Obernai welcomed back the final wave of finishers on Sunday afternoon as the third edition of the Trail Alsace Grand Est by UTMB closed a three-day racing weekend in the rolling, often saturated, sandstone country of the Vosges Massif. The flagship Chevaliers 158K, started Friday evening, concluded its last cut-offs by mid-morning Sunday, capping a UTMB World Series event that brought roughly 7,500 runners to the Alsace region across five race distances.
The Chevaliers podium for the 158K, which featured 6,250 metres of climbing across a loop through Obernai, Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines and the Champ du Feu, was decided through a relentlessly rainy Saturday night that turned the singletrack between the Donon and the Hohwald into long sections of mud. Race organisers reported a finish rate noticeably lower than 2025's, and a flurry of fast-paced shorter-distance races on Saturday produced more headline times.
The Sunday-morning Marcaires 78K, run as a daylight loop out of Obernai's stadium plaza, delivered the weekend's most competitive elite contest. The course's punchy 3,200 metres of climbing across vineyards and pine forest favoured a small lead group that broke clear after the early Mont Sainte-Odile climb. The Marcaires has emerged in just three years as the breakthrough race of this event, with stacked European fields drawn by its tight 80-kilometre format and the speedy descent into Obernai's finish line through cobbled streets.
Trail Alsace's place on the 2026 UTMB World Series calendar carries unusual significance this year. The series's qualification system, revised for 2026 to weight Series Major and Stones events, makes the Chevaliers 158K one of the few European May fixtures awarding full Running Stones for Chamonix qualification. Race officials confirmed on Sunday that more than 70 percent of Chevaliers finishers had registered with the Stones programme — the highest take-up in the event's short history.
Attention now shifts to the next blocks of the UTMB World Series calendar, with Mozart 100 in Austria the following weekend and the Lavaredo Ultra Trail in mid-June. Trail Alsace officials have already opened the Race-Eve registration ballot for 2027, and event founder Anne Champagne told French press over the weekend that the long-mooted shortened expert distance, a 110K Knights race, will be added to the programme starting next May.