Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc 2017 Preview

New features & programme for this year's UTMB

featured in Events reviews Author Ellie Mahoney, Chamonix Editor Updated 7 January 2022

The UTMB or Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, is Chamonix's biggest trail running event and is renowned the world over for its incredibly long and challening races.

The event attracts around 8,000 ultra-marathon and endurance trail runners from no less than 87 different countries to compete in 5 gruelling mountain trail races.

2017 sees the event going into its 15th year and the organisers have introduced a couple of new features to keep spectators, supporters and runners up to date with lots of live data and even more information than ever before. They've also released the programme for this year's event.

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Live interface for spectators

UTMB®LIVE is going to be launched in time for the start of the first races on 29th August 2017. It promises to be more integrated and better than the previous version, bringing together the live stream TV channel, social wall, LiveTrail® runner tracking and webcams.

There will be 15 webcams stationed around the different races, capturing footage of runners passing by which will be compiled into a video for each person at the end. The segments will also be able to be seen on each runner's individual page.

You can watch all the action from the start line of each race, with a small delay, on UTMB®TV. There will also be repeats from the highlights of the start lines, finishes of the race leaders, interviews, reports and films. There will be more than 110 hours of broadcasts. Streaming will be in three languages, French, English and Spanish to help the greatest number of countries as possible to follow the runners.

Live information for supoprters

Lots of runners have supporters, friends and family tracking their every move. The live trail app will allow then to see the race routes and where each individual runner is at each stage of their race. You can use the GPS function to locate them, check their current ranking and see what time they're expected to get to each waypoint of the race.

All runners have the possibility of renting a GPS beacon so that they can be followed long the route they have chosen. Placed in their back-pack, it allows their family and friends to follow them live on a PC, Mac, tablet or Smartphone. The beacons can be reserved on via the UTMB® website in July and then picked up from the Dotvision stand at the Ultra-Trail® salon.

The Finisher webcam will be there to record the moment your friend or family member crosses the line, especially useful if it's in the middle of the night or if you can't be here in person to watch it yourself.

New App for runners

This year, the 8000 trail runners taking part in the UTMB can make use of the new smartphone app which will give them information about their race, as well as the opportunity to track a friend. The app will be made available in August 2017 on the Play store and Apple store and will allow runners to check their own race ranking, time, the number of kilometres run and still left to run.

It also has a built-in SOS and abandon function, which will improve safety for the runners. In the case of SOS, this function allows the runner to their GPS coordinates by text to the race HQ who can then coordinate help.