Broadcast innovation helps Golden Trail World Series attract record audience for 2025 season
The 2025 Golden Trail World Series (GTWS) drew to a close on 12 October with the Trentino Grand Finale in Italy. A season that brought together more than 9,300 athletes from 63 different nationalities, crowned Madalina Florea (Romania – Scott Running) and Elhousine Elazzaoui (Morocco – NNormal) as overall winners, and achieved historic numbers in both TV coverage and digital engagement.
The GTWS visited eight countries across three continents, covering over 240km of racing and more than 16,000 meters of positive elevation across nine races. In terms of the record books,
Innovating the live broadcast experience has been one of GTWS’s key objectives this season, aiming to showcase trail running in a more dynamic and immersive way. Beyond the live footage, broadcasts featured interviews and pedagogical capsules on training and performance. Visually, renewed graphics and 3D maps were introduced, alongside virtual classifications to help audiences follow the race more easily. In addition, technological advancements such as relay drones and 4G, Starlink and WiFi aggregation significantly improved the production feed.
In 2025, six events featured live coverage. After each race, viewers could enjoy a comprehensive 23-minute highlights show, plus a final season recap. Altogether, the GTWS reached a new record of broadcasting hours, surpassing 67 hours of linear and on-demand TV content and generating nearly 18 million views exclusively across Warner Bros. Discovery platforms (HBO Max, Eurosport, discovery+, and TNT Sports).
Beyond WBD, the GTWS enjoyed extensive international exposure across 90 territories, reaching a potential audience of 687 million people through broadcasters across all five continents, including FloSports (USA and Canada), ClaroSports (Pan-America), SuperSport (across Africa), Sky (New Zealand), Fox Sports (Australia), J-Sports (Japan), iQiYi and Run Yeah (China), as well as other long-standing European channels.
Beyond television and streaming, the season was also amplified by extensive coverage across GTWS’s digital and social ecosystem, bringing fans even closer to the action and the athletes, while attracting new audiences to trail running.
The storytelling around the competition and its athletes has been one of the season’s key communication pillars. Through the creation and publication of content that dives deeper into the athletes’ stories, alongside trend-driven and pedagogical pieces offering a behind-the-scenes look at how the competition operates, the GTWS has strengthened its connection with fans. Action content remains the biggest draw for fans, with several videos surpassing three million views. Two strong examples are Pierre Galbourdin’s (France – Brooks) crazy downhill in Austria and Patrick Kipngeno’s (Kenya – Run2gether On Trail) quick ‘pit stop’ in Mexico to fix an issue with his shoe.
Throughout the year, more than 1,000 posts – more content than ever before – were published across the GTWS official social media platforms (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Strava). The GTWS global community now exceeds 465,000 trail running enthusiasts (+24% vs 2024), and in 2025 alone generated more than 90 million video views (+83%) and 2.7 million engagements (+26%) on its official accounts.
After an exceptional 2025 season, fans can expect even more in the year ahead. GTWS is preparing new innovations for TV broadcasts, fresh content for both live events and digital platforms, and a calendar full of surprises.