Nice Côte d'Azur by UTMB closed out its fifth edition this weekend having added the one thing its four predecessors never had: a race that starts in daylight and finishes in the dark. The new night-time 50K format sends runners out from the hilltop village of Levens at dusk and brings them down to a finish on the illuminated Promenade des Anglais, turning what is usually a mid-distance trail format into something closer to a spectacle, with roughly 7,500 runners entered across five distances ranging from 23km to 165km over the race weekend.
The format change fits the race's identity more than it disrupts it. Nice Côte d'Azur by UTMB has always sold itself on the contrast between the Mediterranean Alps' hinterland and the Riviera coastline, and a course that begins among the ridgelines above Levens before descending into a seafront finish under lights gives that contrast a literal, visible shape that a daytime finish on the same course would not. Trail races increasingly compete on the strength of their finish-line moment as much as their climbing profile, and a lit promenade at night is a difficult one to replicate.
The competitive interest in the 50K centred on a straightforward two-way contest: Italy's Maximilien Drion, carrying a UTMB Index of 907, against France's Pierre Galbourdin at 898. The UTMB Index is the series' own ranking system, built from performances across its affiliated races to give every entrant a single comparable number regardless of which course they earned it on, and a gap of under ten points between the two favourites made this about as tight a pre-race index matchup as the format produces.
Organisers built an environmental commitment into the new format from the outset, pledging that 100% of 50K participants would be transported to the start via collective transport rather than private cars — a small operational detail, but one that speaks to a wider pressure point for point-to-point trail races as fields grow. UTMB World Series events elsewhere have faced the same scrutiny this year as they've expanded into new regions, from the debut Golden Trail stop in Japan to the World Series' new stops in Turkey and China.
That expansion is the real backdrop to Nice's growth. The roughly 500-runner increase over last year's edition is modest set against the pace at which the wider UTMB World Series network has grown in 2026, but it places Nice firmly as the Riviera-based closing act of the European trail season, a role it now fills with a format no other stop on the calendar currently offers.