Be Quick – it’s Dakar legend Patsy
Quick by name, and by nature – she could teach you a lot
‘Stubborn? I just don’t give up very easily’
I‘As a kid I was always the tomboy on a Raleigh’
t’s hard to fully appreciate what Patsy Quick went through to achieve her goal of finishing the Dakar. For even the most hardcore riders, Dakar is a pipe dream, only a tiny percentage make it to the start and even fewer to the finish. Patsy has been there, done that. Not once, but four times. “I’m not sure if stubborn is the right word, but I just don’t give up very easily,” she explains.
In her first attempt Patsy threw everything into the race but was airlifted out of stage six after a crash led to life-saving surgery and the loss of her spleen. She returned in 2004 where problems saw her rescued by the Mauritanian army after two nights in the desert. Patsy was back in 2005 only to suffer an engine failure on stage seven and another DNF, leading to her fourth consecutive attempt on the brutal race in 2006.
“That was the year I got to the finish but it wasn’t straightforward. I ended up being towed by Clive ‘Zippy’ Town for 50 miles through sand. There was a lot of motivation to become the first British woman to complete the Dakar.” Patsy believes it’s the time, and effort she invested in her racing along with sponsors and her own money that gave her an unwavering desire to make it to the finish. “Nowadays there’s a lot of people that are doing it to tick off on their bucket list, so when the shit hits the fan and the choice is ‘do you carry on through the pain or give up?’ they give up. When I did it I borrowed loads of money so for me that meant giving up was never an option.” Patsy’s route into biking is far from conventional. No-one in her family rode, instead the passion came from within. “My friends had pink bikes with baskets, I was the tomboy on a Raleigh Chipper [a small version the Chopper],” she laughs. Her own riding career started when she bought a Yamaha DT100 to get to college, before becoming a courier riding a Honda CX500 and Suzuki GS550. Then, in 1991, her passion for travel and adventure kicked off in earnest.
“Just as the first Gulf war started my husband and I decided to ride to South Africa on Yamaha Ténéré 600s. We were lent what was a very early satellite navigation system. It looked like I had an enormous dildo strapped to the back of my bike, and it didn’t work anyway because when the war started all the satellites got turned off. But we still made it.” It wasn’t long after that the desire
to compete became overwhelming which led to a sneaky purchase of a new bike. “My husband and I got a bank loan to do up a property in Somerset and I seem to remember being very naughty and using some of the money to buy a Honda XR400! That was the start of it all really. In 1999, sat around the kitchen table I decided I was going to enter a Rally. At that time I hadn’t even done an enduro and I ended up doing the Optic 2000 which was an FIM Rally. I was the first British woman to do it and I managed to finish first in class despite getting food poisoning. “When I got back from that I did some enduros but the XR was too big and heavy so I bought a Suzuki TM125. The ACU started the British women’s championship. I did it for two years and won the series.” Since achieving her dream of finishing Dakar, Patsy has continued racing and continued winning (she won the two-week Heroes Legends Rally outright in 2012) and has gone on to apply her expertise to rider training and Rally preparation. Her Desert Rose Academy caters for kids starting their journey on OSET electric bikes through to boot camps in Morocco and prepping riders to race Dakar. And because she still rides and races, what she doesn’t know about off-road riding and getting to finish the toughest races simply isn’t worth knowing.