>>See latest Update from 21 PM<<

The Race is on again! At 9 PM the teams started out with a 35 kilometers long mountain bike route. The weather is fantastic; it’s sunny and the wind calm.  

Remember how we wrote about solicitude yesterday. Well, solicitude does not a fun race make, so before start we try to rake up some animosity between the British and French teams. After all, these two nations were warring for hundreds of years. But noooooo! They’re as polite as can be and do not make any attempt to put down the other team.

“They might pulverize us,” goes Andrew Davies of Eastgreenland.com and Saint Etienne of WCup les Moulineaux comes back with “We’ll just try to keep up with the Davies family. The British team is so helpful”. They sound like ladies who lunch.

All things can happen in the Arctic Team Challenge. The mountainbike stage is 5 x 7 kilometers in very hilly terrain, and on the second round, it seems that Ben Bardsley of eastgreenland.com has lost his saddle, however that is possible. Judges and race directors are currently discussion whether helping him will give the team a time penalty. We never said this was easy.

We’ll be back later today with more updates.

The race has just started and it’s off to the Flower Valley

As the weather is very dry, the dust roads can be tough on the throat

Going downhill can be as bad as going up

What do you do if you lose your saddle? Well, some people continue biking the 35 kilometers.
Here’s Ben Bardsley.

Ben Bardsley lost his saddle.

Update at 2:00 PM

All the teams have finished the mountainbike stages of the day. To many, the biking is the killer of ATC, yet they know that the only way to continue the race is to overcome this horrible part of the race.

As mentioned, Ben Bardsley did a big part of the race without a saddle, yet Eastgreenland.com managed to be the first ones to finish the mountainbike stage. After the mountainbike stage, the teams split up in twos. Two people go to B1, two go to B2 and then they meet up on B3 and together they all continue to B4 at the glacier. At the time of this update, Team Eastgreenland.com has reached B3, PharmaNord, Les Moulineaux and Neriusaaq/Thomas Kristesen have reached B1/B2.

Typically, the Icelanders have been smiling all day. Even on the steepest of hills in Tasiilaq, they smile every time the onlookers cheer on them. On their fifth round, a woman yelled out, “You look good!” and Erlendur yelled back “I feel great, too!”

It’s been tougher for the Arctic girls. While going uphill, we had a chat with Pia Nielsen: “It feels great to have such a strong team. The only disadvantage for me is that this makes me the weakest link on the bikes.” However, going uphill Anna has been very strong and has pulled Pia on many stretches. When hearing of Ben’s saddle, Anna’s dry comment is: “What good is a race without a challenge?”

The teams arrived back from the 35 kilometers mountainbiking stage in the following times:

Eastgreenland.com                           2:42:34

Les Moulineaux                                2:50:10

PharmaNord                                     2:53:33

Neriusaaq/Thomas Kristensen             3:04:07

Intersport Iceland                            3:20:01

Feed the Machine                             3:51:30

Pihl A/S                                          4:12:35

Arctic Ladies                                   4:30:35

Update 21 PM:

Once again, Eastgreenland.com was first over the finish line. Very convincingly, too, as none of the other teams had even made it to B4 at that time. There was a great deal of awe among the officials at the finish line who had rushed there just a few minutes before, not expecting the team to arrive that fast.

Ben Bardsley, on his 3rd Arctic Team Challenge, had some unexpected thing in store for him today. When they started out in the mountain biking stage, his seat fell off, and, after reattaching it 8-9 minutes later, two minutes went by and it broke off. After that, he took 1½ lap without a seat! “I do feel that it did in some way affect the following tasks, but we did manage to win the time back and also win the race,” Ben says and continues: “It does help that two of us have been here before, but we also have two new people joining us this year - they have been amazing! We are a unit but each of us has our own goal to achieve.”

Feed the Nerves
This morning, B.Lo of Feed the Machine was nervous: ”I don’t like the idea of stage races because I get too nervous before every stage. I like expedition races a lot better ‘cause then I’ll only get nervous once.” “Ah, she’ll be fine 10 minutes after we starts,” says team captain Christian Burke. Hopefully, she soon got over the nerves.

PharmaNord
For PharmaNord, today has been a day with ups and downs. “It was a hard ride today, the running was really hard, and the backpacks were heavier”, says Henrik Jørgensen. They maintained their speed, but two of them made a detour and came to lose some minutes finding each other, on the top of the Pyramid Mountain. Luckily there were no injuries. “The bicycling ride was rough, though, with all the hills and the constant changing of speed. The difference from yesterday was that there was more running and our legs were tired from yesterday,” continues Henrik. The Polheim Mountain was more vertical but today was harder. “We felt we helped each other, and that the teamwork went really well,” concludes Henrik.

Les Moulineaux
Pierre-Etienne of WCup Issy les Moulineaux felt they had a really good start, and the teammates were there for each other. “We are friends before teammates. We haven’t been in this competition before, and so we feel they have a better chance than others. We don’t need to win and we are pleased with the 3rd place for now - we just want to have fun.” However, they do want to beat PharmaNord because they feel that they have a chance there. The English team has helped them a lot. The real race will start tomorrow. “Be careful,” he says with a small laugh. They had no time today to enjoy the scene all they saw was rocks rocks and rocks, but they are here for two days after the race, and so they will have time to see the sights. Today there was a little bit lower enthusiasm because it was so hard. Now they are very tired, and want to play cards and go to sleep.

This is the official score of the second day along with the accumulated score:

Team                                                       Today’s time                    Accumulated time

Eastgreenland.com                             6:16:28                        9:11:54

PharmaNord                                       7:26:24                      10:38:49

Les Moulineaux                                  7:56:10                    11:25:55

Neriusaaq/Thomas Kristensen              8:31:10                     12:20:37

Intersport Iceland                              9:28:00                      13:46:10

Arctic Ladies                                     11:18:27                     15:57:08

Feed the Machine                             13:01:26                     18:35:24

Pihl A/S                                          15:02:27                      22:51:03

Erwinator Gallery

Andrew Davies speeding up a mountain

PharmaNord crossing a glacier

Feed the Machine biking along

You can look right through it!

Lots of bike on a hill

Members of Pihl A/S help each other

Waiting at checkpoint

Wrooom

Carsten gets a drink after finishing the race