Deep in the Dust: On the Dakar trail

While others found the mud difficult, the Aussie young gun fired himself into 20th overall on the stage, and he now sits 21st overall. Still, the competitive New South Welshman says he could have done better.

“I was in dust the whole way so it was hard to pass,” Smith said. “I took it easy, but then just after the neutralisation zone I passed two guys.”

“But then I ran off the road and got stuck in a bush, so they got back past me and it took me 40ks to get back past them,” he explained.

“But it was good, I’ve moved up 20 places.”

Fellow GHR rider Mark Davidson had a small tumble today, distracted by a fallen rider, Davidson very nearly joined his colleague in the medical wing.

“I fell over today,” he smiled when asked how his day was. “A bit too hard really. A guy had crashed, and was lying on the verge of the road as I came over a crest, and I took my eye off the road to look at him and ran wide. His smashed bike was already there in the gutter so I ran wide straight into his smashed bike, and now instead of one there are two of them![smashed bikes]”

Despite the crash, Davidson made up some of the time lost in time penalties on stage one.

Geoff Olholm and Steve Riley have rapidly become crowd favourites on the Dakar. Their indelible smiles, constant joking and horseplay with the locals, and vivid orange car have generated a lot of interest in the duo. Geoff Olholm was typically positive as he explained his day.

“It was a really good course today, and being up closer to the front it’s not so wooped up and rutted out,” he explained. Adding that the calibre of the field is astounding. “Here, it’s different from Australia, there is a big roost just off the corner, just a big spray of rocks because those guys are hitting the corners so hard they’re just carving the course up,” Olholm enthused.

He said he saw plenty of carnage on today’s stage. “There were plenty of crashes out there, rollovers and smashes in the mud. We came along and saw one car getting dragged along on its side, it just wouldn’t turn itself back over!”

“I was sideways around some corners at 180km/hr, just sideways out of control, but then the next corner would be totally dry, it was incredible.”

Today was a long stage, with a total of just under 700 kilometres, and Olholm said that as well as co-driver Steve Riley’s vomiting, he too suffered from fatigue.

“I started to feel it a bit today, the fatigue because of the length of the thing, so it will be interesting to see how tomorrow goes, but i’m looking forward to it,” Olholm said.

Bruce Garland kept his usual sensitive head today, circumventing the dramas everyone else seemed to have and making ground. He repeated his commitment to a ‘steady as she goes’ approach.

“It was tight and twisty but a lot of fun,” he said, before taking a swipe at some of the front runners. “We got passed a few and a few got passed us, but they’re all going over the top up there. We just need to look after the D-Max and win our class.”

Simon Pavey is adopting the same approach, telling us that he made an effort to avoid the mud on today’s wet course. “I’ve got enough of that stuff in Wales,” he joked. A later than usual arrival at the bivouac was explained by a small fuel issue. “I had some sort of problem, hopefully it was just a blockage in the breather because it wouldn’t feed fuel into the front tank,” Pavey explained. “So I was pretty tight on time over the liaison.”

Still, Simon made it back, and says he’s looking forward to the challenging dunes and mountains that lie ahead.

“Today was fun, but tomorrow is the first ‘real’ day.”