Discussion: Most Expensive Adventure Race Ever?

Pure Wild Adventures is offering this lodge-based week of cool Canadian Arctic excursions including a team adventure race designed by Ian Adamson and guides at Arctic Haven Lodge. Based on Ian's Facebook post, he may be planning to attend but the itinerary doesn't mention him.

Fee per person from Yellowknife is 7,500 Euros, which is currently $11,500 Canadian. This might be a record for AR! ;)
http://purewildadventures.com/files/purewild/pdf/T...

I just checked into airfare to Reunion Island for ARWC 2018. that's not cheap either!

although the airport on the island is appropriately coded "RUN"

ok last post i promise...

STL-RUN is $8k round-trip. would involve connections at ORD and CDG (for me).

but if i break up the search into separate STL-CDG and CDG-RUN legs, the price drops to a more "reasonable" $2k round trip.

Are you going to Reunion, Silky? :)

first 13yrs of RAID, entry etc for a team would be 12-15k USD or so. Could be off a bit. To get my team to the first worlds in switzerland, 2001, budget was about 20k for entry and travel on the cheap. Sponsorship covered most but not all. Many of the teams there had done other expeditions that year like EC, Raid Gauloises, similar or higher budget. That was the end of the dot com boom where a lot of sponsorship money flew around, which helped many teams.

you can find the real #s using the Wayback Machine

In today's dollars, that is impressive! And those are US$.

Silky got me thinking about flights, which I hadn't included. If my team of four flew from Toronto to Yellowknife with no extra luggage or bikes, that would add about $3300. So our race in the Arctic would cost $49,300 per team (Canadian loonies, that is).

To be fair, the pre-race accommodation and meals are all included at a remote Arctic lodge, and the pre-race entertainment includes some pretty cool activities.

If you can find footage of early 90s Raid, or the first eco challenges in 95, a good amount of the coverage was on the wealthy teams there to complete, not compete. as an outsider, that was my first exposure to the sport. the other teams were total studs from NZ, Aussie, France who had Ian Adamson, John Howard, Steve Gurney C2C type backgrounds so they could secure ~6 figure sponsorship needed to compete at home and a few races abroad. Big bucks! Look up results and you'll see team Rolex, cigarettes brands, etc. back then. Some overlap with Camel Trophy land rover expedition and other orgs.

Speaking of which, here's a Youtube channel that has a lot of Eco Challenge episodes.

Um, make that HERE. :)
https://www.youtube.com/user/FunkyPotato

abi, not planning on it at all but just wanted to see where the Island was and then got curious.

We did the same when it was announced. About $3,000 from Philly.

Old South XPD is looking better every day!

On a total side note, does anyone know the real-life identity of Funky Potato? I've been curious for years.

It's Chris Owen Halper, a talented professional photographer/videographer based in Toronto. He used to photograph a lot of our local ARs and he also worked at international races. These days he specializes in 3D video production.