Ryad (AFP)

Dune after dune, bowl after bowl, the organizers of the Dakar finalize the course of the 2020 edition: a long and meticulous work for the team responsible for reconnaissance in the desert of Saudi Arabia, new scenery of the famous rally.

Equipped with his headlamp, a cup of mate in hand, Pablo Eli, 44, moved to his office in the middle of the desert. The night fell, Marcel and Stéphane start the generator to prepare the evening meal and check that the SUVs did not break, while Bruno and Jim set up the bivouac. And it's a second day of work that begins for Pablo, the manager of the road book.

One by one, he takes again in his spiral notebook the small drawings that he drew during the day and which must allow the competitors of the Dakar not to get lost in the immensity of the desert and the maze of dunes and canyons that they will walk between Jeddah and Ryad, from January 5th to 17th.

"I like to find the way and find new places to run the race, when the guy ends the special and told me it was incredible," said the Argentine to AFP in front of satellite images of the course.

- Camels and fennecs -

Alongside his pilot Martin, he noted each course to follow and each waypoint. He also pointed out the dangers to avoid: here a hidden hole, a bump, a risk of compression ... there pebbles or shrubs little visible. All schematized with drawings, arrows and acronyms.

"It's not just about drawing, it's about knowing what you're doing," he says. "You have to imagine what the competitor will do, what he will see, what he needs to know to make a decision", continues Pablo Eli, already master of the road book in 2015 and 2016, during editions which had taken place in his home in South America on tracks he knew by heart.

This year, a new territory, Saudi Arabia, is open to him. After touring Africa and Latin America, the rally was indeed expatriate in the Middle East.

From now on, we do not cross any llamas between the dunes but many camels, and the condors left place to the fennecs. For Edo Mossi, who coordinated the reconnaissance, "it's one of the most beautiful deserts I've seen, the Red Sea is like the Maldives, sometimes it's like Morocco ..."

- It's not Peru -

The race thus finds sets that should appeal to nostalgic African editions. "Here everything is bigger, when you find a place with dunes, it's dunes everywhere, when there's a plateau, it's a 50-km plateau," says Pablo. "In Peru, for example, it was a lot more sinuous, to find kilometers of dunes, you had to make a lot of loops ... Here, the course is linear, I like that".

But to trace a course in an unknown country is not without pitfalls. "It's a lot harder," he admits. "Yesterday we followed a bad track, we arrived at the top of a mountain and we could not go back down, we had to turn back.It takes a lot more time, you have to go back and forth because we do not know the place ".

After signing an agreement with the kingdom, the rally should remain in the region for the next five years at least. "It may be easier next time," wants to believe Pablo.

© 2019 AFP