Reflection #2: Supportive culture for unsupported racing

In 2021, Covid changed the world. It also changed expedition adventure racing in NZ.  GODzone, the country’s iconic expedition race, was delayed. When it was finally held in Rotorua, it changed to a supported format to minimize person to person contact and fall in-line with the country's response to the virus.  According to local lore, the RD’s found that relying on each team to provide a support crew to manage all of their own gear transport between TAs (as opposed to the RDs owning that responsibility as course organizers) was much easier and probably cheaper. When Covid restrictions eased and the virus became little more than a memory, the event’s new format remained. GODZone doubled down on shifting the event’s logistical "heavy lifting" to the participants  -  requiring a team not only to front up with the entry fee of nearly $9000 NZD for a week long sufferfest, but also pay, beg, or convince family or friends to take a week off work and play courier around a 500+ km course (often a point to point distance).

While some crews did little more than just this, many went above and beyond, hiring and traveling in motor-homes, providing laundry services for their teams, setting up elaborate (and cozy camps), and providing hearty cooked meals on arrival to TA. Transition areas became small villages. Some TAs, especially remote ones became potential liabilities.

I served on a support crew for Fear Youth twice–in editions 10 and 11 and remember one such remote TA in chapter 11 where scores of motorhomes and utes with trailers negoted narrow gravel roads to vy for parking spaces (I'm looking at you, Borland Saddle!). The best laid plans (ONE vehicle! No trailers! arrive no more than two hours before your team) were left to volunteer staff to manage, and without skin in the game, these lovely humans made their decisions based on being helpful rather than enforcing what the organizers knew was logistical prudence. I was glad FY were near the front and I was out of there well before things got crazy. 

While I’ve been practicing my "NZ nice" (hopefully Nathan will vouch for me here), I’m not sure there’s any way to sugar coat this one - I think supported expedition racing, well, isn’t.

At best it’s a proxy for both. At worst, it’s neither.  This isn’t to say that a supported event isn’t hard – this latest chapter of GZ certainly showed that a supported event can indeed be big and brutal (as discussed in our last post). But in our opinion a supported event stretches the definition of both ‘expedition’ and ‘race’. One of the things I love about a real expedition is that, start to finish, you essentially rely on yourself and your own planning.

Expedition Adventure racing, especially as it’s performed almost everywhere else around the world, tries to emulate this by using an unsupported format. It’s a team’s own planning, their decisions about equipment, food, clothes, etc that ultimately feeds into their ability to successfully negotiate the course. Teams have to solve 100% of the problems that arise from start to finish on their own, or seek help along the way in a manner that is open to all teams (detouring to a bike shop for example). To me it’s a similar distinction that has necessarily been made between unsupported and supported FKTs. Someone running the Aotearoa trail who’s managing themselves entirely–no evening massages, cooked meals, pre-set up camps, is playing a totally different game than a supported runner who enjoys these perks on a nightly basis.  Supported expedition racing is, in essence, stage racing with shorter breaks between stages. As far as the ‘race’ part goes–supported events introduce a vast host of elements that change the competitive landscape. Not only do teams with more means (or better friends) get to arrive in a TA with more amenities, the all important 'information game' can also be affected in supported races.

I remember in the Fiordland Godzone (chapter 11 again), TA crew could give suggestions to teams about route choices, etc. This meant that I could, as a local and navigator myself, sit while waiting for my team to come into TA and create their optimal route on the next stage for them. I could use my local knowledge, pour over satellite images, and use tracking data from any team who was already out on the leg to give my team an advantage. The race becomes not a contest between teams of 4, but between the teams of 4 and their support crews. Have the right support crew and your bike will get fixed better/faster, all your gear will be packed and ready to go, and you might even get to dodge having to carry packrafts if you have two sets, given the fact that supported races tend to not have any weight limits for gear. 

In a ‘supported’ event, particularly the way GZ has run it, the idea of a level field is fiction. Yes, a strong team can still do reasonably well, but strong international teams, which typically end up with a ‘functional at best’ support crew (and often at substantial cost), are often at a significant disadvantage. Sure, there will always be an issue of local advantage even in unsupported races.  But add to that a much more impactful ‘international visitors disadvantage’, and it makes sense why GODZone’s international numbers have steadily reduced, year after year, once they transitioned to the supported format post Covid. 

Talking to the international teams--ones that did make the journey to NZ for GZ--at other global events around the world (or at V1 of the MAGNIficent last year), we overwhelmingly heard feedback that while GZ’s reputation for putting on gritty and challenging courses is going strong, the supported format was turning them off. And not just the added cost, but because it made it difficult to race as competitively as they wanted to.

New Zealand has a special place in global AR culture. Not only did it help shape that culture with an early Eco Challenge and events like the Southern Traverse, but GZ also cemented the country’s reputation as a hotspot for awesome events. Add to that Nathan, and Crew’s 10+ year run of dominating the sport by winning nearly every World Championship they showed up to, and you see why NZ is sometimes considered the epicenter of the sport. But without a big unsupported event that is attended by international teams, this strong connection to the sport on a global level has suffered. At least that’s our opinion.

The MAGNIficent solves part of that problem of course, but we’d love to see the reboot of GZ find its way back to an unsupported format, and we don’t think we’re alone in that desire.  If it really is a cost issue, then perhaps a hybrid model could work–where a team’s support crew still transports gear around the course, saving GZ organizers the hassle, but under the guidelines of a standardized (and more fair) set of rules. This could almost mirror other races' way of managing logistics–with support crews bringing predetermined amounts of gear (teams get one bin of up to 35kg at TA 6, for example) into TA and then serving as spectators only. 

Teams would have to sort themselves from there, and while there’d be a few more kinks to work out and it still wouldn’t be quite as fair as unsupported, it could go a long way towards turning the attention of international teams back to GZ as a viable option for inclusion on their adventure racing calendar. Unsupported races are also critical because that’s what the rest of the world does.

One of the awesome things about AR is that it centers around exploration, and expedition races tend to be held in places that are pretty awesome to explore. It’d be great if more kiwi teams who loved AR started traveling and competing internationally once they got a feel for the sport. Part of what helped Avaya/Seagate capture the attention of non-racing kiwis across New Zealand was their racing exploits in places that were not New Zealand. Africa, Sweden, Ecuador, Brazil, Costa Rica, USA, Paraguay, etc. And a kiwi team being able to go full course in either GZ or the MAGNIficent gives a team a good indication that they’d likely be in the top third of the field at pretty much any race on the planet.

But if a team has only done supported GZs, they might not really be ready for even an easier expedition length event that is unsupported. I know from experience – watching Fear Youth tackle their first World Champs in Africa after only two runs at GZ - how hard the transition from supported to unsupported can be, particularly in a challenging event. It was painful to watch the team (who's now grown to be one of the fastest in TAs) nearly fritter away their top 10 placing, just before the last leg of the race, when a planned ‘wake-up and go’ scenario turned into a 90 minute faff session. They’d never had to look after themselves when they were broken before, and it was obvious. No amount of supported GZ’s, even if a team is winning them, will fully prepare a team to be competitive in the unsupported arena. 

Perhaps it's ironic then, that its two Americans (one who's now half Kiwi!) who now find themselves so invested in showing the wonders of NZ racing to international athletes. And who also want to show the rest of the world just how incredible NZ adventure racers are - even when their names aren't Nathan, Sopie, Chris, and Stu.

In the end, GZ gets to do GZ, we get to do MAGNIficent, and New Zealand continues to be a perfect backdrop for both--the ideal place to test ourselves as racers and RDs, and the home in which we'll continue to build our vision of a challenging, inclusive, affordable, unsupported, and environmentally sensitive world class expedition that connects us to the global adventure racing scene.