The race that stands between American runners and Ultra-Trail’s Four Monuments Club

The 2026 Diagonale des Fous ('the Diagonale') starts today on Réunion Island. Around three thousand runners will set off across the island. Almost none of them are American.

The Four Monuments club

Only 24 runners in the world have ever completed the Four Monuments: UTMB, Western States, Hardrock, and the Diagonale — the iconic 100-mile-plus races that make up the unofficial majors of ultra-trail. By any metric, it’s a highly exclusive club.

The club has a distinctly Franco-American character. Out of the 24 runners who have completed all four races, nine are American and nine are French. Five are women, three of them American.

Three runners have won all four races at least once: Kilian Jornet, Courtney Dauwalter, and Katie Schide.

Another 214 runners in the world have finished three of the four Monuments. The missing final race differs from runner to runner. For American athletes, however, it is overwhelmingly the Diagonale.

The numbers are striking, but the more revealing figure may be this: only 32 Americans have finished the Diagonale across every edition since 1993, according to the Ultra Monuments database. The race itself began in 1989; the database’s Diagonale records start in 1993. In comparison, the database records 938 American UTMB finishers and more than 6,000 at Western States. However, it should be noted that the database only records finishers, not starters. It can tell us how many Americans have completed the Diagonale, but not how many have tried.

That makes the Diagonale the missing piece for 93 of the 97 Americans who have finished three of the four races. To put that in context, 114 runners worldwide are one Diagonale finish away from entering the club — more than the number missing Hardrock, Western States and UTMB combined.

Which means 82% of the runners in the world who need only the Diagonale come from one country – the USA.

Among them are names familiar to American trail running fans: Zach Miller, Kaci Lickteig, Jeff Browning, Pam Reed, Dakota Jones, Yassine Diboun, Jamil Coury, Ryan Smith and Aliza LaPierre.

That raises an obvious question: why don’t more Americans go to Réunion to run this beautiful and mythical race?

The one Monument you can choose

Getting into three of the four Monuments is mostly a matter of luck. Western States caps its field at 369 and draws from thousands of applicants during its annual lottery. Hardrock selected 147 runners for 2026, with odds that have become a running joke in Colorado. UTMB has around 2,500 places across lottery, points and World Series routes.

The Diagonale des Fous is different. Its 3,000 places are split by residency, with 250 reserved for non-resident foreigners. Foreign runners do not enter through a lottery; they register directly, subject to the quota filling. Réunion residents and residents of metropolitan France and other overseas departments have separate allocations, many awarded through a lottery.

So for foreign runners, there's no lottery to enter, no Running Stones to accumulate toward a UTMB entry, no multi-year waiting strategy. International demand has not, so far, pushed up against the ceiling.

Which produces an odd result. The Monument that is hardest to reach, and hardest to pronounce, is the only one an American runner can realistically plan a season around. The three they chase are the three that might say no. The one that would almost certainly say yes is the one 93 of them haven't entered.

That takes the simplest explanation off the table. These runners aren't locked out. They're choosing something else.

Geography

One answer may be simple geography. Réunion Island lies in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar. For many North American runners, getting there means multiple long-haul legs, often via Paris or Mauritius. A common route from North America goes through Paris, followed by a flight of about eleven and a half hours south to the island. From the American West Coast, the time in the air alone can exceed twenty hours, before connections or recovery time.

Chamonix can be a long weekend away. Travel to Réunion Island is an expedition in comparison.

The timing of the race

The calendar could be another part of the answer. Western States takes place in June. Hardrock follows in July. UTMB comes in late August. The Diagonale falls in mid-October; this year’s edition runs from October 15 to18.

For runners whose biggest goals are built around the American summer 100-mile season, the Diagonale may come after their running season is already over.

The race itself

Then there is the race. The Diagonale des Fous covers roughly 170 to 180 km with somewhere around 10,000–10,500 m of climbing, over technical volcanic terrain, in tropical humidity. For a runner with one long-haul trip a year, that is a reason in its own right, not a footnote.

None of the Monuments are easy, and American runners are not averse to hard races — Hardrock's course is brutal and heavily oversubscribed. But a runner choosing a single international target is weighing an unfamiliar race, twenty hours away, on terrain they cannot easily train for, against two races on home soil and one in Chamonix. The Diagonale asks more and offers less in the way of a known quantity.

Familiarity with the race

Familiarity, or the lack of it, may matter as much as distance. The idea of the Four Monuments seems more familiar in French ultra-trail circles than in the United States.

To make things more confusing to the uninitiated, the race also goes by several names, which can overlap in everyday usage. The Grand Raid de la Réunion is the overall event — a week of several races of varying distances across the island. Its flagship race is the Diagonale des Fous, often shortened to la Diag. People sometimes call the Diagonale itself "the Grand Raid" too, which is where the trouble starts.¹

For those who follow the event, the distinction is clear; for someone encountering it for the first time, it may not be.

Names alone are unlikely to keep runners away. But they can make a race harder to place in an already crowded international calendar.

Coverage and the missing peer effect

One explanation I expected to find was a lack of English-language coverage. That is not quite the story.

The race has been documented in English for well over a decade. In 2012, US ultrarunner Joe Grant traveled to Réunion and wrote a detailed race report for iRunFar — among the earliest first-hand accounts in English of what running the Diagonale actually involves. He did not finish the race, dropping out at Maïdo with about 50 km to go.²

By 2016, iRunFar was covering the race with an in-depth preview, live reporting and a series of interviews. In 2021, trail running media outlet Freetrail released Begin Again, a feature-length film following ultrarunner Dylan Bowman's run at the 2021 Diagonale des Fous that captures both the scale and the emotion of the event. The race has appeared in podcasts and online coverage regularly since, and has become considerably more visible on social media in recent years, where the island's dramatic volcanic setting and raw jungle terrain make for unusually good footage.³

So the information has been there for at least fourteen years. It does not seem to have moved many American runners.

That may say something about the kind of visibility this coverage provides. Watching a race is not the same as planning one. Most of the Diagonale's English-language exposure has come from professional athletes, film crews and brand projects — coverage that travels widely, but from the top down. And much of it reads more as warning than invitation. Grant's account was one of being beaten by the course. Five years later, American rising star Jim Walmsley led the race for more than 100 km before the heat and his stomach caught up with him at Maïdo — the same climb that had stopped Grant. He abandoned on the descent. Begin Again is a film about suffering as much as achievement. For a recreational runner weighing one long-haul trip a year, that is a different proposition from watching a highlight reel of Chamonix.

What it hasn't produced is the thing that actually moves recreational runners: someone in your own training group who has been, and who can tell you which routing to book, what the gear check is like, and how to handle the humidity.

Joe Grant's race report is a case in point. He was one of the first Americans to run the race and document it publicly, and he was precisely the sort of runner whose trip might have been expected to start something — well known, widely read, writing for the sport's main English-language outlet. Fourteen years on, the American finisher total still sits at 32.

When few runners in your circle have done a race, fewer people bring it up as the next obvious goal.

Historical language and administration barrier

During the formative decades of modern ultra-endurance racing (the 1990s through mid-2000s), the Grand Raid operated behind a steep linguistic and administrative barrier.

In the archived versions of the Grand Raid website I reviewed, the site remained in French until 2008; an English-language interface appears around 2010–11. Because the event's official web presence and communications remained exclusively in French before then, every critical step—navigating the registration process, understanding medical certificate requirements, reading mandatory gear rules, and coordinating island logistics—required functional French literacy or a local contact. For American runners accustomed to straightforward, English-first registration systems, this friction would likely have created an immediate perception that the race was an insular domestic event for mainland France and Réunion Island, effectively filtering out non-French speakers before they could even consider applying.

To its credit, the race organization, the Association Grand Raid, has recognized this historical deficit and taken steps in recent years to broaden its international reach. The organization now runs a full English-language site, with translated registration guidelines and rulebooks. It also places bilingual volunteers at the airport and at registration to help foreign athletes navigate logistics, bib collection and gear checks. The friction is largely gone, but most American ultrarunners have yet to be convinced that Réunion Island is, at last, fully open to them.

The surrender of first-mover advantage

There may also be a longer history of how international trail-running destinations became established. In the 2000s, American ultrarunners were increasingly looking overseas for bucket-list races. UTMB, launched in 2003, courted foreign athletes with multi-language media and grew around the accessible Alpine hub of Chamonix. It has since become a familiar objective for runners across the world.

By operating as a monolingual event during the precise era when global ultrarunning was exploding, the Grand Raid surrendered critical first-mover advantage to other international races. By the time the Association Grand Raid finally launched a dedicated English-language website, the international trail-running imagination had begun to settle around a few better-known destinations. It is plausible that UTMB and other European races had gained an early advantage in visibility and travel familiarity, leaving the Diagonale to overcome the perception that it was a remote, difficult-to-access outlier.

A different map

Over the past few years, UTMB has built more than a race. It has built infrastructure: a global calendar of World Series events, a single account through which runners enter them, a performance index, a rankings system, qualifying pathways and a marketing reach no other trail race organization can match.

For a lot of runners, that infrastructure now answers a question it never used to. "What international race should I do next year?" is increasingly resolved by browsing one calendar, in one place, with one login. The Diagonale des Fous is not on it.

Western States and Hardrock sit outside that system too, but they don't need it. They are embedded in the American ultrarunning conversation — in the podcasts, the race reports, the lottery-day rituals, the training-group chatter. An American runner encounters them whether they look for them or not.

The Diagonale is outside both. It isn't surfaced by the ecosystem that organizes international racing, and it isn't carried by the media that shapes American ultrarunning goals.

This may be the part of the first-mover story that still matters. UTMB didn't only reach an English-speaking audience first. It went on to build the system through which that audience now finds races at all. The Diagonale doesn't have to be less appealing to lose out in that environment. It only has to be somewhere the system doesn't point.

Conclusion

These explanations remain hypotheses. The numbers do not tell us why American athletes have been scarce at the Diagonale. They do show where the gap is.

For 93 American runners, the Diagonale is the one race between them and the Four Monuments club. The island is far away, the race comes late in the year, and the challenge is not yet part of the American ultrarunning conversation in the same way as UTMB or Western States.

Maybe that changes one runner at a time.