A Mass Sprint Finish to the Line

Rob Howard / 14.11.2016

There was great excitement on the finish line of the AR World Championships in Ulladulla this evening as 5 teams raced along the coastline almost within sight of each other.  There were some breathless and exhausted finishers too!  As Mark Collins of Sanlam Painted Wolf said: “I was expecting a stroll along the beach to finish and instead I got a 12k sprint! That’s no way to finish a 600km race!”

His team had steadily caught up to Naturex of France as they raced though the river mouth crossings and along the beaches to the finish.  “We caught them where the prize giving ceremony was held,” he said, “and then ran together to the final checkpoint. Then we thought let’s get this done and pulled away.”

His brother Mark told me, “We made a lot of mistakes, but I guess that is to be expected when you are away from top class racing for so long.”  The two brothers last raced a World Champs 13 years ago, so to come back in 4th place in the most competitive field ever is an impressive result.

Less than a minute later the French team walked over the line, naturally looking a bit dejected to have lost a place in a final sprint. In these sprint finishes there are winners and losers, but in truth all the teams are winners.

For the next team across the line it was a bitter sweet moment too.  The Estonian ACE Adventure team raced in, running strongly and one of them said, “We are very competitive and wanted to finish strongly on a positive note as we still have a 2.5 hour penalty.”

Silver Eensaar said, “We were told at the last transition that as we were not in the top 5 we should continue and not sit out the penalty, so that’s why we wanted a good finish. And more importantly we are the first Estonian team to complete a full AR World Championships course.”

The next contest was for the first Australian team and it was Shotz Sports Nutrition who crossed the line first, too exhausted even to smile and just a few steps ahead of the adventurejunkie.com.au team.  There were family reunions and hugs all round in what is a great result for the host nation, who have not had a single team in the top 10 of a World Champs for a long time.

[Update. Final positions after all penalites were 6th-Shotz Sports Nutrition, 7th-adventurejunkie.com.au, 8th-Bones and 9th-Estonian ACE Adventure.] 

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