Green behind the ears, wise behind the handlebars
Dakar 2026 |
Stage 6 |
HAIL
> RIYADH
January 9
th
2026
- 22:22
[GMT + 3]
The youngest rider enrolled on the Dakar is still in the race now the rest day is here. Polish rider Filip Grot, who is, at 20 years, the same age as Edgar Canet, has not fallen nor suffered any mechanical problems, preferring instead to approach the rally-raid methodically.
“For souls nobly born, valour does not await the passing of years,” is the famous quote by Rodrigue in Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid. On the Dakar, this formula could well apply to the youngest rider competing this year. Filip Grot is still only 20 years old and has reached the rest day having tamed all the difficulties encountered during the first week. It might seem like a risky bet for a biker barely out of his teens, whose career is far from that of an emerging star behind the handlebars. “I got my first motorbike at the age of ten or eleven years old,” he remembers. “I was never any good at motocross or enduro and in the end I sold everything to finance carrying on my studies in 2022”. As a result, the young Polish rider stepped away from motorcycling for a while, but the anecdotes tirelessly repeated by his father Pawel, who had tried his luck on the Dakar in 2014 behind the wheel of a truck, finally tickled Filip’s fancy. He likes challenges, such as running a marathon after only several weeks’ preparation, and as a result he accepted to take part in the project to enrol on the Dakar, which began to take shape on the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge in 2024.
Two years later, Filip was present at the start in Yanbu, behind the handlebars of a KTM offered by his father, going about his business unpretentiously and without a career plan, but with a strategy based on caution, moderation and management... or common sense, in short. “For me, the most important thing is to reach the finish,” says the finance student, who is planning his performance methodically and realistically. “You see so many riders having mechanical problems and falling. I think it’s better to avoid such problems and riding a little slower helps you to concentrate and avoid making mistakes. I’ve reached the rest day and I’m going to try and follow a linear progression until the finish. I don’t have the intention to do the Dakar again, so if I finish 50th, 40th or 30th it doesn’t matter to me. However, if I don’t finish, I’ll regret it for a long time”.
In the meantime, consulting the provisional results at the finish in Riyadh could allow the lad to push out his chest proudly. Three places below the 56th place he occupies, there is none other than the second youngest biker on the 2026 edition of the Dakar, namely Edgar Canet, scarcely two months older and who, unlike Filip, experienced serious mishaps on the marathon stage. However, the rider of bike number 123 is unsurprisingly not the type to get carried away: “Okay, it’s unusual but it’s due to a chain of circumstances. We’re not riding in the same league at all and he has to ride at a much faster pace and take risks to achieve his goals”.
