Dakar 2010 Summary

Posted January 18, 2010 - 7:50pm by vsliker

I was going to sum up the race for you, which would have included a lot of Annie Seel and Tamsin Jones, but I found a great review which I can't even touch, so I'm going to put it here instead of my own post. The following is from Bleacherreport.com and written by James Broomhead. I have edited it only by cutting out the trucks and quads and reporting only on the bikes.

Two weeks. 9,000 kilometres. nearly 400 started. Fewer than 200 finished. Sometimes numbers are really all you need to sum up an event.

For the second year running the Dakar Rally, rather confusingly, found itself racing across South America. From the Argentinean capital of Buenos Aires to the Pacific coast of Chile and back again in a variety of cars, trucks, bikes and quads.

The racing took place over 4,000 km of special stages, taking in fast gravel roads, the towering sand dunes of the Atacama desert, a dry salt bed, and a track at 3,000 meters above sea level through the Andes. It took even the fastest finisher nearly 48 cumulative hours.

Recap of the 2010 Rally: Bikes

Let me start off a look at the bikes by saying, for me, they are the toughest people in all of motorsport. Not only do they have to be absurdly fit to survive a very physical ride on rough terrain on heavy bikes, but they have to be expert navigators to find their way through the sparse desert stages.

Oh, and they have to be engineers as well, fixing their own bikes should they breakdown on stage. And all while having a sense of camaraderie that's rarer than hen's teeth in professional sport.

For a perfect example, let me take you under a tree in the middle of nowhere on stage three. There you would find Marc Coma stopped with a fuel system problem (vapour lock for the nerdy or knowledgeable). Rival David Casteu (who was fighting Coma in the overall standings at the time) stopped to see if he could help. He couldn't, but when Casteu tried to start again his Sherco bike refused, thanks to an electrical problem. Coma got a set of jump leads from his field repair kit and helped put his rival back in the race. Coma would eventually rejoin after solving his problem in a wonderfully low tech manner..... Blowing into the fuel tank.

Unfortunately, hurtling across rough terrain on two wheels also makes you vulnerable to injury, some of which can sound quite gruesome, for example Casteu's stage five retirement that apparently involved his calf muscle being pulled away from the bone.

However, the man of the race, and then sadly, the retirement of the race, was Luca Manca. An Italian privateer, Manca had ridden in similar Rally Raid events with some success, but this was his first attempt at the Dakar. And it was an attempt that was having some success, a string of top-ten times on the second, third and fourth stage, putting him fourth overall.

However, all that was to change on stage five. Manca was asked by Coma's KTM team to help their rider on stage, and he did just that, handing over his rear tire to Coma after the Spaniard suffered a puncture. The sacrifice made Luca a hero, part of the 2010 Dakar story, but his chapter was to get longer and darker the following day.

Having completed the fifth stage 25th fastest after receiving assistance, in turn, from Coma's teammate Henk Knuiman, Manca started stage six in the dust of the riders ahead of him and fell only a few kilometers into the day, suffering severed head injuries to the extent that organizers bypassed the normal trip to the campsite doctors to take him straight to the hospital.

There, in a medically induced coma he was diagnosed with cerebral edema and transferred to a neurosurgery unit in the Chilean capital Santiago. After several days in a life- threatening condition Manca awoke from his coma, and is, by all reports at the start of a long road to recovery.

And by way or equality there has to be a woman of the bike race.

That has to be Christina Meier, for her part in the story of stage three.

Her bike broke down, but only two kilometres short of the end of the stage. Unable to fix it by herself Tina, helped by a local, rode a horse to the end of the stage, where she picked up her mechanic and returned to the stranded bike, still on the horse.

Helped by the mechanic’s instructions (under the rules he was not allowed to touch the machine) she made it to the end of the stage. She would go on to be one of the 88 bike finishers.

At the top of the overall standings it was all about two men, and one of them wasn’t actually at the top.

That was reigning champion Coma, who despite being predictably quick, was hit with several penalties. Twenty-two minutes for speeding through a village, followed by a six- hour slap on the wrist for what organisers deemed outside assistance after allegations that he was given a new rear wheel by a spectator on stage seven. The penalty dropped Coma to 24th and had him threatening to quit the rally in protest.

The allegations (coincidentally) were made by the man who benefitted most from them, Cyril Despres.

With Coma demoted, Despres’ only real challenger was removed from the equation, and he went on to take a third Dakar Rally win, with an overall lead of over an hour. Coma, meanwhile, having continued the race finished 15th overall—6h32 behind Despres—6h22 can be accounted for by penalties.

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