Courage and honour
Dakar 2025 |
Rest 0 |
HAIL
January 10
th
2025
- 10:34
[GMT + 3]
Ignacio Sanchís, who is seeking his third finisher’s medal, completed the first week painfully, yet suffering is what this Spaniard does better than others…
Despite being six foot tall and weighing twelve and a half stones, when tiredness takes hold, there is little to do to avoid being submerged by emotion. At the end of stage five which took the riders, drivers and crews to Ha’il for a well-deserved rest day, Ignacio Sanchís’ voice cracked as he talked into the microphone… “This Dakar isn’t hard, it’s very, very, very hard,” he uttered wearily with drawn features. “We were told that the second part of the marathon stage would be easier… Well, perhaps it was for the elite riders, but definitely not for us amateurs. It took every ounce of effort to cover these 428 km. No matter how much I’ve trained and prepared, I feel that physically I’m no longer up to it”. While looking forward to a breather before tackling the excursion into the Empty Quarter, the 45-year-old Spaniard cannot help but give voice to the ditty that has been trotting through his head since the day before… “When night comes I want to fly, I want to hold you all the time, I want to dream… I am Dakar Man!” he sings with a trembling voice and tears in his eyes, dedicating his composition to his parents, whose black and white photos adorn the fork crown on his 450 KTM Rally bike. Although the first week has forced him to draw extensively on his reserves, the native of Enguera, a small town in the region of Valencia, is not ready to throw the towel in on his fifth participation in the world’s most demanding rally-raid. It has to be said that his time on the Dakar has not been a walk in the park. “For my first Dakar in 2018, I set off on a kit bike which broke down on the third stage,” he recounted, his voice full of emotion. “At that time, the Dakar Experience hadn’t been launched, so I had to head back home’ The following year, Ignacio reached the finish behind the handlebars of a KTM, through gritted teeth, crippled by pain on the final day. “I fell on the penultimate stage and broke three vertebra,” he recalled. “I struggled to get to the finish but I managed to do it”. He also crossed the final finishing line in 2020, for the first edition in Saudi Arabia. Following absences in 2021 and 2022, he decided to return to the rally in 2023. Unfortunately, even before the start of the rally, he hurt himself badly during the shakedown. “I was looking at my roadbook, was distracted for several seconds and I hit a mound of sand,” he recalled. “I was stuck on a precipice with broken vertebrae and ribs, a dislocated collar bone and a displaced fracture of my femur. Being airlifted to hospital was a nightmare. I suffered like never before”. This did not dissuade him from returning this year. “I’ve got two finisher’s medals and I promised myself that I would bring a third one back with me,” he said. “I want to have other memories of the rally rather than the premature exits and the suffering that my injuries caused”. Drawing on this ordeal, Ignacio has developed a somewhat warlike maxim: “Courage and honour,” a mantra to encourage him to grit his teeth, even when the urge to give in nags at him.