The AR World Championships - Costa Rica
Aerodiva is Best Costa Rican Team at ARWC
Alex Carrijo / 10.12.2013
After the buzz of the first seven teams arrival, by the end of this Tuesday afternoon it was local team Aerodiva who staged the most emotional finish and attracted greatest number of local press. A helicopter from Aerodiva, a transport enterprise, came up to transition announcing the arrival of their team to finish line after almost 200h of racing.
Captain Pablo Leiva, navigator Marco Méndez, Luis Miguel and Ivannia Fonseca looked very fresh as they crossed finish line to the cheering of their families who came from nearby Turrialba to support them on the last stages of the course. They were really proud of them and created paper banners with incentive messages.
Pablo said they have trained for 18 mouths for this race and were aiming top ten and even more if they were lucky enough. "Our strategy was to follow the world champions since the very beginning and catch up with then up to mid-camp at Chirripo. However, we had to pass to plan B after we had a flat tire on the first 20 minutes from the start and following mechanical problems that made us push our bikes for over 50k.
"Instead of pushing hard on the first half we decided it to hammer down the second partof the course. From the paddle on the mangroves we started to gain ground steadily to make us believe we could catch teams at the the dark zone. We are happy to be 8th but we could have gone further." He mentioned all the other Costa Rican teams who support each others and which they have learned so much from.
Rookie racer Luis Miguel had the company of his parents and girlfriend at the finish. The beautiful Ivannia was saying the strongest part of them were their togetherness. "We have spent a lot of time together in long, long sections training for this race. We concentrated our lives on the goal of finishing the race and we knew we were able to".
Navigator Marco Méndez, an Eco Challenge veteran, had no words to describe what he was feeling ..."only when you go through the whole experience of racing are you able to get this feeling, but I don't know how to describe it".
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