(28-08-2010, 02:06 PM)glaconman Wrote: Cheers for the updates BB. Looks like the UTMB has been cancelled but runners can join the CCC today as an option.
Thanks for that Glaconman. I’d switched off the computer and gone to bed assuming that was the end of the story.
Wrong.
Buses shipped people back to Chamonix. The mountain running elite rapidly made their own plans. Some went out for a beer, others crashed out and dried out.
There were varying opinions of the decision to cancel the race.
Melzer calls it “a smart decision”. Geoff Roes mentions “chaos and uncertainty” but goes on to give 10 good reasons why the UTMB is still the greatest race in the world
http://akrunning.blogspot.com/ Jurek makes plans to run the Spartathlon instead and spends the night eating vegan Thai curry.
Young Kilian Jornet is the most outspoken. From what I could make out from his blog page in French he says that the race should have gone ahead and that they were mountaineers not Heidi, perhaps forgetting that there were 2000 non-elite athletes out there as well.
Anyway, a diluted 90km version was held the next day modelled on the shorter CCC race which Glaconman mentions. Dawa Sherpa and the Greek, Alexis Gounko, led for much of the course but eventually Jez Bragg won it in 10 hours 47 minutes. Lizzy Hawker was first lady so it was a clean sweep for the Brits. Jez Bragg incidentally is a past winner of the Connemarathon ultra.
There’s a good write up of all this here.
http://www.irunfar.com/2010/08/utmb-2010...eport.html
Kilian and Heras decided not to compete. Incredibly they headed off in a car to the other side of the Alps to Val Masino in northern Italy. Here they were accepted as last minute entrants to Sunday morning’s Ultra Skyrunning world championship, 50km, 4000m ascent and several highly “technical” sections with ropes. Jornet broke the course record, Heras finished second. Remember, they'd already run 30 km of the UTMB on Friday night!
So, having spent the last weekend as a passive observer of the 2010 UTMB two things have caught my attention.
1. Despite the disaster of the race being cancelled and criticism of the organizers for how they handled things, everybody seems to agree on one thing. This is the most extraordinary race of its kind in the world today. There is quite simply nothing else like it. Even the Americans are blown away by the scale of it all (see Geoff Roes’ comments).
2. Where was Marco Olmo? Amongst all the chaos and confusion of the weekend’s events nobody seems to have noticed that despite being registered he didn’t even start the race. Had the wily old fox sensed what was going to happen? He was probably at home, biding his time and whispering to himself something along the lines of ...”well, next year I’ll still only be 62, maybe there’s one last UTMB in those old legs of mine....”
