Wiesman Nel

The Mongol Derby is said to be the longest and toughest horse race on earth. This 40-year-old farmer from the Free State placed second out of 43 competitors, of whom only 22 finished. A thousand kilometres, 10 days… This is no regular outride.

Tell us about the race. It’s a stage race, based on a route used by Genghis Khan’s horse messenger system, which connected almost half of the planet in the 13th century.

You begin riding at 6.30 am and the cutoff time is 8 pm that night. Stopping then is mandatory; if you don’t you get penalised: two minutes for every minute spent riding overtime. Every 40 km, you get a fresh horse at a so-called “changing station”. There are also vets, medics, officials and food tents at these stations.

If you don’t make a station by the cut-off time, you have to find a local family who is prepared to take you in for the night, or you must set up camp in the wild.

You have a total of 10 days to complete the race, navigating with a GPS. There are no roads or signs.

Where do the horses come from? In total, a competitor will use about 29 horses to complete the race. About 1 500 horses get trained for the annual event; they belong to various families living on the steppes.

Horses are an intrinsic part of Mongolian culture. It’s probably the only country in the world that can facilitate a race like this, firstly because of the vast open spaces, and secondly because they have so many horses.

What’s your day job? My family and I run Moolmanshoek Private Game Reserve in the Free State. It’s a game reserve with 250 horses. Horses have always been my passion, and that’s one of the big drawcards to get guests to the farm.

At Moolmanshoek, I’ve taken traditional outrides a little further – I take people out on “extreme” trail rides, where we’ll cover up to 50 km per day.

Is that how you began endurance riding? Yes, in part. I was looking for the next big adventure, so I started hosting multi-day rides through the mountains of Lesotho and along the Wild Coast.

Through these trail rides, I met a few guys who had done the Mongol Derby: past winners like Craig Egberink, a dairy farmer from Underberg who won in 2011, and Barry Armitage, who won in 2017. It sounded like an incredible adventure!

One of my clients helped to make it possible for me to participate in the event. His words were: “You always stretch us, now it’s your turn to be stretched.”

How did you prepare for the race? The Derby is in August. I did a trip through Lesotho that February, and in April we traversed pretty much the entire Wild Coast. I did plenty of outrides on different horses in between and spent at least 1 000 km in the saddle that the organisers provided us with. The saddles are made by a South African called Ben Liebenberg, whose workshop is in Mooi River, KZN. It’s a smaller saddle, and it rides differently to a “normal” saddle, but it didn’t take me long to get used to it. The smaller saddle is far better for the horses over those distances because they fit the smaller horses better.

Other than that, I ran and I did exercises to strengthen my core.

How does the race remain fair when horses’ abilities differ? When you arrive at a horse station, you have to select a horse based on your own judgement. Communicating with the officials is near impossible because of the language barrier, and the entire scene is chaos. At each changing station, the horse you arrived on needs to pass a veterinary screening. Its pulse is taken to make sure you haven’t been overworking the animal or pushing it too hard. If its heart rate doesn’t drop in the allotted time, you get penalised by two hours. If this happens three times, you’re disqualified from the race.

I tell you what, those ponies are small, but they’re tough as anything.

What was the riding like? Vast, wide-open plains. If you’ve chosen a good horse, you can cover ground quickly – sometimes as far as 30 km at a gallop. My fastest sections in the race were 40 km over about two and half hours. Because horse riding is so ingrained in Mongolian culture, the horses are conditioned for such long distances and they recover quickly.

Ultimately, it’s an incredible test of survival, endurance and horsemanship. It’s just you, your horse and the wilderness.

South African riders have fared well in the Mongol Derby over the years, with four previous winners: Charles van Wyk (2009), Craig Egberink (2011), Byeronie Epstein (2015) and Barry Armitage (2017).

For more information on the derby, visit theadventurists.com

– Kyra Tarr