The Giants of the Decade!

Trail running is a young sport, yet this hasn't stopped Didier Curdy, the creator of the ITRA Performance Index, from collecting 25,630 race results over the last 10 years, to give a database of 1,746,619 trail runners.

From all the athletes, all over the world and across all distances, it is time for us to reveal the best athletes of the decade.

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Here are the long-awaited top 10 male and female for the decade! 

First man: Kilian Jornet - Burgada (Spain)

First woman: Megan Kimmel (United States)

photo credit: Salomon running 

Second man: Jim Walmsley (United States)

photo credit: Peigne Vertical

Second woman: Elie Greenwood (Britany)

photo credit: Droz 

Third man: Luis-Alberto Hernando (Spain)

photo credit: Benoît Roux

Third woman: Ruth Croft (NewZeland)

Fourth man: Joe Gray (United States)

Fourth woman: Caroline Chaverot (France)

photo credit:Philipp Reiter

Fifth man: Petro Mamu (Eritrea)

Fifth woman: Courtney Dauwalter (United States)

Sixth man: François D'Haene (France)

Photo credit: Paul Vid Gn

Sixth woman: Stevie Kremer (United States)

Photo credit:Droz Photo

Seventh man: Marco De Gasperi (Italy)

Photo credit: Fabio Menino

Seventh woman: Emelie Forsberg (Sweden)

Photo credit: Marc Lester

Eighth man: Rob Krar (Canada)

Photo credit: Martina Valmassoi 

Eighth woman: Nuria Picas-Albets (Spain)

Photo credit: Pauza Mora Perez

Ninth man: Stian Angermund-Vik (Norway) 

Photo credit: Jordi Saragossa

Ninth woman: Maude Mathys (Switzerland)

Photo credit: salomon running

Tenth man: Pau Capell (Spain)

Photo credit: Buff

Tenth woman: Andrea Mayr (Austria)

How was this ranking done?

To choose the best athletes of the decade, we looked at our database of 1,746,619 trail-runners in different 25,630 races. From these results we first chose:

• All men with at least one ITRA race score of 900 or above
• All women with at least one ITRA race score of 760 or above

This narrowed us down to 163 men and 172 women worldwide.
We then judged each athlete by looking at two different criteria:

1. Ranking the athletes based their all time best ITRA score
2. The next criteria analyses the regularity and consistency of each runner, by looking at the number of races in which they have achieved a score over 900 and also adding together all of their scores for races over 900.

By combining these criteria we reached an overall ranking, which constitutes our results.

There are many ways to do this type of ranking. After much deliberation we decided upon this method as it seems to us to be the most accurate and fair to compare the best trail athletes across all distances.