UTMB Is Dropping Age-Group Qualification at Its World Series Majors

UTMB will stop handing out direct Finals places to age-group finishers at its four World Series Majors from 2027, leaving only the top 10 men and top 10 women in each distance with an automatic ticket to Chamonix.

The change, announced Wednesday on the UTMB World Series Instagram account, removes one of the few ways an amateur could bypass the lottery for UTMB, CCC or OCC. Age-group qualification is being moved to a separate rule covering every race in the World Series, which UTMB said will be “announced shortly” without giving a date or any detail.

From 2027 each Major will send a flat 60 runners to the Finals, the top 10 men and women in the 50K, 100K and 100-mile races and nobody else, down from 210 now. Beyond the overall top 10, every age-category winner at a Major gets a place in the matching Final, and the leftover places go further down the age-group results, with the biggest categories picking up the most. OCC, CCC and UTMB each take 70 of those entries from every Major, half men and half women.

Added up over all four events, that takes the Majors from 840 direct places a year to 240, although the full cut won’t arrive until 2028. HOKA Ultra-Trail Australia, the Oceania Major in the Blue Mountains, keeps the old allocation for its May 2027 edition, so next season runs on a mix of three Majors at 60 and one at 210. The other three are HOKA Val d’Aran in the Spanish Pyrenees, HOKA Kodiak Ultra Marathons in Big Bear Lake, California, and HOKA Chiang Mai Thailand, raced on the slopes of Doi Inthanon, Thailand’s tallest peak.

Kodiak, which runs Oct. 8 to 11, and Chiang Mai, which begins Nov. 27, both come before the cutoff and still qualify runners for the 2027 Finals under the current system, age-group places included.

UTMB said the change is meant “to allow top runners in every category to qualify closer to home, while preserving lottery access for the entire community.” The “closer to home” part suggests age-group places will be spread across the much longer list of World Series Events rather than concentrated at four regional races that plenty of runners would have to fly to, but the organization has not said how the new rule will work or how many places it will carry.

Racing a Major will still do more for a runner’s lottery chances than an ordinary World Series Event. Finishers pick up between two and eight Running Stones depending on distance, against one to four elsewhere, and each Stone counts as an extra entry in the draw. The announcement also leaves the regular Events alone, where the top three men and women in each category continue to qualify directly.

For most runners, the lottery remains the only realistic way in, and it is heavily oversubscribed. The independent UTMB blog Electric Cable Car counted about 25,000 applications for the three Finals in 2025, against just under 6,800 starters across UTMB, CCC and OCC the year before. Whether the 150 age-group places coming out of each Major go back into that draw or get handed out under the new rule is the part UTMB has yet to explain.

Val d’Aran, on July 7 to 11, 2027, will be the first Major raced under the new system, and runners who had it marked as their route to Chamonix may be on the start line before they know what an age-group result there is worth.