With two days remaining before the Friday-night gun, Ultra-Trail Australia organisers on Tuesday published the final 240-runner men's start list for the inaugural UTAMiler 161 km — the new 100-mile distance that headlines HOKA Ultra-Trail Australia by UTMB's 18th edition in Katoomba. The race carries 100 UTMB Running Stones, the maximum awarded by the World Series outside the four Majors, and is the first hard-rock 161 km event the Blue Mountains has hosted under the UTMB banner.
The depth of the men's field reflects how quickly Australia's trail community has organised around the new distance. Forty entrants on the start sheet hold prior 100-mile finishes inside 22 hours, and the median finishing CV across the field is four UTMB Index races above 700 points. Daniel Jones, the two-time UTA100 champion who steps up to the mile distance for the first time, sits as the marginal favourite alongside New Zealand's Aaron Pulford and Spain's Manuel Merillas, who arrives off a Transgrancanaria 125 km podium and has used a Katoomba training block since 1 May.
Beneath that top trio the men's field reads like a snapshot of the southern-hemisphere mile scene. New Zealand's Sam McCutcheon, second at Tarawera 102 km in February, is the only entrant with a top-ten Western States result on file. Australia's Nick Conway, who placed seventh at the UTMB CCC 100k last September, makes his domestic 161 km debut, as does Andy DuBois, the 2025 GNW 100 winner. From Asia, Vietnam's Quang-Tri Nguyen and Hong Kong's Stone Tsang both arrive with 2025 Asia Trail Series podiums and will be the runners to track through the long descents into Megalong Valley.
The course profile is closer to a 22-hour day than the 18-hour clocks UTMB-Major fields recently have produced. The UTAMiler route extends the published UTA100 line out from Aid Station 4 at Dunphy's Camp, adding a long out-and-back to Splendour Rock and a second pass of the Ironpot Mountain singletrack before returning to the Scenic World finish on Furber Steps. The total ascent is 6,750 m, with three of the five climbs over 600 m vertical, and the cut-off has been set at 38 hours.
Conditions are expected to be cooler than the typical autumn UTA — a low-pressure front moved across south-eastern Australia on Monday, leaving overnight valley temperatures forecast around 4°C on Friday into Saturday morning and dropping further at the higher exposed sections. The gun is set for 16:00 AEST on Friday 15 May; live coverage runs on live.utmb.world from 18:00 AEST with the men's leaders expected at the first checkpoint at Narrow Neck around 18:30.