The Pole in Arthur Joyeux-Bouillon's Hand: Mountain King's SkyRunner Edge SS 27 Heads to UTMB 2026
At 19:45 this evening, the Place du Triangle de l'Amitié in Chamonix will empty into the streets as roughly 2,500 runners set off on the 23rd edition of the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc — the race that turns this small Alpine town into the centre of the trail-running world for one week every August. Among the Frenchmen lining up with a genuine case for a career-best result is Arthur Joyeux-Bouillon, the 32-year-old from Coureurs du Monde en Isère who has quietly built one of the most consistent UTMB records in the field, and who will be leaning on a distinctive Fluro Pink pair of poles to help him do it: Mountain King's SkyRunner EEDGE SS27.
Three straight top tens
Joyeux-Bouillon's relationship with UTMB is a study in steady improvement. Born in 1994 in the Vercors and raised on alpine skiing and ski mountaineering before falling for trail running in 2013, he now lives at altitude in Savoie and splits his year between winter mountaineering and summer ultras. His UTMB results have climbed in near-lockstep: seventh in 2022, ninth in 2023, and a career-best sixth in 2024. Around those runs sit a third place at the TDS in 2021 and a runner-up finish at the Istria 100 by UTMB in 2023, behind only Jim Walmsley.
He carried that momentum into 2025 with victory at the Val d'Aran 100 Miler, but the back half of the year was harder — a DNF at the Diagonale des Fous in October was followed by a stretch of hamstring trouble that disrupted much of his 2026 preparation. His most recent tune-up, a tenth-place finish at the 6000D in La Plagne on August 1, wasn't the result his palmarès suggests he's capable of, but by his own account it mattered less as a ranking than as proof his body could hold up over a demanding course a few weeks out from Chamonix. Whether that fitness is fully back will be one of the more interesting subplots of this year's men's race, run this time without defending champion Tom Evans, who opted to target the Diagonale des Fous instead, and without Kilian Jornet or Jim Walmsley, both scratches this year.
Inside the SkyRunner EDGE
What sets the SkyRunner EDGE apart from a standard folding pole is the EDGE Clip, a glove-and-grip attachment system that lets the pole become something closer to an extension of the runner's arm than a tool held in the hand. Rather than relying on a wrist strap for leverage, the runner's hand clips directly into the grip through a fitted glove, which allows for more direct power transfer on climbs while still permitting a fast, one-motion release and re-attachment — useful on terrain where runners are constantly swapping between poling and scrambling. The concept sits in the same category as Leki's long-running glove-pole systems, though Mountain King developed the clip mechanism in-house, refining the swing and recovery motion through motion-capture work with its own sponsored athletes.
The engineering underneath that glove system is built for minimal weight. We have constructed the shaft from our own high-grade carbon fibre layup, the 120-centimeter pair used by Arthur Joyeux-Bouillon weighs around 138 grams including the glove itself, folding down to roughly 38 centimeters across three sections for storage in a race quiver. That combination of low weight and a rigid, torsion-resistant shaft is meant to hold up to the repeated loading of thousands of pole plants across a hundred-mile course without flexing enough to waste energy, which matters as much on UTMB's brutal early descent off Delevret and through Saint-Gervais as it does on the long grind up to Grand Col Ferret.
Mountain King sells the SkyRunner EDGE in a handful of color ways, and the version most likely to catch spectators' eyes trackside this weekend is the fluorescent pink edition — officially named Fluoro Pink — a shade bright enough to spot in a headlamp beam climbing through the Alps at 3 a.m. It's a departure from the muted blacks and greys that have traditionally dominated pole design, but it fits a wider trend in ultra-running gear toward loud, easily identifiable colorways that double as a bit of on-course visibility for crews and photographers.
What to watch for
None of this guarantees Joyeux-Bouillon a result to match his gear. UTMB's depth this year — Ben Dhiman, Vincent Bouillard, Caleb Olson, and Baptiste Chassagne among the other Frenchmen and Americans with genuine podium ambitions — means even a fully healthy version of the 2024 sixth-placer would have his work cut out. But after a 2026 defined more by hamstring management than headline results, a return to form on the biggest stage of the European season, with a set of poles built specifically for exactly this kind of terrain, would be a fitting way to close out the year. The field departs Chamonix at 19:45 local time; the leaders aren't expected back into town until sometime Saturday afternoon at the earliest.