Sweden's Tove Alexandersson won the 51-kilometre Mistral Marathon Trail at the Grand Raid Ventoux by UTMB on Sunday in 4 hours, 30 minutes and 10 seconds, finishing 15th overall in a field of 1,322 runners as the three-time short-trail world champion built towards her main early-season target at the Zegama-Aizkorri Marathon on 24 May. The men's race went to Kenya's Nashon Kiplimo in 3:58, the first sub-four-hour Mistral time since the race joined the UTMB World Series in 2023 and a result that puts the 27-year-old Olympic 5,000m bronze medallist's older brother — yes, that Kiplimo family — into the conversation for a wider trail breakthrough later this summer.
Alexandersson, who came to mountain running from a decade as Sweden's most decorated foot orienteer, ran the Provence course as the second half of a back-to-back weekend that began with a 25-kilometre tempo on the south face of Mont Ventoux on Saturday morning. Her first 21 kilometres came through in roughly 1:48; she then put 90 seconds into the women's field on the rolling lower slopes and never gave them back. Switzerland's Maude Mathys, herself fresh off the Beijing Changping WMRA opener, ran second in 4:39, with France's Sylvaine Cussot rounding out the podium in 4:42 as the Provençal mistral wind, for once, stayed where it was meant to and let the race come to whoever wanted it.
For Kiplimo, a marathoner whose only previous mountain race was a Kalenjin trail series 30k in March, the win is a useful piece of evidence that recent shifts in the elite road-to-trail pipeline — Hayden Hawks, Eli Hemming, Jonas Russi and now this Kiplimo — are not freak occurrences. The 51k profile rolls between 750 and 1,400 metres of altitude and tops out at the Col des Tempêtes, well below the windier, more technical lines used in the longer Grand Raid races, so flat-pace runners can do real damage. Italy's Filippo Barazzuol was second in 4:02; Britain's Tom Adams, the home international who won the 110k here in 2023, was third in 4:05.
The Mistral race was contested alongside the 125-kilometre Ultra Géant de Provence, which finished in the early evening with wins for France's Jennifer Lemoine in 16:28 and the United Kingdom's Andy Symonds in 13:07 — Symonds, at 44, becoming the oldest UTMB World Series 100-mile-equivalent champion of 2026 to date. Across the four Grand Raid Ventoux distances roughly 4,800 runners crossed a finish line in either Bédoin or Malaucène, a 12% increase on the 2025 edition and the largest field since the festival's relaunch under UTMB licensing.
Attention now shifts to Zegama, where Alexandersson is one of three pre-race favourites for the women's title alongside defending champion Sara Alonso of Spain and the United States' Allie McLaughlin. She has not committed publicly to a Western States or UTMB calendar later in the year, but Sunday's controlled win suggests an athlete who is treating the early-season trail circuit, sensibly, as preparation rather than performance. The Mistral Marathon Trail 2027 will move to a new Sunday slot on 25 April, race director Antoine Roy confirmed, with a third 75-kilometre distance added to the Grand Raid programme to bridge the gap between Mistral and Ultra Géant.