The 2020 “domestic” edition of Vietnam Jungle Marathon in Pu Luong resulted in two new Asia Trail Master Championship points leaders. In the men’s, not Hung Hai - who took an easy day in between road race assignments - but Vietnam-based Frenchman Gaetan Morizur earned the top spot by finishing second on the 70k , only four minutes behind his compatriot and new face on the ATM tour, Romain Berlon. Morizur bagged 450 points on top of the 425 he earned last June by finishing 3rd in Dalat Ultra Trail 100 and so pushes Hisashi Kitamura, 850 points, down to second place. Local trail star Quang Nguyen Duc completed the podium yesterday in third 23 minutes behind Morizur. Quang came a joint second in this race last year, when the aforementioned Kitamura actually took his first ever ATM points race win. Also for Quang it was the second podium of the corona year 2020: he was 3rd in Dalat as well, abeit on the 70k B-race over there. He improves his ATM Championship total to 720. Markus Gnirck was fourth in the race and just a couple of minutes behind Quang. Phi Lanh Le came fifth. The first runner-up at Dalat Ultra Trail 100 in June thus boosts his ATM total to 825 points - that’s third place behind Morizur and Kitamura.

In the women’s 70k competition we saw a new winner on the ATM tour, too: Dung Nguyen Thuy. She was highly impressive running together a time gap of nearly 40 minutes to established Vietnamese trail star Julia Duong Nguyen Thi! As a price of comfort, the latter took the points lead in the women’s 2020/21 Asia Trail Master Championship with 950 points. Admittedly, she is first of the elite women to deliver two big results in this special year, but she still did it and is the first Vietnamese runner ever to top the ATM Championship ranking. Two years ago, Julia took her first ATM race win at VJM 70. Last June, she won Dalat Ultra Trail 100, too.

Third woman was Hien Tran, officially from the Czech Republic. Hien was fourth on the 100k of the more mountainous Vietnam Mountain Marathon in Sapa last season. That classic race is still coming up, by the way. As VJM, which normally takes place end of May, VMM got postponed from September to end of November. As a reminder, to balance fairness between runners across Asia, each runner will only carry over their best ATM points result of these two races into 2021. The same applies for Thailand, where residents are competing this weekend in Chiang Rai and can do so again on Koh Samui in November, whereas in most countries there is a complete event stop due to the covid 19 pandemic.

With special thanks to Trung Nguyen, himself winner of the 55k race category at VJM yesterday!

Photo material courtesy of Vietnam Jungle Marathon, except where watermark says differently