Watch: “I Thought My Race Was Finished.” Blandine L’Hirondel on Falling Hard—Miles Before Winning UTMB

Blandine L’Hirondel’s coronation as queen of the 2026 UTMB began many miles before the finish line. As she marched up the final climb to the La Flégère refuge, poles in hand, dozens of fans swarmed her like bees. It was in that moment that her imminent accomplishment hit.

“I don’t have words,” she told Trail Runner the next day. “It was so incredible.”

An OB/GYN in her free time, L’Hirondel is one of the most accomplished ultrarunners in history. She’s won (among many other races) OCC and CCC—the 50K and 100K championships, respectively, at the UTMB World Series Finals.

In total, she’d run that final stretch of the race course four times previously, twice at CCC and twice at UTMB. But she’d never seen such pageantry.

“Each race at La Flégère, there is nobody, and it’s a little bit sad because everybody is down to go to to see the first man or the first woman,” she said. “And wow, when I saw a lot of people they were here just for me because they had they were singing my my name they ran with me they walked with me, there was a lot of excitement, a lot of emotion.”

She stopped briefly to fill up her bottles at the final aid station at the top of the climb, tears in her eyes as hundreds more cheered her on. She’d looked indomitable all day, pulling away from Rachel Entrekin before Courmayeur and only widening the gap from there. With a 33 minute lead at the top of La Flégère, all that was left was to let gravity take her down the last (technical) descent, to the final kilometer through the streets of Chamonix.

But of course, it couldn’t be that easy. The 33,000 feet of quad-bashing descent had taken it’s toll. Just minutes into the descent, a bandy-legged L’Hirondel caught a toe and fell on her face. She bounced back up. Several minutes later she tripped and fell again—much harder, her leg landing directly on jagged rocks. Immediately she felt a contusion form as she lay on the ground in shock and pain.

“I thought my race was was finished.” she said. “I said no, it’s not possible. It was a dream, and my dream is ending just four, five kilometers before the before ceremony.”

After what felt like minutes, but was probably five or 10 seconds, she stood up. Back in town, the crowd first gasped, then cheered at the screens following the action.

“I tried to to do one step, two steps, three steps,” she recounted. “It was better, but not very good.”

In a textbook example of mind over matter, she carried on anyway, a run only returning to a walk as she rounded the final bend to cross the finish line as the first female French champion in a decade.