The lottery arms race

Late in 2016 a complaint about the Hardrock lottery went round the sport with talk of a class action attached. Whatever came of the threat, the question behind it stayed: when a race sells chances at a place, what does it owe the people who keep losing?

Ten years on, demand has kept climbing and the fields have barely moved. Permits and trail capacity set hard limits, so the big hundreds have built more and more machinery to decide who gets in. Western States, Hardrock and UTMB now use three quite different systems, and each one rewards a different kind of runner.

Western States: patience, compounded

Western States starts 369 runners, the number it is legally allowed to run through the Granite Chief Wilderness. For 2026, 112 of those places went to automatic entrants, which left 257 for the lottery. To apply, a runner needs a qualifying race of 100 kilometers or longer, finished within the time allowed, in the year before the draw.

The tickets are where it gets steep. Since 2015 every applicant has held 2^(n-1) tickets, n being the number of years in the hat without getting in: one the first year, two the second, four the third, doubling each December a name stays in the hat. The race’s own statistics for the 2026 lottery show what a decade of doubling produces. 11,328 applicants held 93,003 tickets between them. 4,469 were first-timers with a single ticket each. At the other end, five people held 512 tickets, the maximum for ten straight years of trying, and 44 more held 256.

Two later changes softened the edges. Since 2017 the race has drawn an ordered wait list of 75 names instead of overbooking the field, and since 2021 an applicant can skip a year without losing the count.

What the system rewards is persistence, and in particular the persistence of runners who can finish a long qualifier every single year to stay eligible. Every ticket in the hat is equal. Every applicant is not: a first-year entrant is drawing against people whose odds have compounded for a decade, and that gap grows with each lottery.

Hardrock: loyalty and labor

Hardrock deals with about 3,000 applicants a year for a far smaller field, and its lottery page is frank that the mix is a judgment call. The December 2025 draw for the 2026 race selected 147 entrants, 64 from the pool of previous finishers and 83 from everyone else.

The two pools count differently. A runner who has never finished Hardrock gets 2^N tickets, where N is the number of times they applied, qualified and went through the lottery without getting to start. A previous finisher gets one ticket for applying, one for each finish and one for each of those missed years since their last start. The finishers’ pile grows by addition rather than doubling, but someone with eight finishes and two years out is holding eleven tickets in a pool where everyone has already seen the course.

The pools themselves have changed since 2016. The veterans’ pool that the old complaint argued about was merged with the middle pool for 2023, leaving the two that exist now. Since 2022 the share of women on the start line may not fall below their share of applicants, 22.2 percent for 2026, a rule the race adopted after its own ticket formula, by rewarding long-time finishers and applicants, left women underrepresented.

Then there is service. Every entrant owes eight hours of it, working at an ultra, helping organize one or working on a trail that one uses, done in the twelve months to June 15, with a signed form in by June 21 or the runner comes off the start list. Volunteering at Hardrock itself buys extra odds: a one-off ticket for two days of trail work or for captaining an aid station, and a permanent one for every three years of volunteering. The qualifier is narrower than at Western States as well, a 100-mile race with at least 20,000 feet of climb and long stretches above 8,000 feet.

Hardrock rewards belonging. It wants people who come back to the San Juans, work on the trails and help run the event. The cost falls on the never-finished pool, where most applicants sit, competing in 2026 for 83 places.

UTMB: racing inside the circuit

Chamonix has no doubling and no service hours. Its currency is the Running Stone, and the only way to earn one is to finish a race in the UTMB World Series. Under the series rules, an ordinary series event pays one stone for a 20K, two for a 50K, three for a 100K and four for a 100-miler, and a Major pays twice that. Each stone is one entry in the draw. Stones add up and never expire, though a runner who has gone two years without finishing a series race has to earn a new one before entering again. The UTMB itself also requires a valid UTMB Index in the 100K or 100M category.

For 2026 the race added a lever of a very different kind. Applicants who committed to reaching the Mont Blanc valleys by lower-carbon transport and without a car had their lottery chances raised by 30 percent. Participant travel makes up nearly 86 percent of the event’s carbon footprint, by the organizers’ own count. The rules allow train or bus for European journeys under twelve hours and a single flight for longer ones, proof is checked before the race, and a runner who breaks the commitment loses the entry without a refund.

What the stones reward is spending inside one organization’s calendar. A Western States hopeful can qualify at any race on that event’s list. A runner chasing Chamonix improves the odds only by entering and finishing more series races, and a Major counts double.

Where the next complaint comes from

The 2016 argument was about transparency, and on that front the races have moved. Western States publishes every applicant with a ticket count, and Hardrock posts its pool splits and the formulas behind them.

The arguments now are about what the tickets measure. A doubling lottery measures years of waiting. Hardrock’s measures history with one race and hours given to the sport. UTMB’s measures race entries bought within its own series, and since 2026, how a runner gets to the start. Each is defensible on its own terms. None of them is neutral, and an applicant who reads the rules closely before choosing which hundred to chase will see which kind of runner each race is quietly selecting.