The Tor des Geants has produced the two fastest performances in its 16-year history within an hour of each other. China's Jiaju Zhao reached Courmayeur at 3:55am on Wednesday to win the 330km loop of the Aosta Valley in 65:55:22, taking exactly 13 minutes off the course record Victor Richard set last year. He is the first Chinese runner, and the first Asian runner, to win a race that has been dominated by European mountain specialists since its creation in 2010.
Zhao's victory was not the only record to fall. Katharina Hartmuth crossed the line in 67:10:09 to win the women's race and finish third overall, roughly a quarter of an hour behind Switzerland's Jonathan Schindler, who was second in 66:55:06. According to the organisers, no woman had previously finished on the overall podium at the Tor des Geants, and nobody had broken 70 hours. Hartmuth did both in the same run, and finished a little over an hour behind the outright winner across a course that takes most of the field five or six days.
The shape of the race changed more than once. Zhao led early, lost the lead to Schindler around Gressoney on the second night, and took it back over the closing sections as the Swiss runner's pace faded on the final climbs. That kind of sequencing is characteristic of the Tor, where the 24,000 metres of vertical gain and the requirement to manage sleep across three nights mean the leader at any given life base is rarely the eventual winner. Weiqiang Zhang completed a second Chinese finish inside the top four, taking third among the men in 71:53:56.
Hartmuth's run deserves examination on its own terms. Her margin over the rest of the women's field was measured in hours rather than minutes, and her finishing position relative to the men reflects a pattern that has become more visible in multi-day ultrarunning: as races extend beyond 48 hours, the gap between the best women and the best men compresses. The Tor is an extreme case, combining technical alpine terrain, cumulative sleep deprivation and a nutrition problem that lasts the better part of three days. Hartmuth said afterwards that she was proud to have run almost as fast as the men, which is a fair summary of the result.
With around 1,100 starters set off from Courmayeur on 13 September, the majority of the field is still on the course, and finishers will continue to arrive until the cut-off on Saturday. The race remains one of the few in the sport where the leading times and the median times belong to visibly different events: the front of the field treats the Tor as a continuous effort, while most of the field treats it as a stage race with self-selected stages. Zhao's record suggests the first of those approaches still has room left in it.