I think you may be on to something here. Spectators
follow along the trails in cars or vans or buses and that way they can see the
whole ride start to finish.
If you really want fun, let's make them use horse and
buggy type devices. That way there can be two endurance competitions
going. The normal rider/horse ride, and a driving endurance (do you factor
in the weight of the passengers to make it fairer?).
Who says endurance isn't a spectator sport? This is how you get the
spectators involved in all the action. See all by following the horses
the entire 160 KM inside a Landrover. Window seats cost extra.
Tom Ivers once wrote about this experience when he was over there.
Cell phones, radios, and some central command post kind of thing similar to
NASCAR where they radio in all the instructions, which horse and
rider to follow, which one to go back to, all very chaotic. And the
speeds, over 50 MPH in the desert, with the driver paying no attention to the
hills, small as they may be, that you literally flew over at those
speeds. AIRBORNE! I don't think Tom ever went back out
there in a vehicle again after his first experience.
Each Sheik has many horses in the ride and the folks inside these
vehicles take care of more than just one horse during the course of
the day. All instructions to the rider are radioed in, by the Head guy
himself sometimes, which the guy in the truck yells out, literally, to the
rider during the race. I think the main command is, "Ride FASTER!"
Yea, it's a bit different over there. Instead of the phrase "trot
out" they should say "truckout."
I woke up this AM and of course had to see what
was going on with the President's Cup...The real time web cast popped
up..and on my computer it is just this little bitsy screen about the size of
a playing card...and I could make out vast numbers of objects in a big
pack moving along in this big cloud of dust ..thought at first they were
horses all bunched up together..which seemed pretty amazing considering it
was towards the end of the race..I put on my glasses and was astounded to
find that all the objects except for one little gray speck amongst them,
were vehicles!!! and when they showed closed ups of the horse and
rider..most of the time what you saw were trucks and landrovers more trucks
and landrovers with people hanging out the window and crammed into the beds
of pickups. You have to see it to get the full effect of the NUMBERS of
vehicles Literally..just with this one horse..there must be 15 vehicles or
more!!!!!!!!!! The helicopter shots were the funniest....especially on
my tiny screen...All I could make out were a huge number of vehicles
racing around in the desert. Now I'm sure there must have been some
coverage of the vet checks etc that I missed...but if, in fact, what I saw
is a representation of the majority of the coverage of the President's
Cup...so far it belongs on the comedy channel!
