Who doesn’t love a sporting contest that goes all the way to the wire? Football, soccer, tennis, golf, even darts — it doesn’t matter. If the ultimate result hangs in the balance until the very end, count us in!
Every year we hang for the daily blast of coverage of the Dakar Rally on TV. It’s such a brilliant television sporting spectacle, featuring man and machine competing against one another across terrain that is simply eye-popping in its grandeur and yet so harsh in its topography, that we just can’t get enough of it.
Talk about living vicariously through the efforts of two-wheeled sporting champions — the Dakar is without doubt the most confronting dirtbike competition in the world. And all of us armchair experts would love nothing more than being there, saddled up and wrapped in armour, twisting the throttle and chasing waypoints as one of the pawns in a game of dirtbike chess that has a chunky gold nugget Bedouin warrior to win, but a hell of a lot more to lose.
The Dakar Rally was first staged way back in 1979, but this year’s event saw the fight for the motorcycle category victory come down to the closest finish ever in the history of the race. And it came as
