When I die and go straight to burning perdition for my manifold sins, I will either wind up on the Cross-Bronx Expressway for eternity or in a wadi. The Cross-Bronx I can handle; I have lived in New York. But the wadi? I don't think so. According to Microsoft, "wadi" is an Arabic word meaning "a stinking, festering, sweltering, lizard-riddled dry heave that makes every other place on earth look like Beverly Hills 90210, except when it rains, at which point it becomes all of the foregoing plus wet and anything ignorant enough to get near it drowns in about three seconds."

Thierry Sabine, the creator of the Paris-Dakar rally, liked wadis. I don't. I should add that I have never actually ever seen a wadi, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like it if I ever came upon one. My reasoning is simple: wadis have sand in them, and if I wanted to ride in sand, I wouldn't do it on a motorcycle. Besides, if God had wanted people to ride bikes in the sand, She would have given them three wheels. The bikes, that is.

Today was the longest day of the rally in terms of time. The first of 160 competitors started before dawn in Ouarzazate and would run south and west to Smara nearly until sunset. Of the leg's 1,050 km length, the 354-km stage was set in the Draa wadi. It is described, among other things, as "particularly bumpy." It is a feature so large that you can find it on a map of Morocco. And Algeria. Hell, the damned thing might go all the way to Israel for all I know.

It is the kind of vile place that Stephane Peterhansel calls home, so it was no surprise that he won here, averaging better than 93 km/hr and beating the usual suspects --- Joan Roma, Raymond Sainct, and Fabrizio Meoni --- by relatively small margins. It was enough, however, to take the defending champion from 8th overall yesterday to 3rd today. Roma and Meoni grimly held onto to their top two spots, but Peterhansel is now a few minutes closer to reeling them in.

Yesterday's 5th overall rider, Thierry Magnaldi, took his second fall-down-go-boom of the event, this time for keeps. He again wasn't hurt, but his gas tank was destroyed. Fourteen other bikes went to heaven on the day, including Luc Fernandez' R80G/S, dropping the number of starters for tomorrow to 145. That figure, of course, doesn't count the bikes that may mercifully die in their sleep tonight.

Five women started in Versailles six days ago. Just three are still running: Germany's Andrea Mayer, Russia's Isabelle Jomini, and Portugal's Elisabete Jacinto, but it's no contest and never has been. Jacinto is running dead last overall and is about a fingernail away from being time-barred. Mayer (BMW) has annihilated Jomini (KTM) on every leg, usually by forty or fifty places, starting with an unbelievable eight minute lead over Jomini on the 11-km first day stage. That, even by my rather loose standards, is a pluperfect stomp. If this were Little League baseball, they'd be thinking about invoking the 20-run lead rule to spare everyone further embarrassment. What we need to do, I think, is yank the legendary Jutta Kleinschmidt out of the car class (where's she's currently fifth overall and the only woman ever to have won a stage on the P-D) and put her back on a BMW bike.

Richard Schalber's dynamic BMW duo, Gallardo and Ortioli, continue to run flawlessly. They were 7th and 9th through the wadi and now stand 8th and 9th overall. England's John Deacon, who should have started today's run in a casket, is holding on to 10th overall as if his life depended on it. After the completion of yesterday's stage, he smacked into a car in the transit zone on his way to the finish, dropped the bike, and skidded to within inches of a 200-foot drop off the side of a cliff. Compared to that, the wadi today must have seemed to him no worse than a romp on the Cross-Bronx. To each his own, I guess.

	 1	ROMA		KTM	ES	0:00:00
	 2	MEONI		KTM	IT	0:02:27
	 3	PETERHANSEL	YAM	FR	0:08:45
	 4	SAINCT		KTM	FR	0:12:31
	 5	COX		KTM	AF	0:12:43
	 6	KATRINAK	KTM	SL	0:14:19
	 7	ARCARONS	KTM	ES	0:15:07
	 8	GALLARDO	BMW	ES	0:15:30
	 9	ORIOLI		BMW	IT	0:23:30
	10	DEACON		KTM	GB	0:31:33
	11	SALA		KTM	IT	0:35:18
	12	MARQUES		KTM	PO	0:54:42
	13	HAYDON		KTM	AU	0:55:01
	14	SOTELO		CAG	ES	0:55:48
	15	VON ZITZEWIT	KTM	AL	1:03:20

© 1998 Iron Butt Association, Chicago, Illinois

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