Salomon Has Bought the Naming Rights to the Ironman World Championship

Salomon will be the title sponsor of the Ironman World Championship from 2027, a five-year deal that hands a trail brand the naming rights to Kona and makes it Ironman’s exclusive footwear partner, the role Hoka holds today.

The agreement was announced Thursday in Nice, in the build-up to the 70.3 World Championship, and runs to 2031. It makes Salomon a Global Premier Partner with exclusivity in performance footwear, apparel and technical bags. Seven races take a Salomon title or presenting slot, among them Oceanside, Chattanooga, Lanzarote, Lake Placid and Jones Beach, and across every Ironman and 70.3 event the run leg will be called the Salomon Run Course.

Hoka Has the Rights Salomon Is Buying

The shoe brand on Ironman’s start lines right now is Hoka, the official running shoe of the North American and European race series. Salomon’s exclusivity from 2027 leaves no room for that, and 220 Triathlon reported that Salomon replaces it. Ironman’s announcement did not mention Hoka at all.

Hoka built its name on trail, and it now has that name on UTMB’s biggest races, the World Series Majors and the finals week in Chamonix, through 2028. Salomon built its name in the mountains, and its S/LAB shoes are close to default kit at any mountain start line. Each one has gone shopping in the other’s back yard.

VinFast, the Vietnamese electric vehicle maker, held the Kona title from 2022 through 2025, and the race Salomon takes on in 2027 is not the one VinFast paid for. From 2026 the men’s and women’s championships are back on the Big Island on the same day, Oct. 10, close to 3,000 athletes on a single start list, which closes out a two-venue experiment that alternated the fields between Hawaii and Nice from 2023 to 2025. Splitting them was supposed to give the women a stage of their own. Ironman’s research found that it did not move female participation, still around 18 percent of the field, and that more athletes were walking away from the sport once they had finished.

Amer Sports, which owns Salomon, has the money for this sort of thing. Second-quarter revenue came in at $1.63 billion, up 32 percent, and the Salomon-led Outdoor Performance segment accounted for $569 million of it, up 37 percent, with direct-to-consumer sales in that segment up 52 percent. The company raised its full-year guidance to roughly 24 percent growth on the strength of it.

Salomon Sells Three Road Racing Shoes

Salomon sells three carbon-plated road racers in the United States, all under the S/LAB label: the $220 Spectur, the $250 Phantasm 3 SC and the $280 Phantasm 3. The shape of the Phantasm came out of work with Swiss Side, a company better known for making bicycles cut through air, and TRI247 reported that Salomon’s triathletes are racing the run leg in the Phantasm 3.

The best of them is Casper Stornes, who won the 2025 men’s world championship in Nice in 7:51:39 ahead of Gustav Iden and Kristian Blummenfelt for a Norwegian sweep, his 2:29:25 the quickest marathon in the race. He signed for Salomon six months later, in March, with Marjolaine Pierré and Julie Iemmolo, the first long-course triathletes the brand has put under contract, and what the three of them report back is meant to end up in the shoes Salomon sells to the age-grouper chasing nine hours.

The partnership is supposed to go past product too, into training, nutrition, recovery and biomechanics, under Aitor Viribay, the physiologist Salomon made its global sports performance director in early 2025 after three years running human science at the Ineos Grenadiers cycling team.

“Athletes no longer define themselves by one sport,” Salomon president Guillaume Meyzenq said in the announcement. “They run on the road, compete in the mountains, take on triathlons, and continually seek new ways to challenge themselves. Endurance has become a lifestyle.”

Salomon owns nothing in Kona until 2027. It will be there next month regardless, running a pop-up at Kona Heaven on Oct. 7 and 8 with Courtney Dauwalter and Jessie Diggins, who won her Olympic gold on cross-country skis. The race is on Oct. 10. Salomon’s name goes on it the year after.