Well, my day just went to shit. Hopefully yours is going slightly better. I am quite literally shaking right now as I type this and watch the UTMB – Ironman announcement for a Whistler race next year. Worst of all is that they’re attempting to push forward a completely bullshit narrative. They actually posted and then rescinded a comment saying they’d worked with us every step of the way on this, which could not be further from the actual truth here.
I found out about this new UTMB endeavour at about 5pm last night, right around the time my good friend Ihor Verys was wrapping up his incredible 107 laps at Big’s Backyard (717kms) with an assist to the winner Harvey Lewis’ 108. Major props to those two guys on phenomenal runs that kept the community engaged all week long. I bet not a single person behind this new UTMB Whistler venture even knew this race was happening.
Where to begin? I contemplated doing a blog posting when everything went to hell with Vail / Whistler Blackcomb back in February of this year, but I was so done with them and all the BS that I just wanted it to go away. I’d lost too many nights sleep over it already and when they started dragging our reputation through the mud with false claims against us, saying we didn’t have a medical plan, it was laughable and I was done with drawing attention to it and just wanted to move on already.
The best way to summarize what actually happened with the death of WAM would be that the person in charge of events on the Vail-WB side who we’d dealt with for the last two years, has since been fired. This individual was challenging to work with to say the least, and we succeeded with our races despite them and the last-minute obstacles they continued to throw our way. But the issues dealing with Vail Resorts went back two years, to when they gave away our historical weekend to the Everesting organization. In Oct 2021 I got a message from one of our team members essentially saying, “I thought we were on this weekend”, and I replied that we were, only to find out that we most certainly were not. To that point in time we were already 5 years into our WAM races, and the races had always happened on the same weekend in late September. Not a single person from Vail - WB even gave us a heads up that they’d given away our race weekend to another organization back in 2021. We only found out when the other organization went live with their dates. What followed through the rest of 2021 was a hail Mary attempt at keeping our races alive, and every step of the way it seemed we’d not be able to continue. Miraculously, and quite literally at the last second, we found a path forward on a new shared event weekend. Much props to the team behind the Whistler GranFondo for working with us back then to ensure we could keep doing our WAM races.
After the huge success of the 2022 WAM races we all believed we’d finally been rewarded for our years of hard work in building out these events in Whistler. We thought we had the magic sauce with our new courses, and believed we’d just have to cross the T’s and dot the I’s for our 2023 event. Vail Resorts permitted the Everesting group for 2023, within days of the conclusion of their 2022 event (a week after us) and that group then announced their 2023 event almost immediately. All of a sudden our contact at Vail started completely ghosting us. They no-showed on numerous booked zoom calls, refused to reply to emails, and were only providing us with vague comments about there “being issues” and “don’t promote your race for next year as we’re uncertain it’s happening”. This went on for over 100 days, for all of October, November and December!
During this time we managed to form a few allies from within the Vail organization who were attempting to go to bat for us, but they seemed as confused as we did about what was actually happening there.
Eventually, we worked our way up to senior management, going above our contact, to attempt to figure out what was going on. Ultimately, they then laid out a new event approval process that my events partner Geoff Langford figured would take several months to complete, including dealing with new items that were wholly unnecessary. By this time, we were already into late January / early February. The new permits included things like a steep new operating fee, technical and safety requirements completely unrelated to a trail running event, and a host of other items that’d never been there before. All in all though, we felt it was still manageable to work through, and we wanted to continue. We simply asked if they could trust in how we had delivered in past, and if we could agree to go through the process, and eventually get there, but that we’d need to open registration immediately, as we were already pushing into February by this point. The response was that we would not be allowed to promote our race, nor sell any entries until the event was entirely approved by Vail. Geoff’s best guess at this point was that this might put us into late April or even May, however, we have a series of races to produce outside of Whistler and the time for all of this was the 100 days after WAM in which we were completely ghosted by the Vail organization. My personal take in the end was that we were very obviously being forced out. By going about it in this manner no one ever had to take responsibility for saying no to our event, and to their credit they never did say no to us, they simply pushed us out by other means.
Fast forward to this summer as some other local trail races are happening in Whistler, the Vail Resorts – WB events person is continuing to do anything but their actual job, and thankfully they are finally exposed and rightfully fired. We then wonder what this means for us and if we might get an actual apology or something from Vail Resorts about what went down after WAM in 2022.
In the following weeks, we learned WB was interviewing for the events manager role, and our internal expectation was that this would lead to renewed dialogue about bringing WAM back as early as 2024.
For the last 5 weeks, myself, Geoff Langford, and our operations manager Sonia Mahoney, who is based in Whistler, have been holding our collective breathe about a hopeful surprise announcement to the community that we’d be returning to Whistler next year!
Then yesterday afternoon, October 25th, we received a “courtesy message” about what was going live this morning from UTMB - Ironman. This was the first we’d ever heard of this.
We’ve since learned from contacts at Vail – WB that no one knew about this internally as it’d been kept completely under wraps the entire time. Just as we had not been consulted or even notified about this until the night before it launched.
It is important for me to introduce one more item to the conversation here, for if I do not it could come out later and be positioned against me / us and our frustrations with what has just been announced in Whistler.
In 2021 during the pandemic we were contacted via the IM-UTMB group about potentially acquiring our Squamish50 races. I said we were not interested and we moved on. One year later, in 2022 they reached out a second time. By this point I knew two race directors who I respected that’d decided to sell to them. I also heard through a verified source that two more highly respected race directors in the US were also in conversations with them about a potential acquisition. Geoff & I have been doing this now for 11 years now, and the first 5 were a major struggle to make ends meet. Given the unique opportunity on the table we decided, after an incredible amount of dialogue between us and our families, that we might as well hear them out. We signed an NDA and had a single zoom meeting with them. I was completely torn about this and cannot say with any certainty what we would have done had we been tabled an offer. Above all else we would never compromise what we’d built by allowing a major entity to not honour our values. On the single zoom meeting we had with this group I came forth by saying there were “many non-negotiables” on my end, meaning our community support programs, our volunteer appreciation programs, etc. The response was simply that that’d be a conversation for another time. The last we’d heard from them was in late June saying they were putting a pause on this for the short term.
I find myself thankful this morning, thankful that this group have gone and shown us exactly who they are. I was giving them the benefit of the doubt, but in my heart I always knew better. I am embarrassed to have to admit that I almost let a fox in the hen house. I feel like I owe every single person in our community an apology for believing for even a fraction of a second that this group could do right by our sport. Could do right, by our community.
I would like to take the time now to say that Coast Mountain Trail Running are officially announcing our intensions of launching a BC race in direct competition with this event, in September 2024.
Can we pull that off on short notice? We’ve had a number of possible new events loosely in the works for a few years now, but there is still a lot to accomplish here. Our team will put on a full court press to make this into a reality. We promise to announce something firm, one way or the other, by Jan 15th, 2024.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. Thank you to all of the incredible people in our community, and our sport, for reaching out and supporting us right now. I will never fault anyone for wanting to do the UTMB races, but their new structure and strategies are completely counter to the ethos of our sport.
A final side note, after WAM 2022 we commissioned an economic impact study. The results of that study are shown below. Vail kept eluding to there being so much riding on this report, but once we showed them the actual numbers they somehow never mentioned it again.
The combined spending of out of town participants, staff, spectators, volunteers, and other people who visited Whistler for the Whistler Alpine Meadows, in combination with the expenditures made by the event organizers, totalled just over $1.3 million, supporting just under $1.9 million in overall economic activity in British Columbia, including just under $1.5 million of economic activity in the Whistler area.
These expenditures supported $617,000 in wages and salaries in the province through the support of 11.8 jobs, of which 10.3 jobs and $500,000 in wages and salaries were supported locally.
The total net economic activity (GDP) generated by the Whistler Alpine Meadows was:
$1.2 million for Canada as a whole
$971,000 for the province of British Columbia
$717,000 for the municipality of Whistler
The 2022 Whistler Alpine Meadows supported tax revenues totaling just over $416,000 million across Canada.
Sincerely,
Gary Robbins