6th Annual Arctic Team Challenge

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Amazing race by eastgreenland.com!

Jesper Kunuk Egede / 23.07.2006

At 9 PM the teams started out with a 35 kilometers long mountain bike route. The weather is fantastic; it’s sunny and the wind calm. Remember how we wrote about solicitude yesterday? Well, solicitude does not a fun race make, so before start we tried to rake up some animosity between the British and French teams. After all, these two nations were warring for hundreds of years. But noooooo! They’re as polite as can be and do not make any attempt to put down the other team.
“They might pulverize us,� goes Andrew Davies of Eastgreenland.com and Saint Etienne of WCup Issy les Moulineaux comes back with “We’ll just try to keep up with the Davies family. The British team is so helpful�. They sound like ladies who lunch.

Mountainbiking
All the teams finished the mountainbike stages of the day. To many, the biking is the killer of ATC, yet they know that the only way to continue the race is to overcome this horrible part of the race.

Typically, the Icelanders have been smiling all day. Even on the steepest of hills in Tasiilaq, they smiled every time the onlookers cheered on them. On their fifth round, a woman yelled out, “You look good!� and Erlendur yelled back “I feel great, too!�

It’s been tougher for the Arctic girls. While going uphill, we had a chat with Pia Nielsen: “It feels great to have such a strong team. The only disadvantage for me is that this makes me the weakest link on the bikes.� However, going uphill Anna has been very strong and has pulled Pia on many stretches. When hearing of Ben’s saddle, Anna’s dry comment is: “What good is a race without a challenge?�

Eastgreenland.com managed to be the first ones to finish the mountainbike stage. After the mountainbike stage, the teams split up in twos. Two people went to B1, two to B2 and then they met up on B3 and together continued to B4 at the glacier.

The teams arrived back from the 35 kilometers mountainbiking stage in the following times:

Eastgreenland.com 2:42:34
Les Moulineaux 2:50:10
PharmaNord 2:53:33
Neriusaaq/Thomas Kristensen 3:04:07
Intersport Iceland 3:20:01
Feed the Machine 3:51:30
Pihl A/S 4:12:35
Arctic Ladies 4:30:35
These times are unofficial

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