Raid in France - The Adventure Race World Championships 2012
A Fast and Furious Prologue
Rob Howard / 14.09.2012
Teams gathered near the railway station this evening for a parade through town, and the prologue, which was an orienteering competition around the town. The parade along the main street was lead by a brass band from a local alpine rangers dressed in white tunics, puttees, walking boots and carrying their regimental flag and historic alpine climbing equipment.
The racers gathered behind them, not in teams, but by nationality under their own national flags carried by local school children. It was a colourful sight in the evening sunshine and by far the noisiest nation were the Danish, who seem to have a coach load of supporters here. They were all chanting, waving their flags, and one even had a megaphone!
French team Raid Quechua were in a more reflective mood, thinking about their team mate Laurent Fabre who recently died in a climbing accident. Elodie Bourgeois Pin was wearing an orange flag around her shoulders with a message in memory of ‘Lolo’.
When the teams arrived at the village square each team took a sportident timing chip and an instruction sheet for the opening lap of the prologue, which was a mad sprint around the block to spread the teams out before they each collected a map. This was a very large scale aerial photo of the town with 26 checkpoints marked, to be taken in any order, and in no time at all teams were running up and down every street in search of them.
The scale of the race was so compact teams could be seen on all the streets around the town centre and climbing up onto the ridge above town to a close group of checkpoints clustered around a clock tower. It was coming down the steep slope off here that the Daredevils team from Denmark disturbed a wasps nest and were all stung, some of the team a dozen times. Maris Treschow ran down the hill yelling as she tried to get a wasp out of her hair and was pulling stings from her team mates head on the finish line. Nor were they the only injuries, Karen Lundgren of the AXA Sport team had her thigh scratched racing through some thorn bushes.
After 20 minutes the first to get back were Team Raidlight, closely followed by Silva and Team Seagate, who were taking the short run seriously enough to put a tow line on Sophie Hart. The results from the prologue will determine the start order of the race in the morning. Teams will ride out from L’Argentiere-le-Besse at 4am and then the race will officially re-start at 6am with teams going off at 30 second intervals according to their prologue ranking.
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