Top Tier Trail Racing Weekend for SCOTT Running Athletes

The SCOTT Running athletes competed this weekend in both Europe and the US. On Saturday morning it was again time for Cody Lind's father to fire the shot gun to start the legendary Western States Endurance Run. 100 miles of mostly rolling trails, up and down, and a boat ride across a river, from the Olympic Valley to Auburn in California. Thanks to top 10 finishes last year, Cody Lind and Alex Nichols qualified automatically for this year’s edition. They started out together, moving side by side for the first few miles. Last year they finished close to each other, only a minute apart in 16.5 hours.

Because of the amount of snow that fell in winter in the area, some sections of the trail were still covered with snow. A rather unusual sight for a race that is known to be incredibly hot. This meant the temperatures were cooler than in previous editions and so the competition was fierce and the runners fast. Both Alex and Cody did not manage to take full advantage of the conditions, but they both still finished in the top 30!

16. Cody Lind – 16:55:22
28. Alex Nichols – 20:33:10

On Sunday, 25th June, it was time for the next stop of the Golden Trail World Series hosted by the Marathon du Mont-Blanc. Start and finish of this event was in Chamonix in France, the home of UTMB. Next to well-known names from our SCOTT Running team, we also had young talents competing in the Young Race Marathon (15km, 810 elevation gain). Thanks to the strong performances of Lili Beck, second woman overall, and Fannie Sapet, third woman overall, the black and yellow colours were prominent on the podium.

In the elite races, we had Airiau Gautier with an incredibly strong 9th place finish on the 90km distance. On the 42km, the fast pace of the leaders pushed everyone from the start. SCOTT athlete, Iris Pessey, always finds this race particularly challenging as it is too fast and not enough technical for her, but she rallied and placed well in 13th. After the race she said: “I raced, and I learnt a lot. I'm still super happy with everything this weekend, my parents who surprised me during the race, going to an event as a Team with the other SCOTT members, having so many friends along the course... I'll remember only the good things.”

All results:
42km du Mont-Blanc
13. Iris Pessey
30. Antoine Thiriat

90km du Mont-Blanc
9. Airiau Gautier

Young Race Marathon
2. Lili Beck
3. Fannie Sapet
6. Antonin Therond