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| Photos: Quokka Sports |
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Team Nokia Adventure
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Team Profile
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Before the 1999 Eco-Challenge in Patagonia, members of the Finnish team - then racing as Team Halti - openly predicted that they would win the race, gaining notoriety for their outspoken confidence. Battling across the wild terrain, Team Halti nearly made their prediction hold true while vying for the lead during much of the race. However, a navigational error during the final stage knocked them out of contention, and they finished fifth.
After last year's Eco-Challenge, the team of Finns (Pasi Ikonen and Petri Forsman) replaced their team captain and most vocal member of the group, Iiro Kakko, with 40-year-old Mika Hirvinen, an experienced orienteer.
The re-vamped and re-named Team Nokia Adventure battled it out at the Raid Gauloises in Nepal and Tibet this past May, overtaking the favorite, Team Salomon Land Rover, in the last hours for the win. Although it was a well-earned and prestigious win for Team Nokia Adventure, controversy emerged as Team Salomon Land Rover was set back four hours when their support crew was late to the bike transition.
Eco-Challenge Sabah 2000 could be the difinitive race for Team Nokia Adventure whose approach this year is both humble and hopeful.
Ikonen explains, "We know that the course, it's not so good for us. We are not used to such high temperatures, such high humidity, so it will be more difficult for us for sure."
"None of us have experienced the jungle," he continued. "The climate is the biggest challenge. ... It will be a rough race."
"There will be kayaking, there will be sailing, scuba diving and things like that. We are not very experienced in these sports."
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Team Nokia Adventure has resorted to training inside a working mine to escape its home country's unforgiving climate. "It's a very good place to do training," explained Nokia teammate Petri Forsman. "In the wintertime when we have minus degrees outside, the mine temperature is between eight and 10 plus [degrees celsius] all the time."
Forsman, a 31-year-old resident of Lohja, just outside of Helsinki, is also modest when assessing his team's chances. "I think this time there will be many water sections," he said. "There will be kayaking, there will be sailing, scuba diving and things like that. We are not very experienced in these sports."
Indeed, cross-country skiing and ice hockey are the two most popular sports in Finland. But Team Nokia Adventure has been honing its skills in unfrozen water. "We have been doing a lot of paddling and sailing," explained Forsman. "Also we have tried to learn to use a kite for the paddling sections."
Despite their modified approach to this year's race, the members of the team are not without high expectations for their performance. "If we can do the race without mistakes, we can be near the top five, maybe the top one," said Forsman, a longtime member of Finland's national orienteering team.
Though they've attracted a high-profile sponsorship, the members of Team Nokia Adventure, who compete year-round together in the popular Salomon X-Mountain Adventure Racing series, all juggle busy schedules that include regular jobs. "All of us are working in some other places," said team captain Ikonen, explaining that none get paid for adventure racing. "Of course training and racing takes a lot of time, so we can't work like 40 hours per week every week."
Ikonen was employed as a border patrol officer until last year, but quit to work for a company that arranges outdoor activities and adventure vacations. Thirty-nine-year-old Dominick Arduin, the sole female member of the team and a two-time Eco-Challenge veteran, is a marketing manager by day; she's also a cancer survivor who had osteogenic sarcoma, a form of bone cancer, for 10 years.
Arduin lives in northern Finland and the three men live in the south, which makes training as a team difficult. "We can't go jogging together every night," said Ikonen. "But we are not worried about that. You can't be."
"We try to be as well prepared as we can from here," he said. "But of course, there will be surprises during the race, like always with races like this. But we are not worried about that. We'll just go there and see what happens."
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