The Red Bulletin August 2020 (US)

“This is officially the
toughest, most extreme
adventure race in human
history.”
adventure race in human history.” He adds that,
although he believes the teams are qualified, “I do
believe there is the potential that no one will finish
this course. We really have set it that high.”
Somewhere inside the hive of humanity,
Hodder paces and talks into his radio, ticking
through countless final tasks. Square-jawed and
preternaturally calm, with a deliberate, precise
affect, he admits to feeling roiled up for days
beforehand. What began with him and Flavelle in
a coffee shop has mushroomed into a production
that costs tens of millions of dollars.
No pressure, right? “We want a significant
number of teams to finish,” Flavelle says. “And
we’re a bit paranoid that nobody will finish.
Imagine on day one: ‘Oh no, I think we made the
course too hard.’ ”
At the start, finally, 66 teams load into 66
outrigger boats on a 10-foot-high riverbank. They
will paddle several miles toward Fiji’s inland sea,
where they will raise their sails. As teams go
through their preparations, Hodder moves up and
down the riverbank with a megaphone, calling out
instructions, a thin line of order against a mass of
chaos. When word finally goes out to start, months
of preparations and workouts and nerves and barely
harnessed energy boils over in a crush of boats
heading together toward a bottleneck in the river.
Half a dozen canoes flip in the frenzy.
A few things, inevitably, go sideways on the
first day: One team collides with part of a bridge,
damaging their boat and prompting Hodder’s
helicopter to land nearby so he can troubleshoot.
Fiji’s omnipresent winds are somehow a no-show,
causing the contestants to paddle what is expected
to be a sailing section. A member of the first team
to finish that sea crossing passes out in the jungle
heat on a subsequent hike. Then the gusts finally
reappear, and the last teams to recross the water
have to be bailed out when they capsize and run up
against squalls and a brick wall of a headwind.
But that afternoon on the second day, as teams
roll into a checkpoint on the island of Leleuvia,
Hodder feels a wave of relief. “Proof of concept,”
he says, grinning.
Within two days, a few teams had already
dropped out or been eliminated—a surprising
happenstance. Others will soon reach the cold-water
canyon, where they will “push themselves to the
absolute brink,” Hodder says, “to the point where
I thought, This team is done—they’re not going to
be able to move from this checkpoint.”
Will they or won’t they? What happens next?
These are the questions Mark Burnett and Amazon
hope you’ll ask yourself this summer.
Midway through the
epic race, Grylls
surveys the vast
Fijian wilderness.