Tom Evans Will Not Defend His UTMB Title. No Champion Has Since 2009.

Tom Evans will not defend the UTMB title he won last year, and his withdrawal guarantees that the biggest race in trail running will go a 16th consecutive edition without a repeat winner, a streak now long enough to look like a property of the sport’s summer calendar rather than a run of bad luck.

The last man to win UTMB in consecutive editions was Kilian Jornet, in 2008 and 2009. Fifteen editions have been contested since, with 2020 lost to the pandemic, and none has been won by the previous champion. The names in between are the largest in the sport. François D’Haene has won the race four times and Xavier Thevenard three, and Jornet himself won twice more, in 2011 and 2022. Not one of them ever won it back to back.

That drought is specific to the men’s race. Lizzy Hawker won three UTMB titles in a row, from 2010 through 2012; Rory Bosio then won back-to-back titles in 2013 and 2014; and Courtney Dauwalter won in 2019 and 2021 (UTMB was not held in 2020 due to the pandemic). The women’s title has changed hands in every other edition, most recently to Ruth Croft in 2025.

Evans said on Instagram on Thursday that he would not run, a withdrawal first reported by RUN247. The elite list UTMB published the same day had already removed him. “It’s never easy watching a race you love from the sidelines, but sometimes you have to look at the bigger picture,” he wrote. He said he would travel to Chamonix anyway and watch. He gave no reason for pulling out, and he has not said he is injured.

He leaves a considerable hole. Evans won in 19:18:58, the first British man to take the race since Jez Bragg in 2010. He is 34 and a former British Army captain. His winning time is among the fastest anyone has run at UTMB, but it is not the course record. Organizers cut the 2025 route mid-race on the Italian side, dropping the Pyramides Calcaires climb and descent for storm safety and removing roughly 2 kilometers (about 1.2 miles) and 200 meters of vertical gain from the loop, worth anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes to the leaders, by iRunFar’s estimate. Jim Walmsley’s 19:37:43 from 2023 still stands as the official mark.

Evans has not explained the decision. His summer, though, is a matter of record. He started the Hardrock 100 in Colorado on July 10 as one of the favorites, ran in second place through the first quarter of it, and then came apart in the thin air of the San Juans, quitting 58 miles in. iRunFar attributed the collapse to the altitude, at a race Ludovic Pommeret went on to win in a course record. UTMB follows 49 days later. Evans tried a version of the same compression in 2023, when he won Western States in June and then failed to finish UTMB in September. Walmsley, the 2023 champion, returned to Chamonix in 2024, led for nearly nine hours, and dropped at Courmayeur. Afterward, his team said he had been struggling with a knee injury sustained at Western States and had wanted to run anyway. No man has won Western States and UTMB in the same year since Jornet did it in 2011.

The schedule is survivable, which means the runners who take it on are choosing to do so. Courtney Dauwalter won Hardrock on the weekend Evans dropped out of it, running 26:03:10 to reset her own record for the clockwise direction, and she is entered in Chamonix seven weeks after that. She won Western States, Hardrock and UTMB in a single summer in 2023. Nobody is compelled into that sequence. Runners choose it because the prize money, sponsors, and audience are concentrated in three races held within 10 weeks. UTMB comes last in that sequence, so it is where the attrition is most evident.

Evans is not the only name missing from it. Katie Schide won Western States and UTMB in the same summer in 2024 and still holds the women’s course record at 22:09:31. She is out of Hardrock and UTMB this year with a foot injury. UTMB says 846 elite runners have entered across its races this year, 34 more than last year, from 54 nationalities. The entry list keeps getting deeper every year, and the runners at the top keep failing to reach the start.

Without Evans, the men’s race reorders around Walmsley, whose UTMB Index of 967 is the highest of anyone entered, and Ben Dhiman, who finished second to Evans last year in 19:51:37. Also entered is Jornet, back in Chamonix for the first time since he won in 2022 and the only man in the field who has ever defended the title.