ADVrider.com
The Africa ECO Race is canceled for 2023—or postponed, depending how you look at it. Either way, the race, which was supposed to take place this March, isn’t running until December 30, 2023.
This is just the latest in a string of upheavals for the event, which has seen similar turmoil to other rally raids and racing in general, thanks to COVID-19 and now global financial turmoil and other uncertainties. The organization behind ECO specifically blamed the weather for the 2023 cancellation, saying flooding at Lac Rose-Dakar, the finish line for the race, has raised water level 3 meters. And then:
Mauritania and its wild landscapes, awaited by all on our event, is one of the most fragile territories due to the extreme events that occur there, such as the sandstorms or the extreme heat that we experienced during our 14th Edition, in October 2022.
Based on these observations, we have decided to postpone our event.
Uh what? I’m no hydrogeologist, but it seems likely the flooding will recede in the next month, and no matter what time of year you go, Mauritania is going to be a “fragile territory.” Maybe racers will face cooler temperatures if they go in at the start of 2024, but it is a desert, and desert racers expect heat…
With that in mind, you’ve got to wonder if something else is at play here. The March, 2023 date seemed like an odd choice for this year’s race, considering the last ECO Race ran only six months earlier (itself a rescheduled event). Maybe an insufficient number of racers had signed up to challenge ECO?
If that’s the case, it seems an odd choice to run it the exact same time as the 2024 Dakar Rally. But then, there is no real crossover between the events at this point, with Stefan Svitko the only top-tier racer to compete at both. Yamaha’s factory team is done with Dakar, and maybe as the headline attraction at ECO, they wanted the January date. Who knows what’s going on for sure—the official story seems a little off, but maybe it’s just the org making the best of a bad situation?
The post Africa ECO Race Postponed For 2023 appeared first on Adventure Rider.
