 In this video, we are going to hear direct from the guy at Ironman who is responsible for setting up the Ultra Trail Whistler by UTMB. Let's do it. Rarely do we experience such an extreme and polarising reaction to a new story in trail and ultra running as we have done over the past few days with the announcement of the UTMB Whistler event. The video I released just a few days ago is already the fifth most viewed on my channel. In it, I tried to unpack what I could from Gary Robbins own blog post, essentially my only source of information for that video. And in that blog post, Gary claims that his event, the Whistler Alpine Meadows event, had effectively been run out of town by a company called Veil Resorts, leaving the door open for UTMB to drive their steamroller into Whistler. The inference being, and the conclusion drawn certainly by me and many others, was that Veil Resorts and Whistler Blackcomb had already had contact with UTMB and the Ironman group prior to February 2023, which is why Veil Resorts put so many barriers up and made it so difficult for Gary and the WAM team to go about setting up the next edition of their event. Why February 2023? Well, on the 10th of that month, Gary publicly announced that WAM was dead. Not George Michael and Andrew Ridgely, WAM, the Whistler Alpine Meadows event, was dead and they would no longer be returning to Whistler. Subsequently, the announcement of the Ultra Trail Whistler event by UTMB was then met with anger, outrage and uproar by the trail and ultra running community, causing many people to ask for a boycott of all UTMB events and all brands associated with UTMB. Hocus specifically came in for some particularly aggressive finger pointing. Just a side note here by the way, I've read a lot of very angry social media posts from across the pond recently and it has amazed me how few people are aware that the Western States 100 race is on the UTMB World Series calendar for 2023. It is a partner of Western States. UTMB and Western States are partners. Now I did comment on this in a few social media posts and I even had the Mayor of Auburn message me to just make it clear that although that is the case, Western States does remain an independent race and UTMB does not have a controlling stake in Western States. Anyway, I digress. Off the back of my video and the backlash against UTMB and the Ironman group that ensued and continues, I was contacted by an ex-colleague. Many of you will know that I am a content creator for Zwift. Yes, Zwift, the cycling company. Many of you may not be aware that Zwift also does running and I run on Zwift a lot. Now the former head of running and triathlon on Zwift with whom I worked for some three years, Craig, now works for Ironman as the vice president of marketing for North America. He contacted me to say, would I like to meet with the guys from Ironman who were responsible for setting up the UTMB Whistler event? Now unsurprisingly, I wasn't the only one contacted by UTMB and Ironman in what has clearly become a damaged limitation exercise caused by this badly managed and seemingly naive initiative. So on Monday, October 30th, I joined a call in which Craig introduced me to Colby Gonowitz, who is the Ironman director of communications, and Keats McGonigal, who is the vice president of operations for North America. Now I'm going to share some audio clips with you. Recently I had recorded the meeting for my own personal notes, so I wouldn't forget anything. I had no intention of making it public, and no one in the meeting knew it was being recorded. However, in talking to Colby, Keats and Craig afterwards, they agreed that I could indeed share some of the audio with you. In fact, actually it's only Keats who answers my questions during the meeting. But bear in mind therefore that there are no rehearsed clips here. Nobody knew I was recording the event, and they haven't vetted what I'm going to release to you. That, at least, is to their credit. Just before we get into it, if you are finding the video useful, interesting, entertaining, informative, please do click that subscribe button, really helps out this channel, helps me to grow, and helps me to keep making videos like this. Okay, let's do it. Keats McGonagall has worked for Iron Man for 15 years. One of my early positions was actually race director of Iron Man Canada in Whistler. And so I helped to start that event when it moved from Penticton to Whistler in 2012. So I have a long professional relationship with the team in Whistler and all of the people there, been going there for a number of years. He also told me he's been running the trails in Whistler for many years and he was well aware of Gary's Whistler Alpine Meadows event. So Keats is no faceless Iron Man executive. Keats has been working and living and running in and around the Whistler area for a long time. The main question to which I needed an answer was, did UTMB contact Vale Resorts or Whistler Blackcomb at any point prior to Gary's announcement in February of this year? It was actually when it was publicly announced that that event was no longer, and Gary came out and said he's no longer operating in Whistler and leaving the market. I saw that announcement publicly on his website as well as some other media outlets and it was kind of that public statement that was kind of the impetus for me to reach out to my contacts that I have in Whistler and just say, if there's a boy that exists, are you interested in filling this? And to be clear, my contacts on the triathlon side were with Resort Municipality of Whistler and Tourism Whistler. And we had conversations with them over a couple of months in March and April. I actually never directly approached Vale. I never approached Whistler Blackcomb. It was through our contacts in Whistler that they were the ones who actually made the introduction a couple months later. We had email records of like timestamps of when the interactions happened and they were after the void was already created. Look, I stated in my original video that it was quite clear to me that the only reason Vale made it so difficult for Gary and the WAM team to organise the 2023 edition of their event was because they already knew that UTMB would be coming on board. I guess we'll never know for sure. However, I'm inclined to believe Keats, who came across to me as very sincere. However, that doesn't mean that someone somewhere at some level within Ironman or UTMB didn't make contact with Vale Resorts or Whistler Blackcomb prior to February 2023, knowing that they did need a Stones race in Canada for 2024. However, even if we accept Keats and Ironman's version of events that they only proposed the race once Gary had pulled out, it still looks bad. It smacks of really poor judgement to ride roughshod over what Gary and WAM had built up and worked so hard for over the preceding years. So I asked why they had not reached out to Gary and Keats said they had and they have said to him. If we can still work together, let's do this. I mean, part of what we were doing when we set this up was looking at not only our event calendar, the calendar in Whistler, but then the broader trail running community. And Gary has his Squamish 50k, which if you're not familiar with Canada, Squamish is less than an hour drive from Whistler. So it's it's in very close proximity to it. And so we were aware of that event that happens in the middle of August. And we had a couple of options on dates in September. And we said, let's push as far as we can to the end of September. You know, so it's six weeks after if you're getting ready for 100k, running a 50k, six weeks in front of that is perfect. Hindsight's 2020. Could we have done it differently? 100% like I will be the first to admit that, you know, what we were we were functioning on was the the premise that that, you know, publicly Gary had come out and said, I'm not going back to Whistler ever again. Right. And and that's the void and the premise under which, you know, we were operating. Could we have done it differently? Sure. But, you know, this is this is where we sit and we go from here. It's fair to say Keats and others at Ironman underestimated the strength of opinion and the backlash there would be following their announcement of the UTMB Whistler event. You know, I'll be the first to admit that had we known this was going to be the narrative of launching this, we obviously would have done it differently. For me, this caught me a little bit off guard in terms of like, again, from my perspective, we were feeling, you know, a void. I was like, hey, this is super cool. Let's give others the opportunity to do this. And particularly for the Canadian runners. Right now, there's no way for them to get stones in in Canada. This was our goal and impetus on on this whole thing from the beginning. So Keats admits, yes, they did make mistakes, but he's also adamant that they did not make that call until they were under the impression that Gary had completely pulled out. And yes, they could have and they really should have contacted Gary at the outset. They're aware of that. They should also have had a lot more foresight as to what this might have looked like from the outside. So where do we go from here? You're a big organisation. You're huge, but there's always lessons to be learned. And I think I think I think you guys should probably learn a bit of a lesson that might influence how you go about things moving forward and just try and step a little bit more carefully. Nobody is denying that UTMB has has exponentially increased the love and and and reach of trail running. We just need it to be a little bit more respectful of the people who've been there before and and put in the hard work beforehand. Yeah. And and again, 100 percent agree with that. Yeah. And you know, again, I appreciate you having this dialogue with us and pointing in the right direction. Right. This is what's going to make all of us better. And we we take this and we learn from it and we grow just like we have, you know, in the other facets of our business and go from there. So 100 you're 100 percent right as we do more of this in the future. We will definitely do it differently than what we did here. I really do hope this has been a wake up call for Iron Man and UTMB and that they will modify their behavior in the future. I've no problem with businesses looking to grow, expanding, looking to make more money. Heck, we're talking about North America. That's the American dream, right? Prosperity and success. Peter, what are you doing here? Shouldn't you be a what? I quit my job, Lois. You what? Yeah, we're rich now. I don't need to be working. I still believe there's room for everyone. There are plenty of runners to go round. I still believe small race companies can operate at a profit and be successful. But their races have to be good. They have to be well managed, well resourced and well executed to attract runners and to keep those runners coming back. And that involves hard work. UTMB are very experienced at putting on races and by and large, their events are impeccably well organised. Feel free to boycott UTMB if you feel that's the right move. But a very well respected run tuber, running YouTuber, told me this week that he believes, despite everything, that UTMB is a net positive for our trail and ultra running sport. And I have to say, I am inclined to agree with him. Thank you very much for watching. If you'd like to watch the original video, click that link right there. I'll see you over there in a moment and I'll see you on the start line next time. Bye bye.