Is This Any Way to Make a Living? (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine January 2003

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Is This Any Way to Make a Living? (Cont.)


	It's not just a job, it's an adventure race: Team Montrail making a critical navigation mistake during one of Primal Quest's bike legs. (Tony Dizinno)

PRIMAL QUEST POSED CRUCIAL QUESTIONS about the future of the sport: Can you make a living competing in these things? More important for many participants and fans, can you get away with, let alone make a profit, putting them on in the United States?

Before Primal Quest, there hadn't been a major adventure race in America since 1995, when Mark Burnett debuted the Eco-Challenge in southeast Utah. The next year, Burnett decamped for more exotic locales and never looked back. As Primal Quest began, race director Dan Barger was about to find out why.

Barger, 37, dreamed up Primal Quest in late 2000, while sitting at an In-N-Out Burger with a few adventure-racing pals in his hometown of San Jose, California. A champion ultrarunner—he set the world record in the four-event Grand Slam of Ultrarunning in 1998—Barger was known in adventure-racing circles as the promoter of the popular Cal-Eco series, one- and two-day races sprinkled around Northern California. He'd recently placed fifth in New Zealand's notoriously difficult Southern Traverse and decided that North American racers needed their own major league event—one they could drive to. Since 1995, Americans' participation in adventure racing has exploded, but the homegrown scene has been distinctly small-time. The two biggest happenings in the sport remain the Eco-Challenge (always run overseas) and the race that started it all: the French-organized Raid Gauloises, the 12th edition of which will take place in Kyrgyzstan next June. In 2000, 35 adventure races were held in the U.S.; last year there were more than 350. Events come in many shapes and sizes, from the short (about six hours) and popular Hi-Tec Adventure Racing Series to the urban Wild Onion events to multiday sufferbinges like Virginia's Beast of the East. But none of these have approached the Raid or Eco in terms of prize money, exposure, or stature.

Though the Raid has a longer pedigree, it was Burnett who really put adventure racing on the map—by putting it on television (while he was at it, he even trademarked the term "adventure racing"). In the Eco-Challenge, five to ten days of racing emerge as three one-hour shows, carefully edited to maximize the drama and conflict between and within made-for-TV teams. The 2002 Eco, for example, featured a gay team, a cop team, an animal-rights team, and a crew of former Playboy Playmates. None of these outfits finished, but it's a good bet they'll get plenty of airtime when the Eco broadcasts on USA Network in April.

Team turmoil apparently has its appeal. Eco-Challenge's TV ratings doubled between 2000 and 2001, climbing from 1.3 million to 2.6 million viewers, despite complaints among racers that the race was becoming soft. After the 2001 New Zealand race, where the top teams blitzed the course in record time, Burnett himself sniffed that the event was becoming "like off-road triathlon," a "sterile, clinical" athletic contest rather than a true adventure. But there was no lag in the TV audience. When the show aired in 2002, viewers topped out at more than one billion, thanks in part to vastly expanded international coverage.

Burnett has scored even bigger domestic success with the adventure-inspired reality show Survivor, and thus paved the way for other broadcast spectacles. Light fare like CBS's The Amazing Race and NBC's Lost have carved out impressive niches on network television. And this January, the Outdoor Life Network's Global Extremes will send competitors around the planet to duke it out in running, skiing, mountain biking, and sea kayaking in exotic locales, culminating with a climb of Mount Everest—and a $50,000 cash prize per person.

Barger, though, was determined to keep his event pure. "Primal Quest is about creating the best damn race in the world for the best athletes in the world," he says. To preserve its accessibility, Primal's entry fee was set at a modest $4,000 per team. He also promised an epic, high-altitude course of more than 300 miles (though it ended up shorter). Subaru stepped up as title sponsor, and OLN bought the rights to broadcast the race into 45 million homes this past fall.

There were doubters, of course, especially since more than one ambitious promoter has challenged Burnett and lost. Two years ago, longtime race producer Don Mann was forced to cancel The Beast, an ambitious weeklong race he'd planned to hold near Alaska's Denali National Park, when Burnett told the top teams that if they ran it they could forget about the Eco. But when Primal Quest came around, Burnett was uncharacteristically quiet about Barger and his stateside event. "I'm glad there's an event for the 500 teams that can't get into the Eco-Challenge," Burnett told me on the phone from Thailand, where he was filming the latest Survivor. "But they're rookies."

In truth, Barger's dream might have come to an early end if not for a deep-pocketed sponsor: Bill Watkins, president and COO of Seagate, a computer hard-drive manufacturer based in Scotts Valley, California. Watkins, 50, had fallen in love with adventure racing a couple of years back when he signed up for a one-day Cal-Eco race, in which, he says, "I got my ass kicked." Clearly he found joy in the agony. Every year he hires Barger to stage a mini-race for Seagate employees, to build teamwork and leadership skills. He and Seagate CEO Steve Luczo gave Barger whatever he needed to stage Primal Quest. A large chunk of its nearly $3 million budget came from their personal checkbooks.

Their largesse allowed Barger to design his race without first selling the idea to a major sponsor. But he also knew that Watkins wouldn't keep writing checks forever, so the bar was high for the inaugural event: He needed to build his brand, establish himself as the dominant North American race promoter, and attract enough corporate underwriting and TV exposure to sustain the event.

Telluride appeared to be the ideal venue. Surrounded by 13,000-foot peaks, the town is Polartec heaven. The race would be a cornerstone of the Telluride 360 Adventure Festival, a multisport jamboree featuring a World Cup mountain-bike race and bouldering competitions. Adventure racers seemed to agree that it sounded pretty cool: When online registration opened in September 2001, the 70-team roster filled in less than three minutes.

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