24 Hours of Southern Traverse
Mostly downhill biking during 24hours of Southern Traverse
Stan van Jaarsveld / 18.11.2007
The team included Mark Williams, Haydn Key and Mitch Murdoch, along with Matt Woods (Dunedin) all who are recognised as some of New Zealand\'s leading adventure racers. Icebreaker R and R Sport won the 112km race in 14 hours 20 minutes just under an hour ahead of the predicted pace. Twenty one minutes behind were the highly experienced Queenstown Paper Plus team of Bill Godsall (Cromwell) and Jim Cotter (Dunedin). who had been setting the pace all day.
The race began at midnight Friday and the first stage took the teams in the darkness up on to the Crown Range.
Race director Geoff Hunt says that the only way you can guarantee that every team has a fair share of the night experience is to start the race in the middle of the night. \"We have had a great response from the athletes last year with the midnight start so we decided to repeat it.\"
With the first stage being a steep climb from Arrowtown to the top of the Crown Range the teams already begun to split slightly. IceBreaker R & R Sport and Paper Plus Queenstown team lead through this stage but were closely chased by the Murray Thomas led Kapa Design Gallery team and the Queenstown Frontrunner team.
As the teams disappeared into the clear starry night the headlamps could occasionally be seen flashing on the tussocks as the teams moved up onto the second stage, a 15km trek along the ridge line of the Crown range to Cardrona ski field.
What appeared to be relatively simple on the map begun to sort the field as teams struggled to find the correct ridge from Mt Sale that lead onto the connecting Cardrona ridgelines. Again, the experienced heads in the front teams prevailed and it was here that both Icebreaker R & R Sport and Paper Plus Queenstown broke away from the field.
By the Cardrona checkpoint both these teams had opened up a gap of one and half hours on the chasing teams.
SleepMonsters
