Olympic Valley's Race Weekend: Broken Arrow Records Fall as Western States Week Begins

Olympic Valley is in a particular kind of transition today. The timing mats from the Broken Arrow Skyrace are still being packed into event trucks on the lower meadow. Three kilometres away, at the Olympic Plaza near the base of the old Palisades lifts, the Western States 100 volunteer corps is erecting the check-in arch that will mark the start of race week. By 9:00 AM this morning, the first runners began arriving to register — mandatory attendance for every entrant, with the race meeting following at 2:00 PM in the Village.

The same valley. A four-day gap. Two completely different events at the top of what North American trail running can produce.

Broken Arrow Skyrace: The Numbers That Stood Out

The Broken Arrow Skyrace ran across three days at Palisades Tahoe, the ski resort-turned-trail-running-venue that sits at the base of the Tahoe Rim in eastern Placer County. The event offered three race formats across the weekend — the Ascent on Friday, the 46k on Saturday, and the 23k on Sunday — backed by a combined prize structure of $102,200 and a designation as a Mountain Running World Cup event.

Ascent (June 19, Friday). Kenya's Patrick Kipngeno and Anna Gibson won the short vertical race that serves as the Broken Arrow weekend's opening act — a 3.6-mile climb of 2,840 vertical feet up Washeshu Peak, above Olympic Valley's west face. Kipngeno extended his record of winning this format on this course; Gibson's women's title was characterised by one post-event dispatch as a demonstration of what the convergence of ski-racing fitness and trail running economy looks like in a straight uphill race.

46k (June 20, Saturday). Dani Moreno took the 46-kilometre race title in what is the weekend's longest and most technical event — a high-alpine loop that crosses above the tree line multiple times on the Palisades ridgeline. Moreno's win puts the result in a competitive context of the Mountain Running World Cup circuit, where each stop contributes points toward the season's overall standings.

23k (June 21, Sunday). The headline numbers came on the final day. Kenya's Philemon Kiriago ran 1:42:59 — a new course record at the 23-kilometre race, a Mountain Running World Cup event whose prize purse of $30,000 per winner represents among the highest single-race paydays in the discipline. The previous record fell by a margin that the race's organisers noted in their post-event communications. Romania's Mădălina Florea won the women's race in 2:02:18, a time that ran within reach of the women's course record. Second place men's was Elhousine Elazzaoui (1:43:12); third was Patrick Kipngeno (1:44:34), who had won the Friday Ascent and returned to finish in the medals on the Sunday race.

For a sport that frequently struggles to surface results beyond specialist publications, Broken Arrow's prize structure appears to be doing its job: three days of racing on an unforgiving high-alpine course, a field of international depth, and results that will feed into the Mountain Running World Cup standings for the remainder of the season.

What Olympic Valley Looks Like During Race Week

By the time the Broken Arrow timing equipment is loaded and the 23k medals have been distributed, another section of the trail running world has already landed at the Reno-Tahoe Airport and is driving the 45 minutes southwest into the Truckee River canyon, through Truckee, and up the last steep miles into Olympic Valley.

This week, Olympic Valley is two things at once. For the Broken Arrow community — athletes who arrived Friday, raced across the weekend, and are spending their Monday working out the ache of Sunday's effort — it is the quiet post-race valley: coffee at the plaza, a recovery spin on the resort's roads, the particular silence of a competition site after the event clock has stopped.

For the Western States 100 community arriving today — athletes from nine countries, pacers and crew in tow — it is race week. The mandatory check-in and race meeting this afternoon are the formal start of the count to Saturday's 5:00 AM gun at the start line arch.

Race director Craig Thornley opened registration this morning. Runners are picking up their bib numbers, handing in their medical clearance forms, and spending the afternoon at the mandatory meeting where pacers are reminded of the rules they've agreed to know, and athletes are told, politely but firmly, that the canyons between Michigan Bluff and Foresthill at the race's mid-section will be hot on Saturday. The forecast is unclear. The canyons are often hot regardless of the forecast.

The 2026 entrant list has been described by multiple sources as the deepest in the race's 48-year history. The framing is accurate in both directions: the men's and women's elite fields carry a depth of top-end talent that the race has rarely concentrated in a single year.

Men's race:

Jim Walmsley is the central figure. The four-time winner announced in May that he would use a sponsor entry after his 2025 DNS — a race he missed after a knee injury from 2024 became persistent enough to prevent him from racing his way in through a Golden Ticket event. The return of the most decorated active racer in Western States history immediately changed how the men's field was read. Walmsley's course record, his heat management in the canyon miles, and the pace he can sustain through the 60-mile mark have defined the race's competitive standard for most of the last decade. Whether that version of him arrives on Saturday morning is the question.

Kilian Jornet finished third in 2025, less than two minutes behind second place and eight minutes behind the winner. This year, by multiple reports, Jornet is fully committed — not managing toward a recovery or protecting a peak week for another event. The announcement that he is also planning to race UTMB in August has framed the 2026 season as an intentional echo of 2011, when Jornet broke the tape at both races. The last time someone won both in the same summer, Jornet was 23 years old.

Adam Peterman won the race in 2022 and has been racing with consistent form through 2026. Francesco Puppi, the Italian distance runner, is making his 100-mile debut. Puppi's qualifying pedigree on shorter ultras and his road background make the 100-mile transition speculative in the way that first-time hundreds always are, but the names he has beaten at shorter distances suggest that he belongs in the conversation.

Women's race:

Abby Hall is the defending champion. Her 2025 winning time of 16:37 is the fourth-fastest in women's race history. Hall ran the race's second half in control, leading alone from roughly mile 50 to the finish — not a tactical race but a sustained effort that the conditions on the day permitted. She is the favourite by any reasonable accounting of the field.

Fuzhao Xiang (China) finished second in 2025 and returns. Marianne Hogan (Canada), Ida Nilsson (Sweden), and Fiona Pascall round out the top-ten field that sources have described as the women's field's deepest return rate in recent memory.

The Course and the Clock

Western States runs 100 miles from the Olympic Valley start line, through the Sierra Nevada high country, across the American River canyons, and onto the Placer High School Track in Auburn, California. The finish line on the track is 26 hours and 30 minutes after the gun for the cutoff — athletes who don't make Auburn by that time are pulled. Saturday's weather is unsettled. The canyon heat is the race's historic variable: the American River canyon between Foresthill and the river crossing can reach 100°F in late June.

The leaders are typically through the canyon section before the worst afternoon heat. Mid-pack runners face it directly.

For an athlete planning their own Sierra Nevada experience, see our Western States 100 trail destination guide. For the VIVO Rio Pro women's final preview happening the day before Western States starts, see our Rio Pro June 23 field report.