330 km, 24,000 metres of climbing and a finish line nobody wrote about: Tor des Géants and two Vietnamese runners

The finish line in the Aosta Valley

The finish of Tor des Géants sits in the town of Courmayeur, at the foot of the Mont Blanc massif in northern Italy. When Lưu Đức Toản touched it, the clock stopped at 137 hours 50 minutes. Roughly fifty minutes later, Lê Thị Hằng also completed the race in 138 hours 40 minutes. The organisers set the time limit at 150 hours. Both Vietnamese runners finished with about 11 to 12 hours to spare — a cushion big enough to avoid racing the clock, but not big enough to treat any small incident lightly.

In that same window, Jia Ju Zhao (China) won the men's race in 65:55:22, while Katharina Hartmuth (Germany) won the women's race in 67:10:09. In other words, the two Vietnamese runners needed roughly double the winners' time to cover the same distance. That was the first number I wrote in my notebook, and it forced me to tell this story carefully.

A race outside every news feed

I have followed athletics and endurance running for many years. My job is to sit still, read result sheets and cross-check every split. Nobody wrote about that race, so I wrote about it.

Tor des Géants is not part of the Olympic system, does not sit on the World Athletics calendar, and has no qualifying standard based on marks. Its authority comes from difficulty, not from a federation or prize money. It is a single-stage race, with no divisions into daily stages and no mandatory rest hours. Runners manage their own sleep and decide when to stop and when to continue. Along the entire route there are only seven major support stations, roughly 50 km apart. Between them lie mountains, passes, cold nights and daytime sun above 2,000 metres.

That is why I chose to tell this story. While sports feeds run thousands of articles on events with television contracts, a race with a completion rate of about 60% — meaning two out of every five starters drop out — is almost absent from the press. I once counted 1,937 articles about a men's football tournament and 63 about a women's one in the same month. The number for Tor des Géants is even more lopsided. The silence of the media is not an accidental omission. It is a quiet statement about value.

Reading the numbers through terrain, not speed

A common mistake when reading mountain-race results is comparing times with road races. 137 hours 50 minutes sounds slow if you are thinking of a marathon. But Tor des Géants does not measure speed. It measures endurance.

Put the race's own facts on the scale. A distance of 330 km. More than 24,000 metres of cumulative climbing. More than twenty passes above 2,000 metres. The temperature swing between daytime sun and high-mountain night is a real variable, not decorative detail.

The essence of this kind of result is that it is a measure of durability, not of speed. Taking double the winner's time is not a failure. It is a fact: the two Vietnamese runners sit in the mid-to-back finisher cohort, where the only measurable value is that they stayed upright to the end.

And staying upright is not a small thing. The 150-hour limit does not eliminate runners at the gate. It eliminates them on the course. There are no wildcards, no invited entries, no world ranking to hold on to. Only the trail, the passes and the clock.

Two résumés, one trajectory

Looking at the race résumés of the two Vietnamese runners, I see a trajectory built deliberately, not a random leap.

Lê Thị Hằng comes from Vũng Tàu. She had completed Prenn Trail 250 km, Son La Ultra Trail 100 km and VMM 100 km before setting foot in the Aosta Valley. Lưu Đức Toản had run UTMB, Mantra 116 km, ULJU Trail 9 Peaks 100 km and Mt Fuji 100 km. Both are ultra-distance trail athletes with a base of 100 km and above. Their completion of 330 km is the logical outcome of a foundation already built, not a sudden explosion.

There is one detail I consider more important than any praise. Toản himself said that UTMB — the 100 km race he had completed — is still far lighter than what he faced at Tor des Géants. A man who has run UTMB and still says that has set an honest yardstick for the race's difficulty.

He also described sections of path along cliff faces with no safety ropes, where a single slip means no second chance. This is not a detail added for drama. It is a technical description of a route. In 2026, a runner named Yang Yuan died at this race after slipping and hitting his head on rock. That event has shaped how I read every Tor des Géants result since.

In my 18-square-metre room, I have spent years reviewing result sheets and race footage to understand one thing: when you place two Vietnamese runners in a race that has already killed someone, their completion is a fact with several layers at once. Partly a feat of endurance, partly a passage through a narrow door that not everyone gets through.

The contrarian angle: finishing is not winning

There is a temptation in how the media handles stories like this: turning finishers into champions, turning the finish line into a podium. I understand why. A race where two in five drop out makes anyone who reaches the finish worthy of mention. But if the story is pushed beyond the facts, it damages the very value of the achievement.

The gap of nearly 70 hours between the finisher cohort and the winner is a fact that cannot be ignored. Jia Ju Zhao and Katharina Hartmuth are world-class professional mountain ultrarunners. Lưu Đức Toản and Lê Thị Hằng are strong amateurs. Both things are true. Mixing them together produces a distorted picture.

What I want to stress lies elsewhere. When a race sets its completion rate at 60%, the act of finishing is itself a competitive result, not a decorative title. It says the runner managed sleep, food, temperature and each pass better than roughly 40% of the others. That is a real racing skill.

The problem with this kind of story is not the celebration of the athletes. It is that the article omits finishing positions and split data while still placing the two names beside the winners. That framing quietly encourages readers to assign a competitive tier the facts do not confirm. I have no split sheet, I do not know on which section they lost the most time, I do not know their climbing pace. No data, no quantitative conclusion.

About Lê Thị Hằng, I want to say one clear thing. She finished 330 km in a time only about 50 minutes away from her male compatriot. Over a distance like that, that gap is very narrow. It hints at relative depth on the women's side, but I cannot verify it because there is no data on the women's field as a whole. She does not need a status. She needs a seat that gets written about.

Vietnam's mountain-running ecosystem and a growing signal

The race list in the two runners' résumés deserves to be read as a map. Prenn Trail 250 km. Son La Ultra Trail 100 km. VMM 100 km. ULJU Trail 9 Peaks 100 km. These are races with real distances, real organisation, real participants. Their existence says Vietnam's mountain-running scene already has a domestic calendar thick enough to nurture athletes heading abroad.

Of the three Vietnamese entrants at Tor des Géants this time, one based in France did not finish. That detail matters. It reminds us that being close to the Alps does not mean being specifically trained for the Alps. Completion depends on preparation, not on geography.

At the same time, Jia Ju Zhao's men's win is a notable signal of Asian mountain-running's expansion. A Chinese athlete tops a race that used to be a European playground. Vietnam appears in the finisher cohort within that same movement. These are two layers of one story: Asia is advancing into the ultra-mountain arena, and Vietnam's current position is that of a participant, not yet a contender.

What is changing

I am not writing this to cheerlead. I am writing to record a fact that exists: two self-supported Vietnamese athletes reached the finish of a 330 km race with more than 24,000 metres of climbing, in an event where 40% of starters do not make it, and where the 150-hour limit is a line between life and death rather than a technical figure.

Tactics do not need an audience. They need eyes that truly know how to look. Looking at these facts, what I see is not a victory but a foundation. A foundation being built from domestic races, from athletes willing to carry themselves over passes above 2,000 metres, and from a small community that refuses to stand still.

The question worth asking is not where they placed. The question worth asking is this: if this is the starting point, then in ten years who will be the one crossing the finish line at the leading level?