Kaçkar by UTMB: How Turkey Turns a Trail Race Into a National Brand

On the Ayder Plateau, mist still clung to the ancient pine canopies when the starting gun fired at six in the morning. Two thousand athletes from sixty countries ran past one another in the Kaçkar range - the highest mountains of Turkey's Eastern Black Sea region - as if they were crossing an oil painting of paradisiacal hell. I stood there, camera on shoulder, wondering who was really competing here - the feet on the course, or a nation repositioning itself through a race. Scoreboards end a match, but most of the story lies beneath it. And the story beneath Kaçkar by UTMB is far more complex than any standard event report can contain.

Kaçkar by UTMB is not a pure athletics event. It is a political shot wrapped in a sports jersey, a place-branding strategy via trail running that Turkey is executing with remarkable patience. When Youth and Sports Minister Osman Aşkın Bak pressed the start button, he was not merely opening a race. He was inaugurating a multi-year national brand project anchored in partnership with the UTMB Group - the most influential trail-running brand system in the world today. This second edition is the clearest evidence that Turkey sees Ayder not as a summer tourism stop but as an international stage that needs to be lit the right way.

To understand why a trail race in the Eastern Black Sea receives this level of investment, one must examine the ecosystem structure it operates within. UTMB - short for Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc - is not merely a race; it is a global brand with a World Series system spanning continents, where satellite events serve as gateways to the Chamonix final in France. The participation mechanism is fundamentally different from Olympic athletics: no time standards, no World Athletics world rankings, no national team selections. Instead, athletes accumulate Running Stones - the system's unique currency - to increase their lottery weight for Chamonix entry. Kaçkar by UTMB is one node in this chain, and its location at altitudes ranging from 1,300 to over 2,000 meters makes it an attractive option for runners pursuing terrain challenges.

Yet what distinguishes Kaçkar by UTMB from dozens of other UTMB World Series events is the depth of state involvement. Looking at the co-organizers reveals an unusual political coalition: the Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Turkish Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, the Rize Governorship, and the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency (DOKA) - a regional public financing body. DOKA's presence signals that public funding is not ceremonial but serves as the financial backbone. Add Turkish Airlines, the national electric vehicle brand TOGG, and Turkcell - brands regarded as representatives of Turkish industrial power. This is not a local race; this is a national brand coalition attached to an international sporting event.

The most striking remark of the entire event did not come from an athlete but from Minister Bak himself when he likened the ambition for Rize and Ayder to Davos - the Swiss town where the World Economic Forum transformed a small Alpine village into a global brand. This comparison is no accident. It reveals the project's core logic: Turkey is not trying to create an elite race but is trying to create a destination. Here, sport is not the goal - sport is the local-marketing tool. And that tool is being deployed with great discipline. The presence of Race Director Johan Essl, a senior figure of the UTMB Group, confirms this is not a spontaneous event but a node in the world's largest trail brand's global geographic expansion strategy. Turkey is purchasing part of its international credibility by purchasing a position in that distribution system.

I have previously written about an East Asian nation that turned a marathon into a tool of cultural diplomacy, and I realized this model has a surprisingly universal character. A country may not possess an Olympic-level trail athlete, but if it organizes an event with sixty participating nations, it has built itself a stage. Images from the race will be broadcast, shared, geo-tagged, and each share is free tourism advertising for Rize. This is why Minister Bak emphasized that broadcast images from Kaçkar will be beautiful - because the advertising value lies in the visuals, not in finishing times.

A detail few observers notice is the appearance of Anadolu Agency officials themselves in the event - Yusuf Özhan and Hasan Hüseyin Kul participating in the 20 km distance. This may seem incidental, but it is deliberate: it shows the event features multiple distances, not just one, and it creates a human story about non-specialists daring to enter the challenge. People call weak teams underdogs; I call them storytellers who narrate through the pitch. When a trail race has even national media officials running, that itself is a statement: this is sport for everyone, not the exclusive territory of professional runners.

However, there is a substantial gap between narrative and substance that analysts must name clearly. When Minister Bak says ultra-marathon runners are world-class athletes, that is promotional language, not athletic evidence. The original article names no elite competitors, publishes no finish times, reports no course records, and provides no rankings. The sporting quality of this event, judged by elite-competition standards, remains an open question. This does not mean the event is poor - two thousand runners from sixty countries is real - but it does mean that any claim about athletic value must be read as marketing language until start lists and results are published.

The biggest risk of the entire model does not come from tactics or finances but from weather. The Rize Governor himself acknowledged that last year the first edition of Kaçkar by UTMB was shrouded in fog and rain. The Eastern Black Sea region is famous for its year-round humidity, and the Kaçkar range at over two thousand meters is a place where clouds can descend within minutes. An event whose entire advertising value depends on beautiful scenery will be seriously damaged if weather ruins the visuals. This is a distinctive image-risk unique to terrain sports, and it has no solution beyond preparing multiple media scenarios for different conditions. A second edition swallowed by fog would deal a heavy blow to a young brand's credibility.

Placing this event in broader context, it does not stand alone. Turkey is building a continuous chain of international sports-organizing capability: the women's volleyball team's European championship in 2026, ongoing high-level competitions being hosted, and most importantly the 2027 European Games in Istanbul. Kaçkar by UTMB is one brick in that wall - an operational rehearsal allowing the Sports Ministry, local agencies, and national sponsors to coordinate bringing an international event safely to the finish line. If Kaçkar succeeds over the next five years, it will become a case study showing how a country can use terrain sports - a discipline rarely considered at policy level - to build multi-discipline organizational capacity. I write about passes to tell stories about choices in life, and here every step of two thousand runners is a policy choice interpreted through their feet.

From a media perspective, this event also illustrates a clear trend: countries are shifting from the traditional sports-sponsorship model - paying for national teams to win medals - toward the experience-sponsorship model - creating events to tell stories about the country. The second model is cheaper, more feasible for countries without elite traditions, and delivers higher media ROI. The pandemic can stop tournaments, but it cannot stop dreams running their approach, and Turkey is clearly running an approach for the coming decade through events that appear small but carry enormous strategic value. And as long as the Kaçkar peaks remain standing, new routes will keep being drawn.