International Raid Temiscamingue
Pre-Race Cleansing at Raid Temiscamingue
Carrick Armer / 07.09.2023
The opening ceremony of Raid Temiscamingue has finished, and the 24 teams are settled down to pore over their maps and and work out what's to come over the next three days - aside from a prologue race paired up with local Youth teams and 160km over two days of their own racing, that is.
As has been said, this is the second edition of the Raid Temiscamingue, but with the first being run in 2021 when Covid restrictions were still in place, this is the first edition where the event truly is International. While this edition is still predominantly made up of local Canadian teams, mostly from here in Quebec or neighbouring Ontario, four international teams have made the trip over - Brou Aventuras from Brazil, Uruguay Ultra Sports from Uruguay, La Ruta Madre from Mexico and Northern Adventure Team from Finland.
Of course, international travel - especially with all the equipment needed for an Adventure Race - has it's perils, and the Finnish team had a nervous time when they landed at Toronto after their second flight only to find one of their bike boxes hadn't been loaded onto the plane and was still in Chicago. Fortunately they were flying a couple of days in advance of the race, so had enough space to wait for the bike to catch them up.
That said, even the local teams can have their issues in the run-up to a race. Alexandre Beaudry and Quinn Desrochers are racing as 'Les Estropies' ('The Cripples' in English), having had a long sequence of team partner changes due to injuries and other issues, the final pairing only actually coming together a day before Registration. At least they weren't having to fly long distances to meet a teammate for the first time!
Hopefully for the teams all of those issues are behind them, and the purification ritual conducted by a representative of the Long Point First Nation at the ceremony clears the negatives, the frustrations, and the confusion away and helps centre their thoughts on the race to come. The 'defending champions', Adam and Dan Mallory of team Adrenaline Rush, the winners of the locals-only 2021 edition may have their work cut out with a bigger field, but who knows, home advantage may still work in their favour. The hardest thing for international teams to adjust to is usually the maps, since scales, styles and symbols often vary country to country, but at least tomorrow's Youth race gives them a chance to get their eyes in before the main racing days.
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