Racing The Planet Australia 2010

Press Release / 30.01.2010

“The response to our first race in Australia
has been fantastic,” said Mary Gadams, founder and CEO of RacingThePlanet. “It’s a lengthy journey for most of our competitors, but when we ask our community of participants where they would like to race, Australia has long been a popular suggestion.”

RacingThePlanet: Australia 2010 will be the third edition of the annual RacingThePlanet race, with previous events taking place in the rice terraces of Vietnam in 2008 and the Fish River Canyon and Skeleton Coast of Namibia in 2009. The 2011 edition will be staged in Nepal.

Says Mary Gadams, “We had no doubt that Australia would be able to provide many breathtaking locations for one of our endurance races. We considered a number of locations, and have planned a race through some of the most dramatic and culturally important landscapes of The Kimberley. It’s going to be a formidable race, taking competitors through some of the harshest and most spectacular landscapes in the world. Competitors will pass through one section called “The Maze” which will require them to swim and scramble their way through pure Kimberley rock.”

Participants vary hugely in age and experience. The youngest and oldest are both Australians – Christian Prendiville, 20, a student and pro tennis player from Perth, and Frank Maloney, 65, a keen marathon runner and surgeon from Brisbane, neither of whom have before attempted a race of this length and format. In contrast, ten of the competitors have completed RacingThePlanet’s 4 Deserts series, by racing in the Atacama Desert in Chile, the Gobi Desert in China, the Sahara Desert in Egypt and the polar deserts of Antarctica.