AR World Championship – Good start, but bad ending

We started the race well but were unfortunately forced to withdraw when Josefina fractured her wrist in a bike crash.

The race started with a trek amongst some beautiful high country scenery and volcanoes. Here we climbed over a pass at over 4400m before descending down to the mountain bikes at the first transition. We were in a leading group of five teams. We were happy that our week spent in Ecuador acclimatising prior to the race seemed to have paid off. The lead changed several times during the section with some small route choices, but all of the favourite teams except Columbia reached the transition together.

The mountain bike started with an enormous downhill on tarseal, about an hour with hardly a pedal stroke, which was a nice chance to recover after the tough first trek. Unfortunately there was an oil slick on the road where Josefina crashed and sustained the fracture in her wrist. As usual she just brushed herself off and we carried on without further ado. The last part of the ride involved some carrying of the bikes and this is where we realised that her wrist could be a problem.

Next up was a 12hr trek that took us all night. This was a real adventure racing stage with a lot of scrambling on steep goat tracks and time spent finding the track through the Upper Amazon Jungle. Josefina struggled with only having one hand to hold onto the steep hillside. Anyway he managed to keep pace with all the other top teams, partly through good luck, as we often caught up when they searched for the track. The navigation was straightforward as there was only one track (albeit very small) and we were following a huge valley. However towards the end of the trek Aaron and Chris Forne from Seagate were forced to stop several times because of loose stomachs. We dropped slightly behind the other teams at the same time as we came out onto a big road. This road then crossed the river over a new bridge that wasn’t marked on the map, which was a bit confusing. But as the rules stated that we weren’t to cross the river we continued on the true left of the river together with Seagate. It turns out that we were the only teams amongst the leading group to do so, together with possibly the Polish Team.

We came to the transition with several teams now ahead of us but that was the least of our worries. The pain in Josefina’s wrist had gotten worse during the night, and doctor at the transition suspected that Josefina had a fracture. Under consultation with the race doctor it was obvious that 4 more days of kayaking, MTB and trekking could make the injury even worse, and continuing was not an option.

At the hospital in Quito an x-ray shows that she has a broken wrist and will now have a cast on for the next month or so. Of course we are all very disappointed, it is a very similar scenario to last years’ World Championship, but we are also glad that the injury is not worse as there was a lot of heavy traffic on the road where the crash occurred. We fly home early and are back in Sweden on the 14^th.