Kiwis win

Adventure Racing World Cup

Article supplied by SleepMonsters.com, the adventure racing website. SleepMonsters are currently fund raising on Patreon so please give them your support. Kiwi team Avaya captained by Nathan Fa’avae have won the 2018 Adventure Racing World Championships held at Reunion Island, to add to the teams multiple titles. Never in the history of adventure racing has one team dominated year after year. The challenge covered 460kms around and across the high points of Reunion Island off the coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. The all Kiwi team of Fa’avae, Chris Forne, Stu Lynch and Fleur Pawsey took 117 hours to traverse the legs which included paddle, trek, MTB and climbing… to win by 3 hours and 40 minutes over Swedish team Haglofs Silva with Kiwi Aaron Prince on navigation. After 120 hours of racing the last thing you want is a sprint finish and that’s what Haglofs Silva had to do to claim second from team 400Team Naturex. They said they were here to have fun and explore Reunion and that the result was secondary, that they had their doubts and were not confident, and expected to be caught at any time by the good teams chasing them. Yet, in the end, the result was the same as it has been for the past 4 years, New Zealand team Avaya are the Adventure Racing World Champions. Again. Nobody is the least bit surprised, they are so good it felt inevitable. Unbeatable, unrivalled, flawless, legendary, you can take your pick of how to describe this team who have dominated Adventure Racing for so long. For the record this is their 5th consecutive win, having won previously in the high altitude of Ecuador, the jungles of Brazil, the plains of Wyoming and the arid outback of Australia. It’s their 6th ARWC win as they won in 2012 as well, the last time Raid in France were hosts, Fleur Pawsey was new to the team, but the others now have 20 world titles between them, going back to 2005. Nathan Fa’avae said before the start that he didn’t feel they were favourites given the strength of the field. As he was returning from retirement and hadn’t raced at this level for two years, and Fleur Pawsey came into the team as a late replacement some doubts would only be natural. But he said on the podium tonight that one of the reasons for their success was “that we are all committed to the objective, which is to win, and it’s incredible how much support we can give each other out there to achieve that.” Any doubts were put aside, they were here to win and still had the conviction they could do it. And they did.