India gets its own UTMB start line, with first race set for 2027

For years, India’s most ambitious trail runners have measured their dreams in flight tickets.

The road to a UTMB World Series start line has run through Malaysia, Thailand or the Alpine valleys around Chamonix, with visas, hotel bills and long-haul travel stacked on top of the race bib. That calculus is about to change, and with it, the fortunes of outdoor sport in the country.

The UTMB World Series, the world’s premier trail-running circuit, is coming to India. This week it announced a strategic partnership with Yoska, the Indian endurance-sports company led by Deepak Raj that already stages IRONMAN 70.3 Goa and HYROX races in the country. The first Indian UTMB World Series event is targeted for 2027, with more to follow. The collaboration extends a relationship between Yoska and The IRONMAN Group, which partners with UTMB on the World Series, that produced India’s first IRONMAN 70.3 in Goa in October 2019.

The numbers suggest the timing is right. India already counts more than 16,600 runners in the UTMB World Series database, nearly 5,000 of them holding a valid UTMB Index, and 144 UTMB Index races have been held in the country. Participation by Indian runners in World Series events has more than doubled in two years, most of it at races elsewhere in Asia.

Beyond the crowded road

India’s running boom needs no introduction. Big-city marathons sell out, running clubs fill parks before dawn, and the half-marathon has become a rite of passage for a generation of urban professionals. That very success, Deepak argues, is what makes trail running the next frontier. Unlike triathlon, which Yoska spent years explaining to a skeptical public, the runners already exist. What they want is something new.

“As a business, there are a lot of road running events, there are a lot of runners who are looking for experiences beyond,” Deepak told Arshi Yasin, founder and CEO of The Bridge, in an exclusive interview alongside two senior IRONMAN Group executives.

Matthieu Van Veen, Chief Business Officer of The IRONMAN Group, traced part of that hunger to the pandemic. “After the dramatic experience throughout COVID, we’ve seen that people are committing to themselves more, investing in themselves more, and looking at becoming active,” he said.

For many, that commitment began on asphalt and is now drifting toward forests, ridgelines and mountain paths: less chasing a personal best per kilometer, more simply being outdoors.

A global brand built on the trail

UTMB’s pull begins with its origins. The Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, raced around Western Europe’s highest peak, is to trail runners what Boston is to marathoners: the race people plan entire years around. The World Series, launched in 2022, carries that experience to dozens of countries and gives runners a qualifying path to the finals in Chamonix. By 2027, Matthieu said, the circuit is expected to include about 75 events worldwide.

The series has grown that quickly, he said, “first, because trail running is the fastest growing segment of endurance sports, but also because we see interest from road runners around the world that are going into trail running and looking for these experiences. And UTMB World Series has established itself as the premier series around the world.”

The events are built for amateur age-groupers rather than Olympic hopefuls, and that breadth is the brand’s engine. Michelle Pepper, Managing Director of The IRONMAN Group’s Asia-Pacific business, saw it on display at IRONMAN 70.3 Goa, her first event in India. “What I saw is reflective of what we’re seeing around the world, is just this huge variety of participation,” she said, pointing to first-timers, young athletes and a rising number of women on the start line.

Bringing Chamonix closer to home

The venue remains under wraps. Deepak said Yoska was weighing three or four candidate host locations, with the Himalayan foothills, the Western and Eastern Ghats and India’s Northeast among the terrain in contention. Government support will matter, he said, and so will whether a region’s hotels, roads and connectivity can let a race grow from 1,000 runners to 2,000 or 3,000. Yoska will not rush a launch simply to meet its 2027 target.

The race is part of a wider buildout: three IRONMAN 70.3 events in India in 2027, a full-distance IRONMAN in 2028, and about a dozen endurance events across the three brands within five years.

Then there is the question of price. UTMB entry fees are steep by Indian standards, a criticism often aimed at HYROX too. Deepak said the fairer comparison is the full cost of chasing the same race abroad.

“By bringing the race and creating a race just in our own backyard, we’re taking away quite a significant portion of the costs involved in getting the same experience,” he said. Yoska will also study entry fees against European races, he added, noting that its HYROX tickets in India are already priced slightly differently from global rates.

For Michelle, the format itself lowers the barrier, since shorter races run alongside the marquee 100-kilometer and 100-mile distances. “There’s like a 20K run and a 50K run, and so the prices are set up, right? So the newbies who maybe aren’t in yet (or) don’t yet have that appetite to spend to that amount, you know, a 20K distance run is very accessible,” she said.

For a country where trail runners have often looked overseas, the message is simple: the mountains were always here, and soon enough, the start line will be too.