ADVENTURE RACING

Nathan Fa'avae: State of Adventure Racing

By Nathan Fa'avae




Brazilian football may have been in a crisis situation after the World Cup but from what I have seen, the adventure racing scene there is flourishing, with a busy schedule of events and large participation numbers.

As I travel around the world to events it’s always interesting to see how the state of the sport of Adventure Racing is in different countries. Perhaps like most things there are peaks and troughs, so the sport can both boom and suffer over a period of time. Discussions with people often lead to me sharing my view of the sport on a global level and then what’s happening in New Zealand, ‘Godzone’ so to speak.

2014 marks the 25-year anniversary of the sport in New Zealand and also the world, as the first event was held in Fiordland back in 1989. It’s been said more than once since then that “the French invented the sport but the Kiwis perfected it”.

I followed the sport from the beginning and started competing in 1999. I had seven years of regular racing with four of those years as a professional adventure racer. I often think of those years, specifically the period between 2000-2005 as the ‘golden years’ because the amount of hype and energy there was around the sport, especially the main events like Eco-Challenge and the Raid Gauloises.

These events drew large media contingents; they were television productions as well as being adventure races. They sometimes felt like colourful circus shows. Eco-Challenge was often criticised for being more a TV show than a sporting event, but like it or love it, it attracted huge sponsorship and a viewing audience that wouldn’t otherwise know about the sport. These events were big scale on a big budget.

Southern Traverse was a highly regarded event as well as the Outdoor Quest in Asia. Then came the World Champs in 2001. In 2002 Primal Quest entered the mix, offering the largest prize pool ever, a whopping quarter of a million US dollars, which at the time converted to $400,000.00 NZD. Though nothing compared to main stream sports, for a good Kiwi racer they could make over $100,000.00, if their team had a solid year of racing; pretty good for doing something you love.

While the level of athletes at the top of the sport hasn’t changed a great deal, what I have noted is that during the ‘Golden Years’ the depth of the teams was at its highest. Currently at any given race I feel like there are 3 or 4 teams capable of winning, compared with races around 2002 when there were 10 teams with the capacity to win a major event.

I stepped down from full time racing at the end of 2005, for a number of reasons, but the main one was financial. Sponsorship and prize money was diminishing; it was getting harder to make a crust.

So what happened?
Here’s my theory. The sport started at an elite level by the simple nature of it. The very first race, the Grand Traverse, was a hard, challenging and technical course. It wasn’t a sport people could try unless they were already very accomplished in outdoor endurance sport of some sort. A bunch of mates couldn’t just chuck a team together for shits and giggles and enter the Grand Traverse, like they could the local Wednesday night touch rugby league.

This same model was repeated all over the world, experienced athletes and expeditioneers lined up for these epic challenges. Everyone who was there was good, very good: if you wanted to be an adventure racer you needed to be. The Raid Gauloises in Madagascar started with teams skydiving out of planes, the races were much more technical than they are now.

Then Mark Burnett launched Eco Challenge and he wanted to make it more accessible to more people. He had a much more commercial mind and saw a business opportunity. Somewhat by accident, his aims to capture the sport on TV led him to discover the real life dramas that unfold within most teams in an Adventure Race. Now reality TV was born - thanks Mark - I will never forgive you! Hoards of muppets saw Eco Challenge on TV and then threw themselves into the jungles of Borneo, deserts of Morocco and mountains of Patagonia. To highlight this, at the final Eco Challenge in Fiji in 2002, 9 of the 100-teams finished. I won that race but beating teams of Hollywood movie stars and Playboy Bunnies is hardly a big achievement, but freeholding my house was. Burnett then closed the event down, largely due to liability fear. By now a wealthy businessman and glowing Hollywood Producer, the risks
of someone being hurt at Eco Challenge and suing him for his fortune became too unsettling, fair enough as around that time law suits in the US were out of control.

The issue the sport had then was that it didn’t include many people. Globe trotting about to events, it was basically the same people at different races. There was probably less than 1000-adventure racers at the time, less than what the Spring Challenge draws annually. There wasn’t a fan base or a community of grass roots racers. There was only the tip of the pyramid, so when Eco Challenge stopped, the media slowly drifted away, as did the sponsors. Primal Quest filled the gap but failed to succeed, I think due to the fact they kept it in the US versus moving it to exotic locations around the world, and the Race Director was out of his depth. It wasn’t long before the sponsors collapsed their marketing banners and the sport of AR was dangerously close to extinction, disappearing as fast as it appeared.

But that didn’t happen. There had been enough little AR fires built around the world and they were carefully nurtured into solid flames. The first 15-years of the sport had managed to get momentum that wasn’t going to stop, it had inspired enough of the right people.

Thanks to the work of the AR World Series and other passionate event promoters around the planet, for the first time AR was being built from the bottom up. A foundation for the pyramid was built.

New Zealand is a good example of this. There is some excellent ground work going into the sport. At secondary school level there are amazing events such as the Get-2- Go and the Hillary Challenge provided by the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre. The Secondary School regional and national championships are thriving plus there are many other events around the country, the GO-4-12 - another brilliant youth AR.

Interestingly, when the NZ Secondary School Sports Council surveyed students on sport, Adventure Racing topped the charts as the sport students ‘most wanted to try’, and percentage wise has the highest rate of growth. This is not to say it’s catering for huge numbers, but in terms of growth, it sends a message to the Council that AR is a sport the students want to do, that can’t be ignored.

In 2005 there were about a dozen ’24-hour AR’ events throughout the country. In recent years that number dwindled as low as three but has built back up to six or seven with the
introduction of the Absolute Wilderness Race and the latest Next Generation event. The ARC 24-hour race remains strong, as does the Central Otago 24-hour race. The Timaru AR club runs a great event each year. All these are feeders to the sport and creates a mass participation base, something the sport never had when it began. 

One of the proudest achievements of the NZ Adventure Racing with respect to a foundation is the Spring Challenge women’s race. I’m not saying this just because it’s my event, I’m saying it because having an AR with over 1000-people on the start line is simply unheard of anywhere else in the world. Other nations can’t believe it’s true. It’s a credit to the participants.

I’d estimate that if Sport NZ accepted AR as a legitimate sport and counted up how many people identify themselves as Adventure Racers, they’d likely discover that there would be about 20,000-people, maybe even 25,000. We have over 4,000-women on our Spring Challenge database, so that’s how I’m estimating that number.

Godzone has been a Godsend. With Kiwi athletes continuing to smash their way
to the front of a majority of global events, having a home race and round of the World Series is a huge bonus. It provides a vital link between being a weekend warrior and the real deal. It also means the emerging teams can pit themselves against teams like mine, Seagate, which are regularly racing overseas. It provides NZ with a measuring gauge.

China has picked up the AR bug and run an extensive and lucrative series, they are flying solo in many ways and this is reflected in the events, but the money is good so the top
teams keep going back. 

All over the world the ball is rolling, each year there are more events and more prize money, the teams are improving and new sponsors are signing up.

I reckon the sport of AR is in pretty good shape.


Originally published in New Zealand Triathlon & Multisport Issue 99, November 2014