Adventure Racing Scouts
Team Scouts Australia Compete in World’s Toughest Race: EcoChallenge Fiji
Watch Team Scouts Australia compete in the World’s Toughest Race: EcoChallenge Fiji only on Amazon Prime from August 14th.
What would you say if your next Scouting activity was to choose three of your closest Scouting friends and go 671 kilometres through jungles and swamps, over rock faces and mountain ranges, and across rivers and oceans, through the day and night, with only a map and compass to guide you? Sounds like epic fun? Now picture it as a competition: you’re told you will be paddling, riding, hiking, roping, canyoning, and more, but you won’t really know where you have to go until you receive individual maps along the way, or even what type of challenges the future legs of the race will entail. You’re also against 65 other teams from all over the world, the clock never stops, and if one team member quits, the whole team is out. Oh, and it’s going to be filmed, too. Sound intimidating? Team Scouts Australia is a new adventure racing team, and they recently stepped up in a big way to face that exact challenge, competing in the ‘world’s toughest race’, EcoChallenge Fiji.
EcoChallenge is a legendary adventure race that started its life as a television series in the 1990s, sending top athletes across some of the world’s most challenging terrain. Produced by MGM’s Mark Burnett, ‘Eco’ has never lost its status as one of the hardest race series ever staged. Having spent more than a decade producing Survivor, Burnett was keen to return to his roots and has now partnered with World Scouting’s Chief Ambassador Bear Grylls to revive his pet project as a ten-part series for Amazon, World’s Toughest Race: EcoChallenge Fiji.
So what made Team Scouts Australia think this was a good idea? Putting their hands up for a race that was renowned as the hardest going was a big call for a team of amateur athletes hailing from the South Metropolitan Region of Sydney, but for the team’s founder, Myall Quint, watching Eco was where it all began: “I never played a lot of sport as a kid, but I saw EcoChallenge on TV a few years back and it reminded me that all the skills I was learning in Scouts I could put to a sport, and that was adventure racing.”
The group has only been adventure racing for a handful of years between them, but their long-term involvement in adventurous activities as Scouts, Venturer Scouts and as adult Leaders provided plenty of opportunities to develop their outdoor skills. As anyone who has been on an expedition knows, how the group gets along is just as important as speed and skills, so it’s also lucky that Bernard Cronan (navigator), Myall Quint (captain), Ben Warner (adventure racing rookie), Marni Williams (nutrition and motivation) and Brett Johnson (support crew), all go back two decades in Scouting together, from their own teenage years taking part in Dragon Skins and School for Adventure, through to more recent roles running adventurous activities at Ventures and Jamborees. For Marni, the sport reflects the social and gender diversity of Scouting: “Adventure racing doesn’t split men’s and women’s races, the premier category is always mixed. I like being part of a sport that is not just inclusive of all genders, but really requires people of all genders to work together as part of a team—which has always been my experience in Scouts. The support that comes with a race like EcoChallenge also provides unique opportunity for people from different countries and backgrounds to compete on an equal playing field.”
There’s no doubt EcoChallenge will put their Scouting skills and endurance to the test and we can’t wait to see how they go when the show airs on 14 August (and to find out how they go against the American Eagle Scout team!)
