MARATHON DU MONT-BLANC HISTORY: FROM A 1979 CROSS TO A SKYRUNNING LANDMARK

The Marathon du Mont-Blanc did not begin as a marathon. It began as a cross-country race, and it began two decades before the event that now carries the name ever existed.

The race traces its origin to 1979, when Georges Costaz, then president of the Club Alpin Français in Chamonix, launched a 23-kilometer mountain race called the Cross du Mont-Blanc. The first edition drew 450 runners onto the trails above the valley. That number was large for a mountain race of its era, and it established Chamonix as a fixture on the European mountain-running calendar long before trail running became a global sport.

The full marathon came later. In 2003, on the 25th anniversary of the original Cross, organizers added a 42-kilometer event to the program and gave the weekend the name it carries today. The course covers roughly 2,730 meters of climbing, a figure that places it firmly in the mountain-running category rather than the road-marathon tradition that shares its distance.

The first marathon went to a home runner. France's Éric Lacroix won the inaugural men's race in 3:21:04, with Evelyne Mura taking the women's title in 4:04:43. For the first several years the podium stayed largely European and often French, a pattern that would change as the sport widened. Britain's Nick Sharp won back-to-back men's titles in 2006 and 2007, an early sign that the race was drawing runners from beyond the immediate alpine region.

A Festival of Distances

What began as a single race has become a multi-day festival held over the last weekend of June. The marathon is the titular event, but it sits among a slate of races that share sections of the same terrain.

The 10 km du Mont-Blanc joined the schedule in 2004. The KM Vertical, a 3.8-kilometer climb gaining around 1,000 meters, was added in 2011. The original 23-kilometer Cross remains on the program, now the entry point for runners who are not ready for the marathon distance.

The longest race arrived in 2013. Organizers introduced an 80-kilometer event as a test, and the distance grew to roughly 90 kilometers in 2018. With more than 6,000 meters of climbing, the 90 km du Mont-Blanc is the most demanding race of the weekend and pushes well past marathon distance into ultra territory. Together, the races now draw thousands of runners to Chamonix each year.

The course of the longest race reads as a tour of the valley's high ground. From the Place de l'Église in central Chamonix, runners climb past the Refuge de Bel Lachat to Le Brévent at 2,525 meters, then descend to Plan Praz and traverse the Aiguilles Rouges toward La Flégère and Le Buet. A long climb to the Col du Corbeau, near 2,600 meters, leads down to Vallorcine, after which the route rises steeply over the Aiguillette des Posettes before dropping to Argentière. The last major ascent carries runners toward the Plan de l'Aiguille at 2,200 meters and the descent into town.

The route trades the controlled grade of a road marathon for sustained climbs and technical descents at altitude. The 90-kilometer race carries a 24-hour cutoff, while the marathon itself allows nine hours, a reflection of how much the terrain slows even strong runners compared with the road.

The Skyrunning Connection

The Marathon du Mont-Blanc is classified as a SkyMarathon, a category defined by high altitude, steep terrain, and the demand it places on climbing and descending rather than flat speed. That identity reached its peak in 2014, when Chamonix hosted the Skyrunning World Championships. The 80-kilometer race had been added the previous year in part to meet the requirements for staging that event.

The Skyrunning label matters because it shaped who the race attracts. The winners' list reads less like a road-marathon roster and more like a register of the sport's mountain specialists. The race rewards runners who can hold form on a long climb and stay upright on a fast descent, a different skill set from the metronomic pacing of the road.

The marathon also became a regular stop on the Skyrunner World Series, the competitive circuit that brought structure to mountain racing. That status put the Chamonix race alongside events like Zegama-Aizkorri in Spain and the Dolomites SkyRace in Italy, and it ensured that the strongest climbers in the sport had reason to return year after year. The winning times tell part of the story: because the course and conditions vary, the marks swing widely from one edition to the next, and a fast year on the men's side can be more than half an hour quicker than a slow one.

The Jornet Era

No athlete is more associated with the marathon than Kilian Jornet. The Spaniard won the 42-kilometer race in 2012, 2013, and 2014, lowering his winning time each year to 3:23:39 in 2014. He returned to win again in 2017 and 2018, giving him five victories in the event.

Jornet's run of wins coincided with the period when trail and mountain running moved from a niche pursuit into a sport with a professional circuit and a global audience. His name on the Chamonix start list helped draw attention to the race, and his repeated victories on the same terrain made the marathon a recurring measuring stick for the discipline.

The women's race in that era belonged to a rotating cast of mountain specialists. Elisa Desco of Italy won in 2014 and 2015. Ruth Croft of New Zealand took back-to-back titles in 2018 and 2019. Maude Mathys of Switzerland won in 2012 and again in 2021, her 3:51:04 standing among the faster women's marks on the course. American runners Stevie Kremer and Megan Kimmel added their names in 2013 and 2017, and Sweden's Ida Nilsson won in 2016, underlining how international the women's field had already become by the mid-2010s.

After the Pandemic

The 2020 edition was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, breaking a run of annual stagings. The race returned in 2021, and the men's marathon produced its fastest winning time on record when Stian Angermund of Norway ran 3:18:08.

The years since have shown the depth the race now draws. Jonathan Albon of Britain won in 2022. Rémi Bonnet of Switzerland took the 2023 men's title, while American Sophia Laukli, a former Olympic cross-country skier, won the women's race the same year. Davide Magnini of Italy, who had first won in 2019, returned to win again in 2025. On the women's side, Judith Wyder of Switzerland won in 2024 and Joyline Chepngeno of Kenya in 2025.

The spread of nationalities across recent podiums, from Norway and Britain to Morocco and Kenya, reflects how far the sport has traveled from its alpine roots. Elhousine Elazzaoui of Morocco won the 2024 men's marathon, a result that would have been unlikely in the race's early decades. Laukli's win in 2023 told a similar story from a different direction: she had competed in cross-country skiing at the Winter Olympics before turning to mountain running, and her speed on the descents marked a new kind of athlete arriving at the race.

The presence of runners crossing over from road, track, and even winter sport is a measure of how much prize-worthy attention mountain racing now commands. The names at the front of the Chamonix marathon are no longer drawn only from the pool of dedicated skyrunners who built the discipline.

A Fixed Point on the Calendar

The race is administered by the Club des Sports de Chamonix, the descendant of the alpine club that staged the first Cross in 1979. The club was founded in 1905 and runs a broad program of mountain sports, and the marathon weekend is among its largest annual undertakings. More than four decades on, the event holds a fixed place on the late-June calendar, a counterpoint to the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc that fills the same valley in late summer.

The weekend now stretches across three days and several distances, from the youth Mini Cross for children to the 90-kilometer ultra, with the marathon at its center. That structure lets the event serve both the elite athletes chasing a Skyrunning result and the recreational runners drawn by the setting, a balance the original single-race format never had to strike.

The Marathon du Mont-Blanc has kept the character of its origins. It is still a mountain race, run on the high trails above Chamonix, that rewards climbing legs and sure footing over flat-ground speed. What has changed is the scale. A 450-runner cross-country race has become a multi-distance festival that brings the best mountain runners in the world to the foot of the highest peak in the Alps.