Wenger Patagonian Expedition Race 2011
All the Teams Pedal into the Finish
Will Gray / 17.02.2011
After 503km and eight days of racing through Chilean Patagonia, their challenge was over and, for two members of the British team at least, it was mission complete. Three years, three wins. Job done.
Bruce Duncan and Mark Humprhey are now both hat-trick heroes in Patagonia. It doesn’t get better than that – especially when, for Bruce Duncan at least, this year’s event was the toughest and most spectacular he has ever been in.
“We have raced incredibly hard, and we have had a great race,� said Duncan. “At PC3 there were some stunning views – some of the most amazing I have seen here. There were awesome icebergs in a lake and we switched off all our lights and just stared at them in the moonlight. It was amazing.�
Such memories will, no doubt, fire through stronger than the pain the team had felt when racing through the sodden jungle. Their first year had been tough, but last year’s race, they admitted after the event, had not been as challenging partly due to the weather holding up well and partly due to the experience they took with them and the strong team unity they had developed on their first Patagonia outing.
This year, all the experience in the world was not enough for Patagonia’s best two racers to overcome the four days of rain that had drenched the forests and mountains of trek two, which was eventually cut short, but they were still dominant on their feet and finished the shortened course faster than everyone.
Their closest rivals, Gearjunkie.com, had tried all they could to beat them but failed. An audacious move to take dry suits on their trek and swim through the rivers – and even a fjord – to shorten their time had left them cold and uncomfortable, and ultimately still well behind!
With time corrected for their failure to make it to PC10, they lay 16 hours behind adidas and just two-and-a-half hours ahead of the French team when the long trek was curtailed due to the inclement weather making the course impassable beyond PC11.
Now, all that remained was 188km on bikes. Sounds easy, but even that was an 8hr+ blast across the flat plains around one of Chile’s many volcanic national parks, Pali-Aike, that would have broken many of the other teams. It was just a question of when not if these machine racers would make it.
And for us, they went too fast!
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