The rally is taking a toll. If it weren't ending in four days, they'd have to call a truce.

Yesterday was a literal blood bath. The truck carrying the rally's doctors rolled over. Spain's Antonio Boluda was air-evacuated to Dakar in a coma following an accident. The rally's oldest entrant, 65 year-old Hubert Sheck, crashed his car and was hospitalized. Two Frenchmen in a Toyota, unable to cross the dunes to Zouerat last week, were still retreating yesterday to Dakar when they were involved in a catastrophic accident with a local car. Five people were killed and two were injured. The rallyists have taken refuge at a French embassy. That brings to 34 the number of people killed in the rally's twenty-year history.

There is possibly some happy news. My trusted spy on third-world matters, Deep Throat, reports that ". . . authorities have recovered the stolen Toyota truck." The Throat adds, "I doubt the authenticity of this bulletin. I am unaware of any 'authority' in sub-Saharan Africa, much less more than one."

Seventy-eight bikes began today's grueling stage from Nema to Tidjikja, a 745-km haul through unforgiving desert. All but four kilometers of it constituted the stage. They have run through this section of Mauritania in previous rallies, except they used to do it in two days. It was expected to be the most difficult day of the entire rally. No mechanics would be flown in for service tonight, perhaps because not even the National Geographic Society knows where Tadjikja is.

It may have lived up to its billing: As of 0130 EST (six hours behind the rally's local time) on January 15, with the riders scheduled to begin departure this minute, only 44 bikes are listed as having finished the previous day's leg. That may be a function of poor communication from the front lines or it may represent the sequel to the siege of El Mreiti, where fifty riders disappeared in the dunes.

In any event, one picture is worth a wall of words. If you go to the Dakar's web site tonight, you will see a photograph of a dejected rider. It tells you everything that you need to know about what happened today. It is a picture of Richard Sainct. Yesterday he was ahead of every rider in the rally except Stephane Peterhansel. But standing second to Peterhansel on the Paris-Dakar has become equivalent to the curse of "Time" magazine; if an athlete's picture shows up on that rag's cover, within days you will see the onset of a slump from which that poor creature may never recover. Today it was Sainct's turn to be fed to the wolves.

The marching orders at this point could not be more clear: If you're not Peterhansel, you do whatever it takes to get in front of him; if you are Peterhansel, you sit back, roll along, and watch the medics pick up the pieces of the guys who've passed you. Raw speed for one ragged group; a leisurely stroll through the dunes for the leader. Simple, right? Let's watch:

At the first checkpoint Peterhansel leads the field by five minutes;

Up the terrifying track to the Enji Pass they go --- here Jean-Pierre Fontenay, overall leader in the car class, blows out a rear tire but the conditions are too dangerous to change it until he gets to the summit --- and Peterhansel lopes along in the lead, enjoying the spectacular vistas;

Across the dunes called the Mountain of Elephants they plod, Peterhansel still leading and whistling to himself as the trailing riders gag in the dust, sand, grit, and rocks that the Frenchman continuously lobs at their crusted faces;

At the 650-km mark and nine hours into the stage, Peterhansel tires of making a mockery of the sport, lets Andy Haydon and Alfie Cox pass, and takes third for the day, increasing his overall lead by fourteen minutes. Sainct, meanwhile, is lost somewhere between Ethiopia and Hawaii and eventually arrives nearly an hour behind Peterhansel. All of this puts Fabrizio Meoni back into second overall, where he was maybe a week ago, except that now he's a lot farther behind Peterhansel than he was then. And, as we've seen, second place is where death spirals usually are launched.

If you've spent any time around cats, you've seen this kind of behavior before. They'll grab something, bat it around for a while, stare at it in a vacant, bemused sort of way, smack it again, and finally bite its head off. To the uninitiated it appears that the cat is enjoying the slow, dripping torture. What is really happening is that the cat is working itself into a killing rage. It knows, in a primal, instinctive way, that good things take time.

And, surprisingly, it's not all that bad even if you're not playing the part of the cat in this Hobbesian drama. When the cat sinks that first claw into your neck, you more or less know that you can count the minutes remaining in your life on the fingers of one paw. It's just plain over, Jack, and there's no point in whining about all your missed opportunities now. Morphine-like endorphins begin flooding around your system like a bloated river, coating your nerve endings. You feel absolutely great, right up to that last big bite. It was a giggle while it lasted, but now it's time to say goodnight.

That's what we're watching here.

   	1	PETERHANSEL	YAM	FR	0:00:00
   	2	MEONI		KTM	IT	0:33:32
	3	SAINCT		KTM	FR	1:12:34
	4	HAYDON		KTM	AU	1:21:29
	5	COX		KTM	AF	1:59:31
	6	SALA		KTM	IT	3:17:13
	7	JIMMINK		KTM	HO	3:30:30
	8	DEACON		KTM	GB	3:59:22
	9	BERNARD		KTM	FR	4:06:05
       10	VON ZITZEWIT	KTM	AL	4:12:33
       11	ARCARONS	KTM	ES	4:29:43
       12	GALLARDO	BMW	ES	4:37:32
       13	MAYER		KTM	AL	6:40:34
       14	VERHOEF		KTM	HO	7:00:43
       15	KRAUSE		KTM	US	7:18:45

© 1998 Iron Butt Association, Chicago, Illinois

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