Today's route was scheduled to head south and east from Taoudenni to Gao, a 918 km run through Mali with all but the last 112 km constituting the day's stage. Riders would cover the stretch in eleven hours; it takes the local camel caravans forty days to make the same trek. It was to be the last of the three "marathon" days and the longest stage of the rally. It didn't happen.

In the first week of the event, 40 of the 173 bikes that began the rally were lost to attrition. In the last two days, between Zouerat and Taoudenni, they have lost 37 more. One truck has been stolen, another has a 7.62 mm bullet hole in its turbine, and a third has tires that resemble a spaghetti colander. The trucks were brought down by third-world bandits with first-world weapons: automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. I was wondering yesterday how you'd catch a vehicle than can outrun a desert wind; now I know. It shows that while law school prepared me superbly for a career as a white collar criminal, it left me woefully lacking in knowledge of military tactics.

Even to organizers accustomed to the random perversity of the universe, it must have been painfully apparent to P-D chief Hubert Auriol that his beloved rally was quickly coming apart at the seams. Contestants, or to be more precise, former contestants, were strewn out to the west for five hundred miles. The only way that they might see Taoudenni this year would be on CNN. Service trucks were mired in sand. Insolent thieves, contemptuous of the rally's prestige, had made off with one of the Czechoslovakian trucks and were rumored to be on their way to Algeria, just 100 miles to the northeast. I might mention here that Deep Throat, my confidential informant on mid-eastern affairs, doubts that it was an Algerian raid, for "Algerian bandits would simply have killed them and decapitated the corpses." A helicopter dispatched at dawn this morning could find no trace of the missing vehicle. A ripped-off truck is one thing, but a missing rider is a different can of worms, so to speak. You don't survive unassisted in the Sahara for long.

The Paris-Dakar rally is no stranger to the rich and famous. It welcomes celebrities, dotes on them, and curries their royal favor when required. Princess Caroline of Monaco has graced their presence; European pop singers take a turn at the wheel in the dunes; and French movie stars make cameo appearances at checkpoints, having aimed an experimental car through a wadi for a grueling five minutes. Flash-blinding photo ops are the norm. His Holiness the Pope is called out of an emergency conference with the Sanctified Nuns of Our Lady of Non-Interlocking, Front-Load Debenture Bonds to bless the start of the event. But if something --- anything --- should happen to Stephane Peterhansel, the French government will collapse faster than the Pillsbury Dough-Boy on Thorazine.

And, if you're Hubert Auriol, your life at this moment has been reduced to one simple directive: Don't piss in the soup.

Auriol, no fool, cancelled the day, not in the metaphysical sense of making it disappear (though I believe he would have taken that choice, if given the chance), but of turning the former longest stage of the event into a middle-eater, untimed transit zone to Gao. It effectively made one rest day into two and three marathon days into one, for which act he will shortly be nominated for sainthood by any number of people, including me. Forget what the riders were going through; these shenanigans were wearing me thin, and I wasn't all that fat to begin with, though I admit to being pleasingly plump in spots.

The standings are thus frozen at the end of the ninth day: Peterhansel in front of Joan Roma --- the fate of whose broken bike remains in doubt --- by five minutes; in front of the dogged Fabrizio Meoni by eleven minutes; in front of imperturbable Raymond Sainct by seventeen minutes; and in front of the rest of the field by an hour or more. It is a lot of time, though far from insurmountable, for the followers to make up, and if they were trying to make it up on any ordinary mortal they might have a chance.

But Stephane Peterhansel is not one of us. He is literally in a class by himself now, for his only historic competition in this year's event, Edi Orioli, has retired. Between them they have won every P-D for the last eight years. This event doesn't reward new guys: In nineteen years just six different riders have won this demanding rally --- Peterhansel (5), Neveu (5), Orioli (4), Rahier (2), Auriol (2), and Lalay (1). Rarely will you see such a dramatic demarcation between the winner and the also-ran. These men have dominated their sport in the way that Babe Ruth, Secretariat, Muhammad Ali, and Jack Nicklaus did in their day. They were the best who ever played. If you were in the same game with them, you fought for second place and were overjoyed to get it.

They will rest tomorrow, thanks to Auriol. God knows, they deserve it.

Bob Higdon

© 1998 Iron Butt Association, Chicago, Illinois

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