The Mountain Trails of Kaçkar and the Absence Named Women on Vietnam's Trail Map

On the Kaçkar grandstand, I hear many empty seats named after women. That is the first thought that comes to mind when I read the Anadolu Ajansı report on Turkish Minister of Youth and Sports Osman Aşkın Bak firing the starting gun for Kaçkar by UTMB. Two thousand athletes from sixty countries. The numbers sound overwhelming. But as I peeled back each layer of the report, I recognised something familiar in this craft: large figures tend to hide the gaps that matter most. Among those two thousand people, who are the women? How many of them are running for the love of it, and how many for a frame pretty enough to land on the race homepage? The report does not say. That silence, to me, is more notable than anything the minister said on the sidelines.

Forty-five minutes on the sideline, a lifetime that never grows old. In the summer of 2026, while the whole newsroom poured into the Russia World Cup, I sat in a corner and wrote about women's football. Eleven dissenting comments. Two compliments. A 2,500-word analysis that seemed to reach no one, yet found its way to an assistant coach. From that I learned something: what many people look at is not what actually moves. Long-distance mountain running, especially where women are concerned, is undergoing exactly the same shift. That shift is happening quietly, and most sports journalists in Southeast Asia still cannot be bothered to read it.

Kaçkar by UTMB does not sit inside the World Athletics competition system. This is the first thing to establish clearly, because many sports readers misunderstand it. The event belongs to the commercial UTMB World Series ecosystem, operated by UTMB Group headquartered in Chamonix, France. There is no ratified world record in trail running. There is no entry time standard. Entry comes through a lottery and "Running Stones" — points earned at qualifying races, used as weights in the lottery for a place at the Mont-Blanc finals. To understand why two thousand people from sixty countries travelled to the Turkish Black Sea coast, one must first grasp this mechanism.

The first lesson from Russia 2026 still holds: events outside the Olympic system operate on an entirely different logic. They earn money through experience, landscape and destination story, not through medals. That is why, from the outset, I viewed Kaçkar through a different lens than I would a track athletics meet.

On the organisational side, the structure deserves close reading. The Ministry of Youth and Sports, the Tourism Promotion and Development Agency, the Rize Governorship and DOKA — the Eastern Black Sea Development Agency — all stand behind it. The sponsor tier includes Turkish Airlines, TOGG, Turkcell and Maxis. This is a state-corporate coalition, not a federation competition. Race Director Johan Essl is direct UTMB central personnel, showing the French brand is genuinely involved rather than merely lending its name.

This is the event's second edition. A young race in a brand-building phase, not yet a settled flagship. The report explicitly confirms only one distance: the 20 km course the two Anadolu journalists ran. The longer distances, the course profile, the elevation gain, the terrain, any course records — all absent. For a trail race, these are the data points that matter most for assessing sporting quality. Without them, an analyst can only talk about scale, never about standard.

Reading a hypothetical results board, I have learned to read what is not written down.

On the athlete side, the report is near-empty. No winner's name. No marks. No finish times. No ranking. The two named individuals running the 20 km are Yusuf Özhan and Hasan Hüseyin Kul — media and organisational figures, not title contenders. Analysis of form, individual progression curves, injury management or peaking strategy is therefore impossible. Attempting to profile "the athletes" here only leads to fabrication.

And this is where my gender lens must speak. Among those two thousand runners, what share are women? The report does not say. But what I know, from my experience following international trail races, is that the female share of Asian ultra-trail events is rising at a notable rate. On mountain courses, women do not merely participate — they are beginning to win. At ultra distances, the gender gap narrows far faster than in road marathons, because the deciding factors are not purely peak speed but energy distribution and psychological endurance — two domains where women give up nothing.

In women's football, there are no rest days, only untold stories. The untold story of Kaçkar is the same. Two thousand people climbing, opening GPS, crossing fog, and the report only covers the opening ceremony.

If I were present in Ayder, I would immediately ask three questions. What is the longest distance, and what is the elevation gain? Who was the first woman to finish, and where is she from? How are prizes divided between men and women across the distances? Those three questions are enough to turn a tourism piece into genuine sports journalism. Here, none of them are answered.

On geography and operations, the Kaçkar range and the Ayder plateau stand at roughly 1,300 to over 2,000 metres. The Black Sea mountain climate is notoriously humid and prone to thick fog. The Governor himself recalled that the first edition was obscured by fog and rain. This is the single largest operational risk, because the whole promotional value of the race depends on broadcast imagery. A trail race drowned in rain is a race that loses exactly what it sells to its community: the view.

From a transmission standpoint, the chain is clear. Upstream sits regional hosting capacity plus the UTMB brand licence. Midstream sits the event and its sponsors. Downstream sits tourism, promotion and destination brand value. The minister says it plainly: sports tourism brings significant earnings to the country. He even compares Rize and Ayder's ambition to the link between Davos and the World Economic Forum — a comparison about brand positioning rather than athletic positioning.

Placed against Vietnam, I feel a pang of regret. We have Sa Pa, we have Fansipan, we have courses no less beautiful. We have a trail-running community growing year by year. And we have women quietly finishing tough mountain distances — women who, with proper promotion, could become regionally inspiring faces. What is missing is not terrain. What is missing is a mechanism to turn terrain into a properly standardised event, and to turn the event into story, including the story of women.

The counter-intuitive point is this: we often assume an international race coming to Vietnam is for us to learn from, to raise our standard. But in UTMB-system races, sporting quality is almost a by-product. What is actually sold is place. In that model, women are treated as image subjects — attractive runners on a mountain course — not as subjects of performance. This is the trap women's football already climbed out of across two decades. At first people praised the girls for being "pretty". Then they started asking how many goals they scored. That turning point only arrived with data, with stat sheets, with journalists willing to stay after the final whistle.

A contract has an expiry date, but a human story never does. For Kaçkar, the signed contract is a two-year tourism event. But the human story lies with the women who climbed that course, and the report did not bother to name them.

Looking further out, UTMB Group is expanding like a brand franchise. Local races wear the UTMB badge and must meet technical, safety and mandatory-equipment standards. Turkey is using this system to upgrade its organisational capability, in service of a longer road: hosting major sports events, including Istanbul's 2027 European Games. Kaçkar is a test bed. This is not a purely sporting story. It is the story of a nation building hosting capacity and using sport as its loudspeaker.

From this angle, I see a lesson for Vietnam. If we want a Southeast Asian-scale trail race, we need not rush to invite UTMB. We need something smaller: a standardised distance-measurement system, a transparent lottery mechanism, an organising committee that knows how to publish full results. Those seemingly technical tasks decide whether women get named at all.

After every goal, I ask: which woman lost sleep over that? For Kaçkar, I want to ask the same: which woman ran through rain and fog so that her shadow never appeared in any report?

When the stadium is empty, ordinary voices suddenly become leaders. That is why I keep writing about gaps. Because the history of women's sport is written largely by what was forgotten, not what was praised. A trail race in the mountains of Turkey sounds distant. But the gap in that report — nobody speaking of female athletes, nobody publishing their results — mirrors a habit that sports journalism shares everywhere. That habit begins to change when one person decides to stay past the finish line, waiting long enough to ask the woman leading the field one simple question: how did you run?

And that question is worth asking more than the figure of two thousand.