A Day Marked By Camaraderie

Press Release / 09.09.2017

Parc national de la Gaspésie, September 8, 2017. —The kick off of the fourth edition of the Raid international Gaspésie (RIG) took place at 11 am under a sunny sky instead of at 9:45 under a rainy one as it was the case when the athletes woke up in the Village Grande-Nature in St-Octave-de-L’Avenir.

The athletes of the 75 teams of the 300 K and the 150 K have been informed by the organizers that the course race had to be changed because of heavy rain of the previous days: the Cap-Chat River was way too wild! For security reasons, the whole section located between CP 1 (control point 1) and CP 9 must have been cancelled due to the exceptionally high flow of the River in the Parc national de la Gaspésie. About 20 km had to be retrieved from the race course, mostly canoe on the Cap-Chat.

These modifications did not affect the moral and the good humour of the raiders who, very excited, start the race running, to reach their bikes and search for the first control point, few kilometres away.

The orientation skills of the raiders were tested today and the main problem has been hypothermia which affected many of them as they had to swim and do a zipline activity into the Thibault Lake; the heavy rain of the pas days had made the water quite cold. But there have been many manifestations of camaraderie all along the course race, a French team who has assisted a Quebec Team having problems of hypothermia even got a bonus of 1 hour 15 minutes on their timing. Friendship was also created between teams progressing at the same rhythm.

At the end of day 1, the first three positions overall for the 300 km are held by the Outeractive/Dynafit/Espresso Sports team (Patrick Lussier and Alexandre Provost) who dominated with a time of 5:06:45. followed by Raid Bras du Nord (Dominic Drolet and Cindy Roberge) with a time of 5:15:01 and two teams tied for third place, Raid Azimut (Danny Déry-Chamberland and Martin Hardy) and Espresso Sports (Lyne Bessette and Benoît Simard) with a time of 5:17:28.

At the 150 KM, Team Vélo Café/Dynafit SkimoEast from Magog, composed of Arnaud Boisvert and Jeff Rivest cross the finish first with a big smile on their face, but with some problems of hypothermia and cramps in the legs! They have completed the race in 3:03:25. A one second gap separated the second and third positions: Team Desjardins entreprises GIM/Henry (Ken Henry and Marc-André Leblanc) finished the race course in 3:25:02 and Team Power Raid LFG Construction (Jean-Sébastien Dion and David Litalien) in 3:25:03.

Tomorrow, the start of the 300 K and the 150 K will be given from the Petit lac Cascapédia in the Parc national de la Gaspésie in the times: the 300 K at 7 am and the 150 K at 7:30 am.

You can follow the live YB Tracking and all the RIG news and photos at the race live page at https://goo.gl/dQkqvv

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