UTMB 2026 Results: Ben Dhiman and Blandine L'Hirondel Win

Ben Dhiman won the 2026 UTMB in 18:16:29 on Saturday afternoon, having led from 41 kilometers into a 174-kilometer race, and Blandine L'Hirondel won the women's race in 21:54:49. 1,680 runners finished of the 2,407 who started, and most of the names the race was built around were not among them.

It was a strange edition before anyone had run a step. UTMB pushed the start back two hours on the morning of the race, to 7:45 p.m., because thunderstorms were forecast over the massif, and it cut the course so that it no longer passed the Pyramides Calcaires. Neither of last year's winners was in it: Tom Evans did not come back to defend, and Ruth Croft withdrew two days out.

Who won UTMB 2026?

Ben Dhiman, in 18:16:29. The American was fourth over the first climb to the Col de Voza and third at Les Contamines, then took the lead at La Balme at 41 kilometers, before midnight, and held it at every checkpoint for the remaining 132. He came down into Chamonix at four minutes past two on Saturday afternoon. His total rest time for the whole race was nine minutes and 23 seconds.

Baptiste Chassagne of France was second in 18:47:38 and Caleb Olson of the United States third in 18:48:24, so the two of them were split by 46 seconds after 174 kilometers, half an hour behind Dhiman.

Dhiman had been the favorite once the withdrawals landed. He was second here last year to Tom Evans, who did not come back to defend.

One comparison worth making carefully: Evans won in 19:18:56 in 2025, so Dhiman's time is an hour and two minutes quicker. It was not the same course. UTMB cut the Pyramides Calcaires section on the morning of the race and put the climbing at 9,700 meters against the 9,900 it had published, and the field started two hours later than planned, into a cooler night.

Who won the women's UTMB 2026?

Blandine L'Hirondel, in 21:54:49, and she took a long time to get to the front. UTMB's own splits have the Frenchwoman 82nd overall at Les Contamines, 32 kilometers in, which was the furthest back she got. From there she moved up almost every checkpoint: 60th at the Col de la Seigne, 48th at the Arete du Mont-Favre, 41st at Arnouvaz, 29th at Champex-Lac, and 24th by Vallorcine at 155 kilometers. She finished 26th overall.

She won the Diagonale des Fous on Reunion last October, the hardest hundred-miler on the calendar after this one, and she was fifth here in 2024 and fourth at the CCC last year. She spent 21 minutes and 41 seconds stopped in aid stations across the whole race.

Rachel Entrekin of the United States was second in 22:15:54, 21 minutes behind, and Emily Schmitz, also American, was third in 22:17:28, a minute and 34 seconds after her.

All three of them raced it the same way, which is the striking thing about this women's podium. Entrekin was 94th overall at Les Contamines and 29th by Vallorcine. Schmitz was further back still, 161st at Saint-Gervais at 23 kilometers and 145th at Les Contamines, and she finished 33rd. Nobody who was near the front of the women's race in the first 30 kilometers was on the podium at the end of it.

Why was the UTMB 2026 start postponed?

Thunderstorms, and the organiser said so in its own words on the race page hours before the gun. "The UTMB start has been postponed by 2 hours. It will now take place at 7:45 PM from Place du Triangle de l'Amitié." The reason follows in the same notice: "Thunderstorms are forecast over the massif toward the end of the day. Your safety is our priority. By starting 2 hours later, you will reach the first high points of the course once the risk has decreased."

UTMB also explained why the call came so late, which is worth reading if you are a runner or a crew member who had a plan for the afternoon. "In the mountains, weather conditions can change very quickly, and a thunderstorm forecast can only be confirmed in the final hours. We waited until we had as much information as possible before making a decision, rather than acting on a forecast that was still uncertain."

The forecast is behind all of it, and it is a narrow window. Chamonix's own hourly forecast has the rain at its heaviest between five and eight in the evening, with a thunderstorm through the original 5:45 start, and then clearing: by ten at night the chance of rain is close to zero and it stays there through Saturday morning. Two hours later is the difference between climbing to the Col de Voza in it and climbing after it.

The course changed with the clock. "The course has also been modified and will not pass through the Pyramides Calcaires," a section on the climb out of Les Chapieux toward the Col de la Seigne. The race page now puts the loop at 174 kilometers with 9,700 meters of climbing, where before Friday it said 9,900.

It is the second Chamonix race to be cut this week, and the CCC got it worse. The CCC, which started at nine on Friday morning, had already been rerouted through Martigny two days before its gun, and then lost its last climb to La Flégère with the field already out on the course. UTMB's own World Series account put it plainly on Friday afternoon: "When the course changes mid-race, you might have to change your plans too."

What is the UTMB race?

The Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc circles the Mont Blanc massif counterclockwise from Chamonix. It crosses into Italy at Col de la Seigne, passes Courmayeur, enters Switzerland over the Grand Col Ferret, and comes back into France for the finish on the streets of Chamonix. It covers about 174 kilometers, with 9,700 meters of climbing on the shortened 2026 course, and it means two nights out for all but the front of the field.

It is the final of the UTMB World Series and the most watched trail race in the world. The Friday evening start means the leaders run through one night and finish on Saturday afternoon, while most of the field runs through a second. Entry requires Running Stones earned at World Series races, spent on tickets in the December lottery; demand far exceeds the roughly 2,300 places.

Who was racing UTMB 2026?

Courtney Dauwalter, in the women's race, and on paper it was not close. She carried a 100M category index of 859 on UTMB's own top-ranked runners page, forty clear of Riley Brady on 819. Fuzhao Xiang followed on 809, then Abby Hall on 806 and Lucy Bartholomew on 802. Blandine L'Hirondel, third here in 2023, and Eszter Csillag were entered too, and it was L'Hirondel who won it.

Ruth Croft was not in it. The defending champion announced on August 26 that she would not start, and by the morning of the 27th she was off the top-ranked page and off the entrant list, with bib 1 gone with her. Why she withdrew, in her own words. That left Dauwalter as the only woman in the field who had won this race, in 2023 in 23:29:14.

The men's race had no equivalent. Caleb Olson topped the category index on 945 with Vincent Bouillard and Hannes Namberger a stroke behind on 943 and Chris Myers on 937, and Ben Dhiman, second here last year, sat fifth on 932 while holding the highest general UTMB Index of any man entered. Bouillard won this race in 2024 and set the Western States course record in June. Namberger won Lavaredo this summer. Jonathan Albon has won both OCC and CCC, Josh Wade was third last year, and Baptiste Chassagne was second in 2024. Rod Farvard, Zach Miller and Antoine Charvolin, who won the TDS in 2025 and had moved up, filled out an unusually flat top ten.

It was flat because the top of it left before the start. Kilian Jornet, Jim Walmsley and Tom Evans were all out: Jornet, a four-time winner, needed knee surgery; Evans, the defending champion, announced on August 13 that he would not return; Walmsley, the course record holder, withdrew with a knee injury of his own and did not move to a shorter race. What happened to each of them, and who confirmed it, is in the full story of the withdrawals.

Which favorites dropped out of UTMB 2026?

Most of them, and four of them stopped at the same aid station inside half an hour. Lac Combal sits at 68 kilometers, just over the Col de la Seigne and the Italian border, and it is where Rod Farvard, Vincent Bouillard, Josh Wade and Courtney Dauwalter all ended their races early on Saturday morning: Farvard's last read there was at 3:29 a.m., Bouillard's at 3:43, Wade's at 3:48 and Dauwalter's at 3:56. Dauwalter had been as high as 88th overall at the Col de la Croix du Bonhomme and was 129th when she stopped. Nothing published explains any of the four, and Lac Combal took 48 withdrawals in all, so it is the drop point the barriers and the first night hand you rather than something that happened to those four alone.

Fuzhao Xiang, third on the women's index, was gone much earlier, at Les Contamines at 32 kilometers, before half past eleven on Friday night. Eszter Csillag reached Courmayeur at 81 kilometers. Jonathan Albon and Chris Myers both stopped at La Fouly at 114 kilometers, 90 seconds apart. Zach Miller got the furthest of any of them and it did him least good: he reached Vallorcine at 155 kilometers, 18 kilometers from Chamonix, and stopped there after 23 hours.

Three of the five women UTMB ranked highest did finish, and none of the three was near the podium. Bartholomew was seventh woman and 63rd overall in 23:44:29, Brady 110th overall in 25:16:54 and Hall 151st in 26:24:58.

What time did UTMB 2026 start, and when did the course close?

Chamonix started the whole field at once at 7:45 p.m. CEST on Friday, August 28, with no waves, unlike the OCC and the CCC. The finish line closed at 5:30 p.m. CEST on Sunday, August 30. That closing time was the one the timing system held runners to: it was the figure in the cut-off column at Chamonix on both LiveTrail's course table and UTMB's own live results, and the last checkpoint before it, La Flégère, closed at 3:45 p.m.

Two published figures did not quite agree, and the finish list settles which one counted. The race page states a maximum time of 45 hours 30 minutes, which would have shut the line a quarter of an hour before the barrier tables did. Sixteen runners finished after 45:30 had gone by, the last of them Motoki Murata in 45:39:06, so it was the barrier and not the stated limit that decided who got a finish. Before Friday morning the two agreed, at a 46 hour 45 minute limit and a 4:30 p.m. Sunday close.

The one rule change for 2026 was equipment: a mandatory red-light mode on headlamps through the Contamines-Montjoie nature reserve, around 40 kilometers in.

How many people finished UTMB 2026?

1,680 of the 2,407 who started, which is the figure UTMB's own timing platform states, and a finish rate of just under 70 percent. 419 women started and 267 finished.

725 runners left the course, and most of them left it in Italy and Switzerland. Arnouvaz, at 99 kilometers on the climb to the Grand Col Ferret, took 121 of them, more than any other point; Courmayeur at 81 kilometers took 101 and La Fouly at 114 took 81. Most of that number is not people giving up, because UTMB counts runners stopped by a cutoff in the same figure.

The men's and women's numbers behave differently against each other. 267 women finishers plus 152 women who left the course is exactly the 419 who started. On the men's side 1,413 and 573 come to 1,986 against 1,988 starters, so the two runners the totals cannot account for are both men.

Where are the full UTMB 2026 results?

UTMB Live has every runner and LiveTrail, which timed the race, has the checkpoint splits and the counts. There were fourteen timing checkpoints around the loop: Col de Voza, Saint-Gervais, Les Contamines, Les Chapieux, Lac Combal, the Arête du Mont-Favre, Bertone, the Grand Col Ferret, La Fouly, Champex-Lac, Trient, Vallorcine, La Flégère, Chamonix. The UTMB 2026 race page carries the same podium next to the course figures.

What happened at the 2025 UTMB

Storms hit the massif through race weekend. Tom Evans attacked on the climb to the Grand Col Ferret and became the first British man to win UTMB, finishing in 19:18:56, 33 minutes ahead of Ben Dhiman, with Josh Wade third.

Ruth Croft won the women's race in 22:56:23 and became the first runner to have won all three of Chamonix's finals: OCC, CCC and UTMB. Camille Bruyas was second and Katharina Hartmuth third.