Into the Mercantour National Park

Rob Howard & Anne-Marie Dunhill / 18.09.2012

Seagate left transition 10 (AT10), after taking their second mandatory 4 hours of sleep at 7.10 on Tuesday morning, and it was over an hour later before the second team arrived, so the kiwi team have at least a 5 hour lead.  In second place at this point were Raidlight Canoe Evasion, who had made up several places overnight during another high altitude trek and a cycle ‘ride’ in the Mercantour National Park, which took the teams into Provence and the Maritime Alps.

Raidlight had started the race suffering from stomach problems but have overcome them and perhaps getting caught by the dark zone on the first kayak stage was not such a bad thing for them and they are benefitting from the additional rest.  The same might be said of Silva, who overtook Quechua in the night and were only 23 minutes down on Thule at AT10, having been almost 8 hours behind them at the start of day 3.  These 3 teams are closely grouped in the chasing pack behind Seagate with Quechua in 5^th.  The French team had a broken spoke setting off on the bike ride overnight so this may have slowed them down.

It was on the cycle stage into AT10 that Raidlight moved from 5^th to 2^nd, but there may not have been much riding going on.  The race is well known for its ‘hike-a-bike’ stages, it is almost a trademark, and section J was when the wheels came off the ground.  Kyle Peter of Tecnu said; I’ve never done a ride like that before in any race anywhere!  We were hardly riding at all, maybe just a little bit downhill from the high pass.”

He had just reached a checkpoint at Guillaumes after riding down a broad and rocky river bed for the past couple of hours.  Occasionally there was track on the river bank but for much of it teams were pushing and carrying bikes over the boulders alongside the river. 

Team FJS had the most frustrating end to this section when they tried to get to checkpoint B33.  They emerged on a road and saw the two jury members 100m along it, roughly at the location of the checkpoint.  Having been penalised earlier in the race for walking along a road to a checkpoint and told this was not in the spirit of the race, they stopped, turned around and continued up the river bed to try and find a way up to the checkpoint without going along the road.

This wasn’t easy and they spent 20 minutes before finally forcing a way up a steep overgrown bank to get to the right spot, only to be told by the jury members that they could have ridden along the road in the first place.  (They were there to check that teams were all together.)  When told; “It’s OK you have found it now”, the response was a heartfelt and grumpy, “No, it’s not!”  It isn’t always easy following instructions in international races, though all the other teams we saw pass through didn’t hesitate and came straight down the road and onto AT10.

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