After yesterday’s prologue win with Tosha, all the riders got to choose their starting positions last night and they had good ones to start in today. But we didn’t have a perfect day as we had some issues, the first one being with Ricky who injured his knee in the dunes. He has had to stop the rally and as we have Dakar 2025 so soon, he needs to recover as fast as possible to be 100%.
Our best rider was Tosha again with his third position, he is in a good place to start tomorrow’s long stage just behind Ross Branch and Daniel Sanders. Pablo did a good job, he lost a little bit of time at the beginning as there were many rocks and he didn’t feel so comfortable to attack, but later on he started to have good pace and he did a decent stage.
This kind of terrain with many rocks doesn’t suit Adrien’s style of riding but he is still in the fight. Tomorrow’s stage two will be tough, more or less like today but longer. Ricky was in the title fight with Adrien and Ross Branch, so now with just Adrien we will keep fighting to the end, but don’t want to risk too much in this rally just before Dakar 2025.

I finished the first stage, but it was a rough one as it felt really long. It was not too long on the paper but the riding was very hard indeed. The beginning was super rocky with many dangerous notes but also the navigation was tricky and because of the rain it was hard to find the piste. Honestly, I didn’t feel so good today and I couldn’t ride to my best pace during the stage so I was struggling a little bit to try and figure out the technical sections. The good thing is I am here and now we have four long days coming up to look forward to.

It’s a little bit of a bummer, but you know it’s racing and it’s part of it. I caught Pablo early on and we were riding really well together but then soon as we got to the dunes, I jumped a dune but when I landed I bottomed the frame out on the moguls that was on the other side. That meant the first thing that hit the ground was my right leg which absorbed all the energy in the landing. For the remainder of stage I then had to take it easy. It’s a bummer I’m out as I’ve let the team down as I felt that this was the rally for me to shine, but Dakar is more important.

It was a tough day, I started in fifth and caught the guys up in front quite quickly. I tried my best across the terrain that was really rough but the navigation was quite confusing and it was very difficult to find the right piste. It was the first day that we’ve used the new tablet in race conditions and it meant I wasn’t quite so confident finding my rhythm so I didn’t have all my speed but I’m focused as always as tomorrow is another day.

Today was another hard day at the office, the first 30km was super gnarly so I tried to ride smoothly and with confidence as it was really easy to crash and damage the bike. I tried to push in the dunes and taking the third place today has put us in a really good position for tomorrow.