Blandine L’Hirondel Wins the UTMB and Nearly Loses Half Her Lead In The Final Kilometers

Blandine L’Hirondel won the women’s Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc on Saturday in 21:54:49, reaching Chamonix at 5:43 p.m. in 26th place overall. She won the OCC in 2021 and the CCC in 2022, making her the third person and second woman ever to win all three UTMB finals. She is the first French woman to take the UTMB since Caroline Chaverot in 2016.

The time is the fastest a woman has run this race. It is 14:42 inside Katie Schide’s 22:09:31 from 2024, which was the mark to beat; however, the course was slightly altered this year due to inclement weather. By the timing system’s own arrival records, Schide covered 176.7 kilometers with 9,915 meters of climbing. L’Hirondel covered 173.6 kilometers with 9,700 meters, after organizers cut the Pyramides Calcaires section on the Italian side and pushed the start back two hours on Friday because of forecast thunderstorms. That is 3.1 kilometers shorter and 215 meters flatter than the route the previous best was set on.

L’Hirondel had the race won for a long time and still came close to making it interesting. She led Rachel Entrekin by 40:09 leaving Vallorcine with 18.3 kilometers to run. She reached the line 21:05 ahead. Entrekin took 19:04 out of her over that closing stretch, most of it on the last seven kilometers down into Chamonix, which L’Hirondel walked through in 54:21 while Emily Schmitz came down the same descent in 38:20.

Entrekin was second in 22:15:54 on her first UTMB start. The American won the Cocodona 250 Mile outright this year with a course record and took the Chianti 120K before that, and according to iRunFar’s women’s preview, the last woman to win the UTMB at the first attempt was Courtney Dauwalter in 2019. Schmitz was third in 22:17:28, 1:34 behind Entrekin after closing 2:18 on her over the final 18.3 kilometers. Schmitz raced in the 45-49 category and was 147th overall at Col de Voza in the opening hour and a half, which makes her run from there to third the largest move on the women’s leaderboard.

L’Hirondel has run this race twice before and improved on it enormously. She was third in 2023 in 24:22:50 and fifth in 2024 in 24:35:54, outside the top 30 overall both times. Saturday was two and a half hours faster than either. She arrived in Chamonix on the best year of her career, having won Transvulcania in 7:43:47, a course record that took 19 minutes off the mark Ruth Croft set in 2024, ahead of Lucy Bartholomew and Emelie Forsberg.

Most of the names that would have made the race harder were not in it. Ruth Croft, the defending champion, withdrew two days before the start. Schide, who held the fastest time, did not enter. Dauwalter, a three-time champion, stopped at Lac Combal at 3:56 a.m., 67.8 kilometers in, and has given no reason. None of the three women who finished on the podium in 2025 was in the top three on Saturday. The men’s race had gone the same way hours earlier, when Ben Dhiman ran 18:16:29 to become the first man inside 19 hours.