Source :- THE AGE NEWS
By Jonathan Drennan
Daniel Sanders may have become just the second Australian to triumph at the Dakar Rally, but his mother, Pauline, sensed something special was going to happen two weeks before he maneuvered his motorbike onto the starting line in Saudi Arabia.
For a year, Pauline had watched her son work night and day with his mechanics to perfect his machine and his mind for the arduous challenge ahead. When the man universally known as “Chucky” finally left the family farm in rural Victoria to travel to the race, she told him to return with the trophy.
“He just said, ‘I can do this, I can. It’s just a matter of not if, it’ll just be when I can do this’,” she said on Saturday. “And when he left for the airport, I said, ‘I’ll see you with some metal, Daniel’, meaning a trophy.
“And he sort of just gives me a little bit of a grin, like yeah, I’m with you. We were just very confident.”
The Red Bull KTM rider became the first competitor in 16 years to lead from start to finish in the gruelling two-week race.
Daniel Sanders on his first motorbike aged eight in Victoria’s Yarra Valley
The 30-year-old from the Yarra Valley finished sixth on the final mass-start 61-kilometre sprint, having decided to “play it safe” as he protected his nine-minute lead over his nearest rival, Spain’s Monster Energy Honda rider, Tosha Schareina.
Sanders flew home across the desert dunes to Shubaytah on Friday night (AEDT) to seal a magnificent wire-to-wire triumph in Saudi Arabia.
Sanders lost only 10 seconds to Schareina as he triumphed by eight minutes and 50 seconds overall to become the first Aussie in six years – following his friend, two-time motorcycle winner Toby Price – to claim the crown, and just the second in history to prevail in 47 editions of the world’s most challenging rally.
Sanders’ long journey to glory in Saudi Arabia started at home in Victoria’s Yarra Valley where he rode his first motorbike on a homemade track, built on a back paddock with help from his father, Peter, a former competitive endurance motorcyclist.
Sanders’ parents wanted their son to experience a range of sports and Pauline remembers a young boy who had a unique competitive mindset, regardless of the rules of the game.
“I remember when he was playing mini ball, which you play before you get to basketball age, and you don’t score in mini ball; you shoot goals, but no one wins,” Sanders said.
“And if Daniel knew they didn’t win, he would just nearly have a meltdown. I thought ‘I’m going to have to take this kid to a sports psychologist because he’s just about winning and losing, it’s just not normal’. He just had that determination and streak that ‘I’ve got to strive and I’ve got to win’.”
Sanders won the prologue of the forbidding 7700-kilometre race then won four of the first five stages to open up a lead he never looked like relinquishing.
He prevailed in his fifth attempt at the brutal race in the Saudi deserts, his previous efforts having been dogged by bad luck and injury after he finished as the top rookie in fourth in 2021.
“It’s massive. When I came over the last dune, I could see the bivouac, and then I just got instant chills through the whole body,” said the emotional Sanders after the final stage.
“I was super, super nervous [and], yeah, couldn’t believe it. All the emotions started coming through as you could see at the finish line.
“It’s the biggest race in the world for motorbikes and off-road, so to win the Six-Day International Enduro and then now the Dakar, it’s just ticked off all the goals for my career and everything I’ve wanted to achieve. So it’s a massive accomplishment.”
Daniel with his parents Pauline and Peter the day before departing for Saudi Arabia.
After finishing fourth in 2021, he was going well the following year with two stage wins under his belt, but, while lying third, fractured his elbow and wrist in an accident. Two years ago he limped home in seventh after a nasty bout of food poisoning and a thorn stuck in a muscle in his arm.
In the build-up to last year’s race, Sanders broke his femur training in the outback and wasn’t at full fitness as he finished eighth. But victory in the Rally of Morocco in October set him up for the biggest win of his career.
It has been an exhausting two weeks for the Sanders family, with Peter travelling to Saudi Arabia to support Daniel while Pauline kept track of the race from home and remained confident her son could seal an overall victory.
“You’re always looking when the next time is coming, but as soon as he won the prologue, I thought, yep, he’s on track,” she said. “He knows what he’s doing and when he also won many [stages] in the first week, I thought the poor competitors, he just comes across so cool, they’ll just think, how are we going to rattle this guy?”
The Dakar is the classic off-road marathon challenge that started life as the Paris to Dakar Rally, which swept across Africa to Senegal. But because of security dangers, it has morphed into a desert challenge across Saudi Arabia.
Pauline believes that after the celebrations are over, Daniel will be more than happy to get back to his other love, tending to his beehives on the family farm.
“He’s very family orientated, so many people really gel with him, young and old,” she said. “He’ll just be the same boy here [on the farm]; he’ll be itching to open his beehives and have a look at how they’ve been going. And he’s very down to earth, so no, fame won’t affect him in any way.”
with AAP
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