The Deepest UTMB Field in Years Is Missing Its Fastest Woman

Katie Schide, who owns the fastest time any woman has run at UTMB, will miss the 2026 race with a foot injury, the most conspicuous of several gaps in a field the organizers have billed as among the deepest in the race’s history. The race, the climax of the UTMB World Series season, sends its 100-mile flagship out of Chamonix on Friday, Aug. 28, over a loop of the Mont Blanc massif that covers 174 kilometers (about 108 miles) and 9,900 meters (about 32,500 feet) of climbing.

The men’s start list is led, by reputation, by Jornet, who returns to the race for the first time since his 2022 win. By UTMB’s own ranking, though, he is not the top-rated man in it. That distinction belongs to Walmsley, whose UTMB Index of 967 sits above Jornet’s 948, with the Americans Ben Dhiman and Caleb Olson, Germany’s Hannes Namberger and France’s Vincent Bouillard and Britain’s Jonathan Albon all bunched a few points behind. The Index is UTMB’s own attempt to rate every runner on one scale, and this year it does not line up with the star billing.

The release ranks the men by that number but gives no times. The men’s course record is Walmsley’s 19:37:43, set when he won in 2023. Bouillard’s winning run in 2024 was 19:54:23, the fifth sub-20-hour finish in race history but not a record. Bouillard arrives in Chamonix off the Western States course record he set in June, one of the fastest performances of the ultra season. The 2025 men’s champion, Tom Evans of Britain, is not on the elite start list UTMB released Thursday, so the men’s race is without its defending winner as well.

The strength does not stop with the men’s favorites, and a good deal of it is Chinese. Three runners from China finished in the UTMB top 10 last year, and Jiasheng Shen, the highest-rated of them at an Index of 903, returns after taking eighth in 2025.

The women’s race was built to be a rematch. Ruth Croft of New Zealand returns as the defending champion, and remains the only woman who has taken victory in each of the three Finals races. Dauwalter is chasing a fourth title after coming up short last year, with three UTMB titles already, from 2019, 2021 and 2023. Schide’s absence changes the math. Her 2024 victory in 22:09:31 took more than 20 minutes off Dauwalter’s previous record of 22:30:54, and no one else in the 2026 field has run within reach of it. Behind the two headliners, the American Riley Brady, China’s Fuzhao Xiang, Nepal’s Sunmaya Budha and France’s Blandine L’Hirondel, a former CCC winner who knows the course well, are the names most likely to reshape the podium.

The two shorter championship races carry the same theme. In the CCC, over 101 kilometers (about 63 miles), both 2025 winners are absent, and the American Jennifer Lichter arrives as the favorite off her win at Western States in June, where she and Bouillard both set course records on the same day. Her closest challenger may be China’s Miao Yao, the 2025 OCC winner, who has moved up to the longer distance and won the Val d’Aran race by UTMB earlier this summer. The OCC, at 60 kilometers (about 37 miles), is the speed race, and its most unexpected entry is Molly Seidel, the American who won marathon bronze at the Tokyo Olympics and is now lining up against short-trail specialists led by Sweden’s Tove Alexandersson and Switzerland’s Rémi Bonnet.

The numbers behind the billing are real. UTMB says 846 elite athletes have entered across all its races, 34 more than last year, that 46 percent of them are women, and that 54 nationalities are represented, a field the organizer describes as “one of the strongest fields in its history.”

When the flagship sets off on Aug. 28, it will begin to settle whether the Index is right that the race is Walmsley’s to lose rather than Jornet’s, whether Jornet can still front a race he has won four times after sitting out three editions, and whether any woman in Chamonix can run within reach of a record whose holder will spend the weekend watching rather than racing.