The headline race of Trail Alsace by UTMB, the 158-kilometre Ultra-Trail des Chevaliers, set off from the Lac Blanc ski station at 22:00 local time on Friday with 720 runners and 5,100 metres of climbing ahead of them. The pre-race weather briefing called for a clear, cool night across the high Vosges, with cloud building in the eastern valleys from late on Saturday morning, and the elite field went out into headlamp twilight on what is widely regarded as the most demanding course UTMB hosts in northern France.
The Chevaliers route is the longest of four races on the weekend and traces the historic frontier of the Alsace-Lorraine border through Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines, the Vallon de Sainte-Catherine and a string of castle ruins that gave the race its name. The current course record of 19 hours 24 minutes was set in 2024 by the German runner Stephan Hugenschmidt and remains the target for an elite field that this year includes France's Sylvain Court, Spain's María Martín-Vivaldi and the Belgian veteran Karel Sabbe in his first French ultra of the season.
Sabbe, the multi-time Appalachian Trail FKT holder, has spent the last six weeks on the Vosges trails after relocating his pre-summer block from the Dolomites; UTMB's pre-race kit check on Friday afternoon confirmed he is racing in the Adidas Terrex Agravic Speed Ultra 2 that the brand launched at the start of April. Court, who won the equivalent race in 2023, has built his spring around this start line after pulling out of Transgrancanaria in February with a fall, and Martín-Vivaldi is using Chevaliers as her final tune-up before Western States.
The wider Trail Alsace weekend draws around 4,000 starters across the 158K, the 87K, the 47K and the 22K races, with the shorter distances spread across Saturday morning and Sunday. Organisers said before the race that the festival village in Obernai had recorded its highest ever Friday-night attendance, and the start line for the 158K was lined three deep along the gantry at Lac Blanc. Live tracking is being delivered via the UTMB World app, with on-screen splits routed through the new generation of LiveRun GPS trackers introduced at UTMB Mont-Blanc in 2025.
The first elite finishers are expected at the Obernai finish gantry in the early hours of Saturday afternoon. The race counts for triple Running Stones on the UTMB World Series ladder and is one of only two European weekends still offering direct qualification to Chamonix's CCC race in late August. Snowdonia by UTMB starts in Llanberis a few hours after Chevaliers gets under way, giving the European trail circuit two parallel headline ultras on the same weekend for the first time in the World Series era.