes it different.

And different doesn’t monetise well through traditional rights.

There’s a blueprint here in Ironman. The endurance racing company has had situationships with many broadcasters in the past from ABC and NBC in noughties, to Outside, ESPN and DAZN today, but there has been no documented money given for their media rights despite decades of trying to prove the model could work and they too could slot neatly into the broader sports media economy. It’s not a failure of execution, but a reality check on what and where the value of the product actually is.

UTMB appears to be taking the long way round to the same conclusion.

Because while these deals add polish, they also introduce friction. Audiences fragment across platforms. Access becomes inconsistent. Casual viewers, already a fragile cohort in a niche sport, are asked to hunt for coverage rather than stumble upon it. For a property that still depends on growing its base, that’s a strange trade to make.

Meanwhile, the obvious route sits in plain sight: Use YouTube as your free livestream host with ads and commentary, then use UTMB Live as your paywalled option with graphical overlays, no ads and LiveTrail data integration. People who have already paid for a UTMB race in the past get access, otherwise you pay a season pass for the livestream. UTMB gets customer data and another income stream, and the far significant reach of YouTube.

YouTube already does the heavy lifting: global, free, frictionless. It aligns with the culture of the sport, where participation trumps spectacle and community spreads organically.

A YouTube-first model wouldn’t mean lower ambition. Quite the opposite. It would allow UTMB to build a broadcast that actually fits ultra running. Slower, more observational, less obsessed with mimicking traditional sports coverage. A place where the live feed is the spine, not the entire experience. Where highlights, storytelling, and personality do as much work as split times.

Layer something more sophisticated on top through UTMB Live and you have a product that serves both ends of the audience without compromising either. Casual viewers get access. Dedicated fans get depth. UTMB keeps control.

Most importantly, it keeps the audience.

Because that’s the part that feels oddly under-discussed in all of this. Media rights are only valuable if people are watching. And in a sport like ultra running, attention is hard-won and easily lost. Sure, they’ve seen growing “live broadcast views” through broadcasters (I won’t get into how flimsy a metric “views” is), but trading reach for the promise of future revenue that may never properly arrive feels less like strategy and more like clinging on to an addictive habit.

There’s a version of this where UTMB makes money from its livestreaming rather than leave it up to regions and brands to partially fund it. That won’t be done by imitating traditional sports and clout chasing deals with more online platforms, but by leaning into what makes it unique.

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As an addendum to all this, the first UTMB livestream was meant to be at the Tenerife Bluetrail this weekend before it was cancelled due to the adverse weather. UTMB confirmed to me that there are no plans to replace that livestream with another race this year.

Another reason why traditional broadcasters would be hesitant to pay for coverage…

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For those curious about the cost of the livestreams, the livestreaming tender for Tenerife Bluetrail this weekend (before it was cancelled), was euros 82.5K, up from 75K euros last year.