The Red Bulletin August 2020 (US)

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Adventure legend (and first-time Eco-Challenge host) Bear Grylls showboats the day before competition begins. I t was at the top of a daylong climb up a massive waterfall in Fiji that Kevin Hodder felt the first twinges of doubt about what they were getting themselves into. It was March 2019 and Hodder was already more than a month into a backcountry scouting expedition, trying to piece together a course for Eco-Challenge, the freshly rebooted reality TV show built around a supersized adventure race. That afternoon, race director Hodder, race technical director Scott Flavelle and two others had fixed ropes and scaled more than 650 feet up the side of Vuwa Falls in searing tropical sunshine. Here was precisely the kind of audacious-looking, stupidly scenic moment that makes for obsessivecompulsive streaming habits back home. Or at least in theory, anyway. Somewhere near the top, they had literally climbed inside a cloud, all mist and wind and slashing rain. This is typical in Fiji, where warm tropical air collides with the mountains, but in this case the climatic whiplash set off an odd chain of events: One team member, lead race coordinator Ryan Vrooman, succumbed to heat exhaustion just as Hodder, who feels the cold keenly, started shivering, experiencing the early stages of hypothermia. It was a dilemma. “It’s hard for me to warm up unless I get moving,” Hodder says, “and it was obvious that Ryan wasn’t going to be moving.” The depleted team strung up a tarp for the night and Hodder recovered in a sleeping bag. The group woke the next morning, their fourth day in the bush, to more dreary, cold rain. They pulled on clothes still drenched from the falls and pushed forward. For the next proposed section, Hodder and Flavelle, who had designed many adventure races together, had selected a 6-mile-long river canyon that included climbs over two more falls, gaining a combined 1,500 feet of elevation. From maps and Google Earth, they could see that the current pooled 38 THE RED BULLETIN
in places along the route like pearls on a necklace. But the traverse didn’t look egregiously hard. They were reminded that day of an old truism about creating adventure races: Don’t believe what you see on a map. The pools were actually ponds of what Hodder, 51, characterizes as “really, really cold” water, deep enough to require stretches of swimming. The shallower sections served up jumbles of slick, algaecoated rocks hidden just under the surface of the dark water, making every footfall a gamble. “It was a matter of finding a speed where you’re not bashing your shins or falling off rocks,” says Flavelle, 61. There was no getting around the water, either: The jungle along the banks was denser than the beats on a K-Def record. In the end it took nine hours to stumble, slip, curse, wallow and churn their way through the canyon—and all four are strong athletes from the mountains of British Columbia. “When you’re tired and wobbly,” Flavelle says, “you’re just fighting for every step.” On the other side they looked at each other in the dimming light, aware that they faced a reckoning. If they eliminated the difficult leg from the race, they’d just beaten themselves up for nothing—and would still have to identify and execute a Plan B the next day, to connect the east and west sides of the island. “We would be cutting out the heart of the course,” Hodder says. But if they kept it? They would need warming tents to treat hypothermic racers. With 66 teams of four participants each navigating that terrain, the potential for unscripted carnage—broken ankles, Designing a televised adventure race is like writing an epic story. You need crucibles of danger. dislocated shoulders—would be significant. And with the low cloud cover, flying in a rescue chopper would be dicey. Even if there were no injuries, that 6 miles would likely destroy any number of teams that had already been racing almost around the clock for somewhere between five and eight days by this point. It would be great TV. But there’s a line, and they were right on it. As Hodder puts it, “The question in our minds was, Is it too much?” Designing a televised adventure race is like writing an epic story. To create a great one you need crucibles of indecision and danger (or at least the appearance of them); moments of rollicking fun and meditative ones; and challenges that deliver racers to both Herculean mountaintop triumphs and morale-killing slogs. To pull off such a race, someone has to assemble all of those narrative parts. Which is why, when producers Mark Burnett and Lisa Hennessy decided in the summer of 2018 to revive Eco-Challenge after a 16-year hiatus, they called Hodder and Flavelle. COREY RICH/AMAZON The race's start is pure bedlam as 66 teams scramble into outrigger canoes and fight rush-hour traffic as they head toward the sea. THE RED BULLETIN 39
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The Red Bulletin August 2020 (US)

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