The Race That Changed Running: The Inside Story of UTMB by Doug Mayer

Author:Doug Mayer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Helvetiq
Published: 2023-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

UTMB MONT-BLANC SERIES

DEVELOPMENT OVER TIME

The UTMB event in August has continued to grow and add more race distances over the years.

What could go wrong? On February 8, 2020, the Polettis, along with everyone else in the Chamonix valley, picked up their copies of Le Dauphine, the regional newspaper. Five cases of a novel virus from Wuhan, China had shown up in a holiday chalet in nearby Les Contamines. At noon on March 17, France went into the first of three national lockdowns.

Suddenly, the world changed, and with it, trail running as well. UTMB’s international races were all canceled, save for a race in Thailand. Eighty percent of the Ultra-Trail World Tour races were canceled.

The Chamonix races were canceled, too. That summer, the normally bustling mountain city was a ghost town.

“Very quickly,” said Duchemin, “we realized that we had a tough choice: either we had to lay off 70% of the staff, or we had to use all of our new financial reserves.” The Polettis and Duchemin chose to keep the staff engaged, but it cost them dearly.

“We lost 1.5 million euros in one year,” said Duchemin. “Thank God we had those reserves.”

THE SUITS ARRIVE IN CHAMONIX

Over the years since that first flurry of interest, the courting had continued unabated from one company in particular: the Ironman Group. The sports marketing company based in Tampa, Florida, had developed triathlons into a global phenomenon, and it had paid off handsomely. The company was worth more than 700 million dollars. But the sport had peaked in the US in 2015 and since then had been steadily declining, and the Ironman Group was casting about for the next big thing. (In this book we refer to the IRONMAN Group by the name ‘Ironman’ for sake of readability. This should not be confused with Ironman triathalons.)

The only reason Ironman even had trail running on its radar was thanks to one run in 2017. Dave Beeche, then a Senior Vice President at Ironman, had gotten acquainted with trail running while taking part in the 100-kilometer Ultra-Trail Australia. “It was like a lightbulb went off for me. I thought it was incredible. The vibe was totally different from any other endurance event. I had great conversations. It was inclusive, not exclusive. It was collaborative, not competitive. I asked for advice and everyone was offering help.”

In trail running, Beeche saw a different community from the triathlon world. “There’s one bucket of people who just love exploring nature. Trail running is part of the journey for them. They’d never be caught dead in an Ironman,” he said at the time. “And there is a group of people who have done Ironmans and are ready for new challenges and new goals.”

Ironman liked what they saw. To test the waters, on May 15, 2018, they made a purchase—Ultra-Trail Australia, the first race Beeche ran.

“We started looking at the fundamentals of the trail-running market,” Andrew Messick, CEO of Ironman Group, told me just outside the posh Mont Blanc Hotel during UTMB week at the close of August 2022.

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