Looking good for 2008!

Jacqueline Windh and Rob Howard / 14.01.2008

Hey, wasn’t it about this time last year that we were all worrying about cancelled races and the future of AR? There was talk about the Raid World Cup not returning, few big races had announced their dates yet, and we were all wondering if we would ever see Primal Quest again.

My, how things have turned around! Sure, the Raid didn’t return, but its organizers Saga Events came back with the Mountain XGames, held in France in July, attended by 40 of the world’s best teams… and then Saga followed up in December with the Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge, with 26 top-knotch Teams participating. No one is complaining about that!

While a few of the ARWS regular competitions took a year off (hopefully just one!), we still saw lots of races from this series taking place: Poland’s Bergson Winter Challenge, Spain’s Bimbache Extrem, Brazil’s EcoMotion Pro, XPD Australia and XPD Portugal, and the first edition of A Raid in France… and then, of course, there was the hotly contested ARWS Championship in Scotland in May/June.

And several of the big races that we’d worried about returned after all, in some great locations – Raid the North Extreme in northwestern British Columbia, Reunion d’Aventures on Reunion Island, Huairasinchi in the high Andes of Ecuador, and the Dream Raid in New Caledonia, to name a few.

And then Primal Quest came through too – just taking a break for 2007, folks, but promising to be back for 2008 .

One recent development is that shorter but faster staged races seem to be getting bigger on the international scene … while some, like China’s Wulong Challenge and Mexico’s Extreme Adventure Hidalgo have been around for several years, there are some newer ones now too. 2007 marked the second years for both the highly successful 7 Cerros Medellín Urban Adventure Race (Colombia) and Trinidad’s Tropical Power Coast 2 Coast, and the first year for the Keen Adventure Race held in John Jacoby’s backyard, southeastern Australia.