Thierry Sabine, the all-terrain adventurer

Dakar 2026 | Stage 10 | BIVOUAC REFUGE > BISHA
January 14 ^th 2026 - 10:00 [GMT + 3]

Forty years ago, on the evening of 14th January 1986, several kilometres from Gourma Rharous in Mali, the Dakar lost its founder in a helicopter crash. The aircraft, piloted by François-Xavier Bagnoud, was carrying Thierry Sabine as well as French singer Daniel Balavoine, journalist Nathalie Odent and radio-technician Jean-Paul Le Fur. In spite of all the members of the bivouac reeling in shock at this accident and morale being at rock bottom, the rally reached the Senegalese capital through great suffering and the Dakar has since continued to perpetuate his famous motto across the continents: “A challenge for those who go, a dream for those who stay behind”. Sabine was full of infectious energy as well as brimming with ideas for all kinds of adventures and organised a wealth of events in addition to the Dakar. Alain Grosman, who was involved in a great many of these projects and who is still busy within the PCO on the 48th edition of the rally in Saudi Arabia, plus Roger Kalmanovitz, the former ‘Dakar Foreign Minister’, have both taken the time to share a few anecdotes about the man they followed up to his 36th year on this earth and whose memory they cherish. What follows is an – inevitably incomplete – overview of the many facets of the man in the white overalls…

PROFESSOR SABINE: COMMUNICATION AS THE CORNERSTONE OF THE ADVENTURE
Having an idea is a good starting point but knowing how to publicise it and enhance its appeal is essential in order to bring it to fruition. Thierry Sabine had a natural talent for communication, which he honed in the classrooms of the EFAP (Ecole Française des Attachés de Presse or French School for Press Officers in English). Approximately ten years after graduating, the Paris-Dakar boss worked running tutorial groups at his former graduate college, where Alain Grosman, who like Sabine chairrf the student council, was studying at the time. “The title of the course was public relations but the real masterclass that he gave was how to look on the bright side of life. It was a lesson in which the human dimension took centre stage”. As it happens, this ability to network with his connections in the media world, to organise the right photo opportunity or to find the formula that would be a smash hit, rather than ‘go viral’, as they did not say at the time, was part of Sabine’s approach: “Each time that he launched something, he could count on, among others, a friend at radio station Europe 1 to talk about it or another working for the magazine VSD to write a few pages about it and that was all there was to it”.

ENDURO DU TOUQUET: THE LABORATORY
 Thierry Sabine knew just how to seize an opportunity and was particularly responsible for promoting French pop group Il était une fois, whose members enjoyed their moment of glory thanks partially to their press officer. What’s more, the young driver stood out thanks to his skills behind the wheel, both on rallies and on race circuits. In professional terms, Sabine’s signature style was to take an unconventional approach to events and offer his clients unexpected projects, such as attracting visitors in summer to a winter sports resort like Le Corbier and especially boosting visitor numbers, during the off-peak season, to the seaside resort of Le Touquet with an extra-extra-large motorbike race on the sand. Sabine’s first major success was creating the Enduro du Touquet, whose inaugural edition in 1975 brought together almost 300 bikers. This gamble quickly paid off and the event became an essential one in the motorcycling and all-terrain worlds. The race celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2025: in mid-February, more than 1,000 participants regularly take part in the premium race and Le Touquet welcomes more than 500,000 spectators for this weekend-long motorcycling festival. For a great many French riders, it is in fact a rite of passage before tackling the sands of the Dakar. For example, Adrien Van Beveren was a three-time winner before devoting himself to the rally-raid discipline.

THE ‘RAID BLANC’, A PIECE OF MAGIC AMONG MANY OTHERS
 Thierry Sabine was active on several fronts. Almost simultaneously to the launch of the Dakar, in 1978 he created the Croisière verte (the green cruise), which was a motorbike race through France: the specials took place on military land, during which his collaboration with the army taught him, for example, how to use radio communication tools and master the radio code language that is still used on the Dakar’s channels. This ability to look towards many different horizons was always with him. His passion for adventure knew no bounds and he also wanted to tackle the mountains. This gave him the idea of the Raid Blanc (the white raid) in the spring of 1985, a Dakar on snow, which immediately appealed to Alain Gaymard, the manager of the Arc Aventures ski school. The broad outline was explained to Alain Grosman, who was tasked with orchestrating this unprecedented challenge. “Like on the Dakar, there were link routes to be covered using climbing skins, then specials against the clock on skis. I was the coordinator and responsible for promoting the Sabine spirit, working with a team of thirty ultra-experienced mountain guides, even though I was just a 24-year-old lad. It was an inter-resort raid contested by teams of five people. On the way to the presentation press conference, in the car I briefed Thierry about the technical details. However, when he took to the floor, he didn’t mention any of it at all, instead speaking about ‘the tracks in the snow that are the same as those in the sand of Ténéré’, the pioneering spirit, adventure, etc. At the end he received a standing ovation! Had he wanted to, he could have encouraged the whole world to follow one of his ideas. On the very first edition of the Raid Blanc, Patrick Tambay, Eric Tabarly, Florence Arthaud and Cyril Neveu all took part, for example”. Following the same principle, he also pitched adventurers into the waters of River Niger for a motorboat race between Niamey and Bamako, using zodiac boats. “Only one edition took place and then he passed away,” Grosman quite naturally regrets. “But there would have been others, he had lots of ideas like that”.

SABINE AND THE JET-SET: A STAR MAGNET
Combining extreme adventures, sand, dust and tins of sardines with glamour is an impossible equation, one that Thierry Sabine never sought to solve. The challenge of the Dakar in 1979 was open to all riders and drivers seeking the unexpected, who later went on to be referred to as the ‘warts’, as well as experienced champions. However, this unprecedented promise put forward by the most charming and poetic adventurer of the time extended its appeal far beyond this sphere. “Showbiz celebrities wanted to rub shoulders with him and to be part of his entourage,” remembers Roger Kalmanovitz. “He had so much charisma that he attracted them without even meaning to. And they soon flocked to him”. In fact, the jet-set rushed to enrol and the Paris-Dakar Rally welcomed stars from sports as well as entertainment and even royals. Swimmer Christine Carron, cyclist Jacques Anquetil, Prince Albert of Monaco, actress Chantal Nobel, actor Claude Brasseur and even Mark Thatcher, the son of the ‘Iron Lady’, among others, all tried their luck on the rally, which, thanks to their presence, enjoyed booming popularity. “It’s true that he was clever at connecting people but he didn’t go looking for them and he never asked them to register,” confirms Grosman. “They knew what they were getting into and that they were setting off on an adventure where there would be no comfort but they wanted to do it all the same”.

JOKES AND LAUGHTER: THIERRY’S SILLY SIDE!
One of the character traits that regularly comes up when people talk about Thierry Sabine is doing things conscientiously without taking himself seriously. With such a fertile imagination, jokes of all kinds flew thick and fast in his company. “One evening, we held a birthday party in our offices on the street Rue des Boulainvilliers,” explains Grosman. “He took out a Michelin map on which he drew a fake route and then deliberately left it lying on his desk. The next day or the day after that, it was already in the press… we were in stiches with laughter!” Sometimes, the jokes were less subtle but, after all, his excessive side needed to express itself: “I remember when we repainted the walls at the Leonce Deprez centre with whipped cream and chocolate cake during an edition of the Enduro du Touquet. That kind of prank really made him laugh,” chuckles his fellow prankster from back in the day. “Similarly, one evening, things got out of hand at his farm in Epernon, where we were holding work seminars. He had flare guns, so we started messing around with them and his barn caught fire!”

SABINE AND BALAVOINE, AN ETERNAL FRIENDSHIP
Among the stars on the Dakar, it was undoubtedly with Daniel Balavoine that Thierry Sabine forged his closest friendship. The singer enrolled on the rally for the first time in 1983 and then returned for the edition in 1985, which he finished in 30th position as co-pilot to journalist Jean-Luc Roy at the wheel. Sabine and Balavoine built an even stronger bond through working together on the ‘Paris-Dakar, Paris du cœur’ initiative set up to install water pumps in African villages that had no access to drinking water. Roger Kalmanovitz can attest to the strong relationship between the two men: “Just after the Paris-Dakar in 1985, Balavoine invited me to his birthday. I felt rather uncomfortable because I thought I would be going to a big party with lots of show-biz celebrities but when I arrived at his house, there were only five of us for dinner, with Thierry and his partner Suzanne, plus Daniel and his wife Coco. It wasn’t very jet-set at all that evening!” In 1986, due to promoting his hit song L’Aziza, Balavoine was unable to take part as a competitor in that edition of the Paris-Dakar Rally. However, he insisted on coming for a few days to supervise and publicise the installation of the water pumps. What followed was the most tragic chain of circumstances in the history of the Paris-Dakar Rally…

THE NEW ADVENTURERS… AND UNFULFILLED DREAMS
At the beginning of 1986, the Paris-Dakar Rally had not even celebrated its tenth anniversary but had almost reached full maturity. In Thierry Sabine’s mind, the event had succeeded its launch and its development could well be ensured by someone to whom he could have passed on the baton, in the short or medium term. “We made the journey together from Paris to Sète, where all the vehicles were loaded onto a ship to travel to Algiers,” says Roméo Kilo, Kalmanovitz’s nickname in the radio code language used on the Dakar. “Thierry didn’t often confide in people but he told me about his desire to hand over the reins, mainly because he wanted to focus on the television programme he had just launched on [French TV channel] Antenne 2 and the press magazine of the same name”. Indeed, his flair for communication pointed him in the direction of this rapidly expanding media, on which he wanted to continue making it “a dream for those who stay behind” by going to meet people from all the corners of the globe. “Once again, he was an innovator because there were no adventure programmes at that time,” says Alain Grosman, providing a bit of context. “As for his projects, he continued to think big and to look far ahead. He wanted to revitalise the idea of Jean-Claude Bertrand, who invented the rally-raid discipline, to race on each of the world’s continents. However, what he had in mind was not to do it in the same way as the Dakar. During a conversation we had during a dinner in Rouen, he spoke to me about a rally that would last six months, with around fifty adventurers and their friends, spending two months in Africa, two months in South America and two months in Asia. It hadn’t reached the planning stage yet but it was in the pipeline”.