Europe 1 with AFP 8:18 p.m., January 01, 2023

Father and son, Jean-Loup Lepan and Fred Lepan share the adventure of the Dakar 2023 together. The first city participates in the motorcycle category, while the second accompanies him minutely.

The Dakar, a family story.

The biker Jean-Loup Lepan is 24 years old, the bib 76 and a targui tattooed on his left arm.

Fred wears the Dakar logo on his right arm.

Twenty years apart, father and son live the "human adventure" of rally-raid and perpetuate its legend.

"I have been immersed in the Dakar since I was very young: I was born in 1998, my father left for his first Dakar in 2002, and when you are a kid, you idolize your father", says "the little one", mustache and small hoops in the ear.

"I always said to myself that I would like to do it, I found this race a bit crazy and when I saw the images from Saudi Arabia", where the event has been established since 2020, "it recalled the crazy stories that my father tells me every day, I really wanted to go there”, says the biker from the village of Embreville (Somme, north).

>> READ ALSO

- "Notoriety has dropped in France": the Dakar begins in relative anonymity

Bank loan

He took out a substantial bank loan, put his job as an education assistant aside to line up last year alongside Sam Sunderland, Ricky Brabec and other pundits he had only seen until then. 'on TV".

He finished 29th in motorcycles, a promising debut.

As in 2022, his father is on the trip for the 45th edition which started on Saturday, in order to be by his side, his tent pitched in the middle of the desert in the dusty ground near that of his son in a bivouac where he knows " almost half of the people," he says.

"The Dakar atmosphere, the human adventure, is still there", according to him.

>> DISCOVER ALSO

- 365 marathons in 365 days: a Briton makes a crazy bet in 2022

"Crazy welcome"

Fred plunged into the Dakar fascinated by the Mauritanian desert, "it was the Dakar that made you dream", the one launched by Thierry Sabine in 1978 and "that we watched on the 5, the adventure, something inaccessible ".

In this Dakar, the caravan went from bivouac to bivouac set up in military airports, he remembers: "we could have a hard time driving at night if we got lost" or "spent three days without seeing our assistance. We was all a bit in trunk-motorcycle mode", specific category of today's Dakar, only without assistance, says, inexhaustible, the one who did nine Dakars and finished 20th, especially in 2005.

From Latin America, where the race relocated in 2009 for security reasons, Fred remembers "the crazy welcome", "July 9th Avenue in Buenos Aires with a million people, we were accompanied of four police officers there were so many people!"

During his Dakars, "the motorcycles were more or less standing. Now it's a big machine, more and more professionalized, there is a selection" according to the sports curriculum.

>> DISCOVER HERE

- Formula E: the car of the future already exists… and it is French

Photos in full special

The other selection is financial.

Jean-Loup had to pay more than 15,000 euros for registration, some 30,000 for the motorcycle, 22,000 for the services of an assistance, tell the Lepans.

So Fred supports Jean-Loup upstream to overcome these obstacles, from training to finding partners to warnings against the "complete frustrations of high-level sport", which Jean-Loup covets.

He also supports him during the race: "I get up at the same time as him, I watch him leave in the morning, I do nothing, but I'm there for him and I know the pressure and the fear before the stage, it's getting closer."

It is also necessary to feed the Instagram account with videos and photos, for the family and for the sponsors.

"Me, my wife gave me two or three disposable cameras and I stopped in the middle of the special when it was nice to do (some)", says Fred.

Jean-Loup will not allow himself these deviations.

He cherishes the hope of tickling the big names, even if, according to him, the Dakar, "it's a competition for very few drivers, it's an adventure for 99% of the others, you need the budget and then the audacity to get started, it takes a lot of time and training".

Once he has taken up the challenge of his second Dakar, another awaits him: "I am going to work, to repay the dreams I lived with my father".