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March - Indoor Antics

Rob / 08.12.2002

There were a few raised eyebrows when Phil Humphreys of ACE Races took up the offer to stage an INDOOR adventure race at the first ever Outdoors Show at the NEC. The idea was to have an arena based event and it was a great opporunity to showcase the sport to a wider audience, which Phil didn\'t hesitate to take, even if intitially he had no idea quite how he would do it.

In the end it was a triumph and a bit of an early season wake-up call for the invited teams of top AR athletes. It was no tame showpiece event, it was hard and bruising with repeated circuits and intense head-to-head racing of the sort you rarely get in AR. Spectactors were treated to the sight of 6 teams of 3 racing around a small arena, clinging onto static climbing walls, and paddling and pedalling furiously on simulators. There was a zip wire, an inner circuit for real bikes, and above it all a big screen showing some of Dream Team TV\'s race footage.

The show was an incredible success (they had to shut the doors with massive queues outside) and thousands of people watched the competition and found out a bit about adventure racing, many for the first time. In the arena it was Jim and Nicky Davies and Ben Bardsley who won the first national indoor title - the start of an amazingly successful year for Jim and Nicky in particular.

The SleepMonsters Are Coming

The Indoor Race was also when SleepMonsters.com was launched on an unsuspecting world and it was the first event we provided live coverage on, starting as we meant to go on, with plenty of pictures, news reports and quotes from the scene. The pictures show just how hard it was - they are not a pretty sight! You can see the coverage here.

Races Come and Races Go

Among the rush of news announcements on the first days the site was up were announcements of race dates for the new Red Bull Northern Exposure and Trailplus, news that Eco-Challenge was heading for Fiji and that World Champions Nokia Adventure were coming to Ireland for Adrenalin Rush. Anna McCormack was on TV in the first series of \'Tough Enough for the SAS\' and Dream Team TV and Primal Quest were launching new web sites.

On the international scene the X-adventure Raid Series was announced and became the only way to qualify for the Raid Gauloises - a significant change for the oldest and most famous adventure race of them all.

There was some very sad news too when Tatiana Goldini collapsed and died at a race in Argentina, and in the UK the sport lost one of it\'s main series when Blue Eskimo went into receivership. Teams who had entered in advance lost their money and Adrenalin Rush took the place of the Blue Eskimo event in the British Championships.

You can read the news stories here.

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