The AR World Championships - Costa Rica
The Top 10 is Complete
Rob Howard / 11.12.2013
With two night time finishes on day 9 of the race the 9th and 10th places of ARWC 2013 were filled by Team Bones from the USA and Team Mountain Hardwear from the U.K.
Bones, who were recent winners of the Gold Rush Mother Lode race in California arrived on Tuesday evening and were the second US team to finish. That they made the finish at all was remarkable as Ray Malone had broken a rib on the first day of the race and had been in pain for the next 8 days of competition.
Team Mountain Hardwear finished in the early hours of Wednesday morning. It was a low key finish with only a couple of staff on duty in the middle of the night and the finish arch not inflated – and it was raining! Luckily they had two supporters there to cheer them in, hold the finish arch up for them to run under and give them some food before getting them a ride to their hotel. Anthony Emmet needed a bit of medical treatment too, having been bitten by a caterpillar on the canopy tour! The medics gave him an injection just to be on the safe side.
Like so many teams they had struggled to find the log bridge control on the bike ride and lost several hours. “The navigation on the ride was hard because many of the tracks were not on the maps,” said Kim Collison. “The control on the border was in the middle of nowhere and we just asked everyone we saw where Nicaragua was and got there eventually.
“The log bridge control was a nightmare. We’d almost found it but gave up, and then spent hours finding another way in, only to realise we’d been on the other side of the river to begin with! It was really difficult in the dark and we’d been into a local town to try and get directions. We saw the Toyota and Ecuador teams there.”
Course planner Antonio de la Rosa said there two logs on the bridge but they were slippery, especially in bike shoes, and that it was safer to wade the river, but that was chest deep. (Mountain Hardwear didn’t need to as they went the long way around.)
It was near here that East Wind from Japan had an accident which left the girl in the team unconscious. She was taken to hospital and is now OK and recovering, but it was sad way for the team to end their race after coming so far and racing so well.
Bivouac Colts were also having problems. A rather confused policeman arrived at the finish in the early hours having found them in a confused state. He was told where they should be heading and will hopefully have gone back to point them in the right direction!
Toyota Adventure Racing Team and Ecuador Explorer have now passed Bivouac Colts and are on the final rafting stage to the finish. This is taking a long time and proving difficult for the guides as none of the teams are paddling, they just fall asleep and the poor guides have to stop them falling out along the way!
SleepMonsters
