The World Adventure Racing Championships (XPD Australia)
Why Did The Swedish Teams Do So Well?
Rob Howard / 10.11.2011
After every race there are lots of questions, but the most common at this AR World Championships draws to a close is; “Why are the Swedish teams so good?� Four Swedish based teams in the top 6 is an astonishing result for a country with such a small population. To recap; - The winners Thule Adventure Team are sponsored by a Swedish company and the team members are half Swedish and half French. They are most recently formed of the 4 Swedish teams.
-Second placed team Silva are also sponsored by a Swedish company, and have one New Zealander on the team (Aaron Prince), who lives in Sweden.
- 5th place AXA Sports are sponsored by a Swedish sports centre. They included on US racer and one Australian, who was a late replacement.
-6th placed FJS was originally a team from the Swedish Army's Parachute Ranger Training School in Karlsborg, Sweden (Fallskärmsjägarskola in Swedish, or simply "FJS") set up in 2000, since when they have expanded and competed regularly as international races. All four of the team are Swedish.
I sat with Bjorn Rydvall of Team Silva to see if we could find some answers to the question of why Sweden is currently the top nation in adventure racing, and then subsequently spoke to Martin Flinta of Thule Adventure Team.
To begin with Rydvall just said it was a coincidence. “Some teams I expected to do well underperformed or had injury problems, so perhaps it was a coincidence that we happened to do so well this year. Wilderness Traverse had an injury and Blackheart made lots of mistakes and I expected both of those teams to be near the front.�
“Maybe the climate suits us.� He added. “We are used to the cold and wet, but you would expect the Australian teams to have home advantage really.�
No real answers so far then and when I asked about the race calendar in Sweden I was surprised to be told there have been no multi-day races this year at all. “Normally there are two on the calendar,� Rydvall said, “but they did not take place this year.�
However, Flinta told me, “We have the Swedish cup and there are races every weekend. The standard is very high and the entry is good with 200 to 400 teams of two racing. We have won all our cup races this year, but even a small mistake means you will lose as we are racing against Silva, FJS and AXA regularly. I would say 90% of the races are navigational also.�
Rydvall continued; “All of our teams are really experienced and have done other big international races this year. We have learned from past mistakes and in this race we all had problems, with illness, mechanical breakdowns and mistakes, but we had the experience to overcome these. I think Thule had the best race, with the least problems. We can’t complain about our problems after what happened to Seagate however!�See All Event Posts
