COROS dominates wrists at UTMB – who won on most wrists?
The Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc (UTMB) is one of the pinnacles of ultra trail racing and is the World Series final. The course varies each year, this year was the longest at 176.4km (over 100 miles).
Its 2024 edition had 1760 finishers from a record starting field of 2761 and its winners were Vincent Bouillard (France, 19:54:23) and Katie Schide (USA, 22:09:31). (More: Full Results)
But what technology was used?
Coros Dominates
In recent years, Coros has made a concerted effort to become the trail watch of choice, taking over the mantle previously held by Garmin and Suunto. The 2023 race was somewhat of a technological upset when Jim Walmsley won wearing a Wahoo RIVAL…a triathlon watch rather than a trail watch! This illustrates that sub-24-hour finishing times open up the runners’ choice of tech to watches not especially dedicated to Ultra Trails. Let’s turn to 2024.
More: The watch data is based on extensive technical research by the French site Montre Cardio GPS, (English translation)
The 2024 tech winners were Coros Apex 2 Pro (BOUILLARD) and Garmin Fenix 7s Pro (SCHIDE).
I determine the most successful brand to be the one on most top-20 finishers’ wrists. Here’s how they fared:
- Coros – 13
- Suunto – 10
- Garmin – 6
- Polar – 2
by the same measure, the most successful Watch Series are:
- Coros Apex 2 – 8
- Suunto Race – 6
- Coros Vertix 2 – 4
- = Garmin Fenix 7 – 3
- = Suunto 9 – 3
Which makes the most successful watch to be the Coros Apex 2 Pro (7 wrists)
Take Out
The Apex 2 Pro from 2022 has a claimed GPS battery life of 75 hours and 25 hours in maximum accuracy mode. I suspect that this spec coupled with Coros’ marketing got many of the athletes to choose the brand and stick with it since.
As a trail brand, Suunto has created a lot of goodwill over the years. I suspect 2023’s excellent-looking RACE models easily won back the athletes who chose to wear one this year.
Garmin is surprisingly under-represented. Whilst it competes well on battery life and weight, the 7X and Enduro models have the largest screens which you would have thought would be the best to display a map for trail navigation – furthermore, I believe only Garmin and Suunto can show map elevation contours which must also be useful.
Of course, the choice of watch is also influenced by sponsorship.
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Fabulous to see Suunto back in the game.
that’s what i thought
On your 2nd last para about maps…is it ALLOWED to be tech assisted for navigation in UTMB? 🤷♂️
Even in UK FRA events, theoretically you have to declare yourself as an “uncompetitive” runner if you use map or other navigation aid supported with GPS from your watch.
Add similar discussion recently, and we noted that Coros (didn’t pick up on Suunto) seemed to be sweeping up the elite end of ultra events and couldnt really work out why so few Garmin. Coros also seem to have pretty much taken over the middle-distance track runners….is it all just down to sponsorship, and Garmin are seen as a less fast moving brand?
” is it ALLOWED to be tech assisted for navigation in UTMB?”
Not only allowed. UTMB race regulations – similar to other events of this type – highly recommend to be equiped with a GPS-enabled watch with the race course uploaded. Also, in case of UTMB a smartphone with LiveTrack app is MANDATORY!.
” Even in UK FRA events, theoretically you have to declare yourself as an “uncompetitive” runner”
You probably think of different type of sport. Most normal ultra trail races around the world recommend to have a watch with navigation aid.
All that said, having some experience in ultra running, I think that a map in a watch is not that helpful in case of most ultra races. All you really need is the watch to tell you if you are on course or not. And for that a simple bread-crump trail with your position superimposed on it is all that is needed. I’ve run a lot of ultra trail races without a map, but just a course uploaded to the watch, and never got lost.
> Of course, the choice of watch is also influenced by sponsorship.
This.
Coros is aggressive with sponsorships and Garmin is very much not. Some Salomon athletes seem to have a crossover brand family relationship with Suunto.
I would lay odds that a substantial portion of the athletes with an Apex 2 Pro or Vertix 2/2s have some sort of partnership with Coros. I would be surprised if anyone would choose a Polar Grit X2 unless they are sponsored.
Sponsored or not it is super interesting to me that the Suunto Race and Race S is much more popular than the Suunto Vertical. 1 MIP : 9 AMOLED.
All of that aside, I think that Coros, Garmin, and Suunto are using the same NXP ARM CPU and the same GNSS chipset. The core feature set is somewhat commoditized. They all have excellent performance and battery range now. Elite runners don’t need 50 or 100 hours range for UTMB, either, so range doesn’t matter anymore as a differentiator in the 100 mile ultra distance.
Not to be discounted is that Garmin fenix costs a *lot* more than Coros Apex Pro or Vertix and Suunto Vertical or Race Models. The marginal Garmin features are generally nice-to-have things like music, payments, on-demand routing, lifestyle physiology tracking and not the performance critical stuff which they all have pretty much nailed down now.
Polar is dead