Lythgoes Adrenalin Rush

Anyone’s race or will Nokia dominate?

Rob / 26.05.2002

No team comes to the race more feared by the other competitors, or bearing a greater weight of expectation than the World Champions Nokia Adventure of Finland, but they have plenty of strong competition. Captain Petri Forsman lead them to 2nd place in the Raid Gauloises only 3 weeks ago, a fairly short time to recover from the longest adventure race ever, but the team here is a different one. Only Mikko Vehmas was with Petri in Vietnam and they are joined by Jyrki Jarvinen and Kaisa Varis. Neither are regular team members - it’s Jyrki’s second race with the team.

While waiting to do his kayak test he commented on the opposition and the course. “It looks hard, and will be tough if it’s very wet,� he said. “The competition is strong with Reebok Adventure, the other Swedish team ‘Maybe Xdin’ and Eco Internet of course.� Obviously, he wasn’t concentrating too much on the opposition or he would have known Eco Internet are not competing – though it was originally announced they would be. Jyrkis smiled and said, “ How sad.� He wasn’t particularly aware of the British and Irish teams either, having a more international outlook.

Of these the one’s he should watch most are probably Team UK and Omniglow Lythgoe as both have previous race winners in their team. Team UK have Pete James and Tom Gibbs who were on last year’s winning team, professional US athlete Dave Norona and Alexandra Stewart, a kiwi now based in the UK. They were busy at the maps and calculations over Sunday morning breakfast and figuring how far they could get on the big sea kayak stage before the dark zone is enforced. (All the lead teams have that on their minds.) They were studying the tide times too.

Omniglow Lythgoe have Nicola and Jim Davies from the 2000 winners, Team Parrot, probably the most successful UK team internationally. They are joined by Noel Hanna, who raced a lot with Team Peak last year and finished 2nd in the first Adrenalin Rush, and another veteran of the race Gary Robertson, who knows Fermanagh well.