We didn’t think it was possible, but the relay had even more difficult terrain than we’d encountered so far.  The map is posted in the team blog gallery.

After the very long, long in which Paul didn’t ride and Alex ended up taking it a bit easier after an early mistake, we thought this would be a good start for us.  Both Paul and Alex were relatively fresh and raring to go for the relays.  All three had ridden without big mistakes in the complex middle distance terrain and were confidently looking forward to the challenge in the relay.  Paul had even found what he suspected, and turned out to be, the first and 2^nd relay check points out in the forest when riding parts of the B-Final.

But it was not to be.  In fact the day turned from bad to worse, to laughable as we managed to find new and inventive ways to DNF.  Out of six riders in two Aussie teams, four didn’t finish. At this point it’s important to say that Carolyn and Steven were the riders who finished.

So what happened?

Paul started strongly on a medium length split and rode with only a few small mistakes.  He came back 20^th, but the courses were split with up to 5 minutes difference, and we were only behind 10^th by about 2 minutes.

The problem was the 5^th check point.  We had resolved as a team to check our codes carefully. Paul did this religiously, but mis-read 338 which he found, as 335, which he should have found.

Alex also raced very well, only dropping a minute or so on the flying Mika Tervala. Unfortunately, Alex had mis-punched 3 check points and one of these didn’t have the verification pin prick in the back-up paper.  So he too had DNF’ed.

This left AJ to race.  As usual he raced fast and sure and had a great ride.  Then it transpired that AJ too had missed a check point.

In the 2^nd team, which quickly became our only team in the race officially, Steve also rode really well on first, finishing about 2 minutes behind Paul, on a long split.  Carolyn rode really well on what was a long course for women, at one point catching the New Zealand team.  Dave went out but he too had trouble in some of the most detailed parts of the map and punched a wrong check point.  Both teams DNF’ed in the one race.  We’re still scratching our heads in disbelief too.