Julien Veysseyre Becomes the First Amputee to Finish the UTMB

Julien Veysseyre came through the arch in Chamonix shortly after 4 p.m. on Sunday, 44 hours and 16 minutes after he set off, and became the first amputee to finish the UTMB.

Official timing has the 39-year-old Frenchman 1,475th in 44:16:04, wearing bib 1416 and listed for Salomon’s para team. He was one of about 2,400 runners who left the Place du Triangle de l’Amitié at 7:45 p.m. on Friday, two hours later than scheduled after the organization delayed the start over a thunderstorm risk and took the Pyramides Calcaires out of the route, leaving a loop of 173.6K (108 miles) and 9,700 meters of climbing, about 31,800 feet. The delay moved the last cutoff to 6:30 p.m. on Sunday. Veysseyre had about two hours and 25 minutes of it left. Ben Dhiman and Blandine L’Hirondel had won the race and the women’s race on Saturday, in 18:16:29 and 21:54:49.

Veysseyre was 1,341st through Les Contamines on the first night. By Courmayeur, about 80K in, he had dropped to 2,099th, and he had been running since the start on a painful sound foot and with discomfort where the prosthesis met his residual limb.

“I could barely run any more. It was every man for himself. I got to Courmayeur and in my head I was 98 percent certain I was not going back out,” he said in the mixed zone afterward, speaking in French, in comments carried by AFP.

He went back out, and the numbers turned around: 1,539th into Champex-Lac, 1,433rd at Trient, 1,412th at Vallorcine and 1,475th at the line, a gain of more than 600 places over the second half of the course. Some of that is runners ahead of him dropping out rather than runners he went past, and the finish figure is worse than the Vallorcine one because runners who were behind him there came past on the last section. He was moving up from Courmayeur to Chamonix either way.

Five guides took turns with him across the two nights, and part of what they carried was a second prosthesis, swapped in as the ground changed, according to AFP. UTMB runs no para classification, so the result files Veysseyre in the 35-39 men’s category with everyone else.

The cost of covering that ground is documented. People with a below-knee amputation use 10 to 30 percent more metabolic energy to walk than people without one, according to a 2018 paper in Scientific Reports, and running on a blade adds socket friction and a gait that loads the sound side harder. Veysseyre was out there for 44 hours and, by La Montagne‘s count, stopped for only 1:59:16 of it, including two longer breaks of 37 and 40 minutes, one on each night.

Amputee runners have finished 100-mile races before him. Amy Palmiero-Winters, who lost her left leg below the knee after a motorcycle crash and talked to Marathon Handbook about racing on a blade, was the first amputee to finish the Western States 100, in 2010, and the first woman with an amputation to finish Badwater the year after, in 41:26:42, according to LetsRun. No amputee had finished the UTMB before Sunday.

Veysseyre lost his right leg below the knee after a workplace accident at 18. He came to endurance sport through triathlon and won a para cross-triathlon world title in 2023, which is how Salomon found him. He finished the CCC last August, 100.5K and 5,764 meters of climbing, in 21:55:47 for 877th, and said then that the UTMB was the reason he was there. He left a job in human resources in the spring to train and speak full time. His two sons ran the last stretch with him on Sunday.

La Montagne reported that he goes to La Réunion next, for La Mascareignes, 74K and 3,800 meters of climbing, which starts at 1 a.m. on Oct. 16 at Hell-Bourg and finishes in Saint-Denis. He has said he wants trail racing to build para categories of its own, and points at triathlon, where he says the system already works.