Covering nearly 600 kilometers through some of the steepest terrain in the French and Swiss Alps, the 2005 Raid World Championship adventure race is billed as the world’s toughest. Getting lost on the course only makes it tougher.
That’s what happened to defending champion team Nike/Balance Bar, which missed a critical checkpoint and slipped to third place in the five-day race last week. With three of its four members hailing from Colorado, the team many considered a favorite in the multidiscipline mountain epic lost its early lead and finished behind two local race squads – winner Les Arcs-Quechua of France and runner-up Solomon Suisse.
“It was a really big bummer,” Nike/Balance Bar stalwart Mike Kloser of Vail said in a telephone interview. “Missing that checkpoint was a complete oversight and blunder on behalf of the team. We lost about an hour and a half, but what was worse was the effect it had on our mental state. That was the undoing of the race.”
In a race filled with challenge and turmoil, the missed checkpoint during a paddling portion across Lake Geneva ultimately led to the demise of the top American team, consisting of Kloser, Ian Adamson of Boulder, Monique Merrill of Breckenridge and Michael Tobin of Boise, Idaho. Already about an hour behind the pace set by the French team, the navigational blunder by Adamson all but sealed the victory for Les Arcs-Quechua on its home turf and allowed the Swiss team to move into the silver-medal position. Nike/Balance Bar had been racing side-by-side with Les Arcs-Quechua, trading leads over four days of racing.
“For us it was a race of mistakes,” Adamson said. “We would have liked to have been racing alongside Les Arcs-Quechua all the way into the finish, but that’s life.”
Entering the race – which included a variety of disciplines ranging from mountain biking, orienteering and trekking to more technical skills of canoeing, river kayaking, ropes courses and inline skating – Nike/Balance Bar team members predicted the outcome would be determined by the team that made the least mistakes. What they didn’t anticipate was foul weather including harsh, cold, rain and snow blamed for sapping the strength from Tobin as he became ill midway through the race.
Tobin, recognized as one of the strongest endurance athletes in the sport, managed to persevere, although the foul weather extended the race course as competitors were forced to circumnavigate the flanks of the Mont Blanc Massif rather than traverse the glacier over the tallest peak in the Alps. Still, there was no shortage of vertical gain throughout the event. Racers notched nearly 80,000 feet of vertical gain over the course of the world championship.
“This was one of the toughest race courses ever,” Kloser said. “It was absolutely abusive to the body, especially the knees, because it was always up or down. The only flat portion was the paddling.”
