Rally Raid
6 things you'll hear in Decoding Athletes with Cyril Despres and Mike Horn
The final episode of the podcast series brings together Cyril Despres, legendary five-time motorcycle winner of the Dakar Rally, and Mike Horn, one of the world's greatest modern-day explorers.
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The Decoding Athletes podcast series, hosted by Matthias Dandois, concludes with a bang as he reckons his "mind is blown" listening to the inspirational words of two giants from very different fields – motorsport legend Cyril Despres and his 2020 Dakar Rally co-driver, Mike Horn, the ultimate extreme adventurer whose deeds and words make you believe the impossible is possible.
1. "When walking very close to the North Pole, I got a message via satellite. It just said, 'do you want to do the Dakar with me?'"
So how did the sporting alliance between Despres, the Dakar motorbike legend, and Horn, who's normally boggling everyone's minds with his incredible feats of adventuring, actually come about? As usual with Horn, it was somewhat out of the ordinary.
2. "I didn’t train at all for my first Dakar. The first time I rode a rally bike was in Paris. The camels and dunes, I discovered in the race"
Despres recounts his remarkable rise from bike shop mechanic to wide-eyed debutant in the world's toughest rally raid and reveals why he owes everything to the faith and generosity of his injured boss.
3. "It was tough to sell. I was a good mechanic, but I was a really bad as a wine salesman!"
Riding the Dakar Rally never did come cheap, but at least these days Despres doesn't have to be quite as inventive as back at the turn of the century when, in a novel sponsorship agreement, he had to raise £15,000 by flogging 1,000 bottles of wine to keep his dream alive of competing in Africa.
Mike Horn is an explorer without limits
© Chris Brinlee Jr/ The Red Bulletin
4. "I was sad, I was 27-years-old and I was crying every morning, but I said, 'I have to push myself. I need this victory'"
Despres traces the harrowing journey he made in 2005, when he had to emerge from two tragedies in the space of three traumatic months to keep an emotional promise to honour a deceased friend and deliver the first of his five Dakar Rally triumphs.
5. "Never give up. I can't give up. If I give up, I die. Imagine if you can get that into the mind of a football player"
Horn shows us why he's been in such demand as a motivational speaker, as he relates the sort of positive thinking that saw him invited to take, among others, Germany's football and India's cricket teams under his psychological wing and help transform them into world champions.
6. "I like being alive, because one life only has 30,000 days to the age of 82. We can't waste one of those days"
Horn has Dandois and Despres enraptured as he outlines his philosophies that have helped him push the boundaries of human achievement and reveals how they all stem from idolising his inspirational, rugby-playing dad.
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