The OCC, the short-course centrepiece of the HOKA UTMB Mont-Blanc race week, will start from the Swiss village of Orsières on Thursday 27 August for its 14th edition. The 55-kilometre route, climbing 3,425 metres of vertical positive over a single bright Alpine day, has now grown into the World Series 50K Final under UTMB's reformatted championship structure, putting the race squarely on the radar of the international trail elite for whom the Tour du Mont-Blanc is too long an investment but Chamonix Sunday is too tempting to skip.
OCC pre-registrations were up 16% on 2025 figures, with nearly 11,400 hopefuls applying through the Running Stones lottery for a place on the start line. The cap is much smaller than that — historically around 1,800 to 2,000 runners — and the spike in demand reflects the format's broader appeal: a single-day point-to-point in Alpine terrain, with no overnight section, that fits the busier athletic and family schedules of working-age trail runners better than UTMB's classic 100-mile loop.
The course itself is now well established. Runners climb out of Orsières into the Val d'Entremont, push over the Champex-Lac aid station and the Bovine traverse — borrowed from the longer CCC and TDS routes — before crossing into France over the Col de Balme and dropping into Le Tour. The closing section delivers the same sting as every UTMB-week race: a stiff final climb to La Flégère above Chamonix before a brake-burning technical descent into the town centre and the famous arch on the Place du Triangle de l'Amitié.
The 14.5-hour cut-off allows nearly all qualifying runners to finish, but it is short enough that the elites cannot rest on early-leg cruise control. Recent winning times have hovered around five hours flat for both the men's and women's records, with the women's mark the more vulnerable of the two on a year of fast conditions. Half of the front group typically reaches Champex inside the first three hours, by which point the pace is already too quick for any straggler from outside the lead pack to recover within the closing 25 kilometres of climbing and descending.
The 2026 entry will also be the first OCC under the World Series Final's expanded prize structure, which has equalised payouts across men's and women's podiums and added a deeper top-ten purse than at any previous UTMB-week event. With the race now a single-day final on a popular distance, organisers privately expect this year's edition to draw the deepest combined elite field the OCC has ever fielded — and to set the tone for a Mont-Blanc race week that, by Sunday's UTMB finish under the Maison de la Montagne, will have given out more prize money than at any point in the festival's quarter-century history.