The closing of the 34th edition of the Grand Raid on 18 October has shifted attention on Réunion Island from athletic achievement to the institutions and communities that made the event possible. Some 6,800 runners from 43 countries took part in the ultra trail competition, which ran from Thursday 15 to Sunday 18 October, and the parish of Notre-Dame de La Délivrance in Saint-Denis marked the occasion with a thanksgiving mass celebrated on Sunday 18 October, presided over by Father Sébastien Payet.
The celebration, held as the race concluded, was intended, in the words of the priest, “to carry in prayer the runners, their families, the volunteers and all the people mobilised around this emblematic event of our island.” The parish told Aleteia that it wished to “highlight the human values” that animate the Grand Raid: “perseverance, solidarity, self-transcendence but also fraternity.” A fuller account of the celebration and its context can be found at https://fr.aleteia.org/2026/10/19/a-la-reunion-apres-leffort-du-grand-raid-le-temps-de-laction-de-grace/
The mass did not stand alone. It followed in the footsteps of an earlier initiative by another religious institution on the island: “Our Dominican brothers of the Saint-Sauveur cathedral in Saint-Denis offered the runners a blessing mass for their equipment,” the parish testified. Taken together, the two celebrations reflect the way religious bodies in Saint-Denis positioned themselves alongside the event’s organisational machinery, offering spiritual accompaniment to a competition that mobilised thousands.
That mobilisation was considerable. Five ultra trail routes were on the programme, designed for different levels of trail runners across the “intense island”: the Diagonale des Fous, the Zembrocal Trail, the Trail de Bourbon, the Mascareignes and the Métis Trail. Competitors crossed some of Réunion’s most demanding terrain, from lush forests to steep rocky ridges within the Réunion National Park, a site inscribed on UNESCO’s world heritage list. More than 2,000 volunteers were mobilised along the courses, and runners relied on encouragement from spectators and on mutual assistance between participants, gestures the source describes as evidence of the solidarity at the heart of this gruelling race.
The finish line at the Stade de la Redoute in Saint-Denis carried its own emotional weight. Across all races, 5,656 finishers were recorded. The overall victor was the French runner Hugo Deck, aged 26, who covered 180 kilometres with 9,700 metres of elevation gain in 22 hours, 54 minutes and 19 seconds. Every runner who crossed the line, the account notes, lived an adventure that leaves an indelible mark.
Yet the parish’s decision to hold a thanksgiving mass the very day the race ended points to something beyond sporting results. In its view, the Grand Raid is above all a human adventure, marked by mutual aid and sharing, and the eucharistic celebration was the chosen means of naming that publicly. The framing matters: rather than concentrating solely on podium finishes and record times, the institution at the centre of Sunday’s celebration chose to foreground the collective effort, the volunteers, the families and the participants’ shared endurance, that sustain the event year after year.
For an event now in its 34th edition, the sequence of the past few days illustrates how the Grand Raid rests on several pillars at once: a race organisation capable of staging five routes across protected natural terrain, a volunteer corps numbering more than 2,000, religious communities offering blessing and thanksgiving, and thousands of runners whose perseverance gives the event its meaning. The thanksgiving mass at Notre-Dame de La Délivrance, celebrated as the final runners completed their journeys, served as the formal close of that collective undertaking, an acknowledgment, in institutional and communal terms, of what the island had accomplished together between 15 and 18 October.