Jiaju Zhao Breaks the Course Record at the Tor des Géants

Jiaju Zhao got back to Courmayeur at 3.55 a.m. on Wednesday, 65 hours and 55 minutes after leaving it, with a course record and a win nobody from China had managed before. His 65:55:22 over the 330K loop took exactly 13 minutes off the mark Victor Richard set last year, and made him the first winner from outside Europe since the Tor des Géants started in 2010. Katharina Hartmuth broke the women’s record and finished third overall a little over an hour later.

He led almost the whole way and did not stop properly until Gressoney, the life base at km 203, which he reached at 9.42 p.m. on Monday, 35 hours and 42 minutes in. The South China Morning Post puts that halt at 50 minutes with only about 20 of them asleep, and reports everything he slept afterward came in 10-minute pieces at checkpoints. It was still long enough to cost him the lead, and Carreras de Montaña had Jonathan Schindler going past while Zhao was inside, the first time since the start he had not led.

He had it back by the third night, and he could see how much of it he had. “At Ollomont I thought the others were far away, then they told me Jonathan was 19 minutes back,” he told Territorio Trail. “Last night I saw his headlamp in the distance. There were less than 50 kilometers to go, I felt good, and I decided to speed up.” Schindler never got closer than that. He finished second in 66:55:06, 59 minutes and 44 seconds down, and he had slept through both nights on the theory that it would leave him fresher. “In the end I hoped to catch him before Bosses,” he told NewsBiella, “but he was too strong.”

No life base on the course requires a stop, and the only constraint is the 150-hour limit, which leaves how much anyone sleeps entirely up to them. Everyone at the front of this year’s race took that as licence to do almost none of it. Hartmuth ran her 67:10:09 on about a quarter of an hour across three days, and Zhang Weiqiang, third among the men in 71:53:56, told Gazzetta Matin he had managed just 45 minutes.

Sixteen recreational runners were put on a treadmill after a normal night and again after a night with no sleep at all, and their running economy actually improved while their time to exhaustion at the second lactate threshold fell 13.2 percent. The efficiency was real and it was worth nothing the moment the effort got hard. That was one night, on a treadmill, over about an hour of running.

“I seem more dead than alive,” Zhao said in comments to Chinese media on Wednesday morning, reported by AostaSera and translated here. He described pain everywhere and a stretch near the top of a climb where, half asleep, “it even seemed to me that everything was swaying.” Then: “This is the last time I participate in races over 168 kilometers.”

He has started this race twice, and the first attempt ended at Gressoney, the same life base where he stopped to sleep this week. He had come to Courmayeur in 2025 only 15 days after finishing 10th at UTMB in 21:19:47. This year he ran the OCC instead, 17 days out, and jogged the 60K in 253rd, 8:31:40, according to his UTMB profile. He says he did nothing aimed specifically at a race this long. “The day after Gressoney I said I would return to win,” he told Territorio Trail. “Many can say it, but not everyone can do it.”

Every man who has won here since 2010 came from Italy, Spain, France or Switzerland, and the best any Chinese runner had managed was Zhang’s sixth place last September, which Xinhua called an Asian record at the time. Zhang took two hours and 40 minutes off that on Wednesday to finish fourth overall, and Zhang Huiping was second woman in 80:35:31. “Next year I will be here again,” Zhang said. The race itself is still going: 46 of the 1,117 starters had finished by Thursday morning, 375 had abandoned, and the line in Courmayeur shuts at 6 p.m. Saturday.