ITERA Expedition Race
Racing Denmark Win ITERA 2022
Rob Howard / 18.08.2022
At 14.26 Team Racing Denmark crossed the finish line at ITERA 2022 to win the race in a time of 96 hours 26 minutes.
Sadly, they didn't get to paddle into the bay to finish on the North Pier as planned, and instead rode along the town's main waterfront and onto the pier to the finish gantry and a well earned race victory. They had race consistently throughout and crucially not making any major mistakes. They stayed close to the leaders at the start, took a strong lead in the mid part of the race (partly helped by the mistakes of others) and held their pace to the end under pressure from the Endurancelife AR team.
Speaking on the finish line Ole Hemme Hansen said, "We are a new team and have not raced all together before, and for me it is my first race over 24 hours. Mikkel (Overgaard) and Mikael (Halberg) are the experience campaigners in the team." Thea Otte Andersen laughed and added, "And I'm the girl!" She was smiling when she said that, and is an experienced campaigner too, having won the European Champs and finished on the 3rd placed team at Expedition Africa Lesotho earlier this year. She has a black eye after a bike fall
"We could see from the early stages who the top 5 teams were and it was quite close, but we felt we had the strength to match them, especially on the bikes," Ole continued. "Our team work as good and we slept for 90 minutes before the Ben Nevis trek then raced to the finish. We did get help up at the Via Ferrata but it makes no difference now. You win a race with all your actions but I guess if I had to pick one stage it would be the long bike push (Stage 7 Glenfinnan) where we got ahead. It was the stage where you pushed your bike over one mountain, and then you pushed it over another mountain!"
On that stage the Danish team took a strong lead, and it was the stage where SWECO and Adventure Trophy decided, to their cost, to take a much longer ride to avoid all that pushing.
The second team to finish were Endruancelife AR, only 53 minutes later. "It's not bad for a scratch team and a B team," said Ian Furlong who only joined the team 2 weeks ago but knows them well. He was a late call into the Endurancelife team which raced at Expedition Africa Lesotho earlier in the year. He added, "Why spend so much energy planning for a race!" Mark cranny said "We were looking over our shoulders for the other (Endurancelife) team at the end, and kept expecting them to come up behind us." (Hence the joking reference to the B team.)
The first two short course teams across the line today were Team W.I.C.K-ed and KARMquest, and as all the other teams have already exceeded their times (with the penalties added in) they will be first and second short course. Andrew Higgins of KARMquest said at the finish, "Thank you to all the marshals and helpers who make it all happen for us. It is amazing to see you around the course, often several times!"
