The year Chinese ultrarunning stopped

On 22 May 2021, twenty-one runners died of hypothermia at a 100 kilometre race in the Yellow River Stone Forest in Gansu. A storm came in early and the mountain section had no shelter.

Within days China’s General Administration of Sport suspended ultra-distance and mountain running across the country, along with other events it judged high-risk, while safety standards were written.

You can see the moment it took effect. Chinese ultras ran at their usual rate through the spring: 37 races that May, the same as May 2019. In June there was one. In July and August there were none at all.

Line chart of Chinese ultra races and finishers from 2014 to 2025, both indexed to 2019 equals 100. The two lines track each other closely for a decade and collapse together after the sport was suspended in May 2021, finishers falling furthest to 16. They meet again at 77 in 2023, then separate: races reach 91 by 2025 while finishers reach 163. — Chinese ultra races and finishers, both indexed to 2019. Ultra and mountain racing was suspended nationwide from May 2021 after 21 runners died at a race in Gansu.

That is worth separating from the pandemic, because the two get conflated. COVID did hit Chinese racing, hard and early, with no events at all in February, March or April 2020. But it had recovered inside the same year, and October 2020 was the single busiest month in the whole record, busier than October 2019. The sport was fine until the ban.

What came back is not what stopped. By 2025 China had 76,621 ultra finishers, 63 per cent more than in 2019, which makes it the third largest ultrarunning country in the world behind France and the United States.

It got there with fewer races. 298 against 328 before the ban. Every bit of the increase came from those races being bigger: the average field went from 144 to 257, close to double.

That fits what the suspension was for. Races resumed under stricter safety requirements, and a stricter requirement is easier to meet with a full medical team, tracked runners and a large budget than with a handful of volunteers and a card table. The sport that came back is more consolidated than the one that stopped.

There is one number that stays small throughout. Even now, China has about 5 ultra finishes per 100,000 people a year. Germany manages six times that and Switzerland thirty-six times. In a country of 1.4 billion, an ultrarunning population the size of a market town is enough to finish third in the world.

Based on DUV data as at September 2026. Population figures are mid-2025 estimates from the UN World Population Prospects 2024 revision. Field sizes are finishers per event.