Saab Salomon’s Canada Raid

Rob Howard / 04.09.2006

The Saab Salomon Adventure Racing team leave for Canada tomorrow in pursuit of a podium position at the 3rd Raid World Championships.

The 1000km race through the forests and fjords of Quebec has been the number one priority for the team this year. They have raced all 3 Raid Series events to qualify for the final, finishing 3rd, 7th and 4th in Australia, USA and France, and coming second in the Western Europe qualifying zone.

The team for the final is led by Phil Davies and includes his sister Nicky, Chris Near and Simon Stainer, supported by team managers Tim Lloyd and Jon Bardgett. “We have been concentrating on paddling for the last 6 weeks,” Lloyd said, “and longer training sessions. All the team are fit with no injury niggles, but our biggest headache has been finding good racing kayaks in Canada. We’ve had to spend a lot of time on this and hope we have some half-decent and competitive boats.”

“It’s Simon’s first long race but there is 27 hours of mandatory sleep so we are hoping this will help him get through. I think the sleep stops are partly to help teams deal with the dark zones, which could be a feature of the race. (It looks like there could be four for the paddling and ropes stages, so getting caught in two of those could be a maximum 18 hours of sleep.)”