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Coast to Coast Conservation

Michael Jacques / 25.01.2010

Everyone knows Robin Judkins, the eccentric, unemployable rogue who created the Speight’s Coast to Coast. And everyone knows Steve Gurney, the equally eccentric endurance junky who won the 243k world multisport championship no less than nine times. But not many people know Sam McLeod, the quiet possum hunter and hands-on environmentalist who has helped ensure the Speight’s Coast to Coast benefits the Southern Alps as much as it does the thousands of endurance athletes who have completed the race across the South Island’s Main Divide.

Finding Sam McLeod can take longer than the slowest finisher in the Speight’s Coast to Coast, which is fitting, because McLeod plays a part in making New Zealand’s favourite race as inspiring for the winner as it is for the last person across the line. In fact, McLeod has played a part in ensuring that the Speight’s Coast to Coast continues to exist at all.

McLeod is a professional possum hunter and predator controller. If he’s not up in the mountains setting traps and collecting carcases, he’s at home in Wanaka skinning carcases, preparing traps, packing gear and collecting consent forms. This might sounds like a world away from the bright, buzzing thrum of the Speight’s Coast to Coast, but every year McLeod is standing on Goat Pass, often beside Judkins, watching 800 athletes from a dozen countries racing from the Tasman Sea over the Southern Alps to the Pacific Ocean.

McLeod and Judkins go way back, to before the Speight’s Coast to Coast was even a twinkle in Judkin’s eye.

In the late-70s Judkins operated a kayak touring business in the Southern Lakes area. Searching for a promotional angle and inspired by a Playboy article he conceived the Alpine Ironman, a ski, run and kayak event that was totally unique in New Zealand at the time. Sam McLeod, a ski-bum come possum hunter, thought it might be his kind of race.

Turned out it was. McLeod finished fifth in the Alpine Ironman, which was the event that inspired the Speight’s Coast to Coast and the creation of multisport. The race was won by John Howard, who would become a worldwide legend of the sport, but McLeod, who only lost thanks to a sieve of a kayak borrowed from Judkins, might have become a legend himself but for a skiing accident in the United States shortly after.

“I fell off the North Face of Crested Butte,� shrugs the 50-year more than a quarter of a century after the fact.

The result, however, was a little more than a shrug. McLeod shattered his left femur and knee, and effectively ending any prospects in this new-fangled world of multisport and adventure racing. “I can laugh about it now,� he grins wryly. “These days the North Face of Crested Butte is where they hold one of the world’s premier extreme skiing competitions ... so it was a pretty impressive fall.�

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