Amid the driving rain and rising waters that turned the Coast to Coast into an unexpected adventure, King Steve Gurney handed over his mantle to a real Kiwi bloke.
While many succumbed on Saturday to the conditions and the cold on the 33km mountain run over the Great Divide, Hawkes Bayhard man George Christison thrived. When he arrived at Klondyke Corner near Arthurs Pass in driving rain, Christison had made what proved to be the winning break.
He held that advantage all the way to Sumner Beach, near Christchurch, with nine-time winner Gurney passing Richard Ussher, a pre-race favourite, (Queenstown) on the final 70km bike ride to Christchurch to claim second in his 20th and final Speight's Coast to Coast appearance.
Amid the growing professionalism in adventure sport, the mantle of the great Gurney passed not to one of the new breed of fulltime racers, but to a gnarly Hawkes Bay father of four.
Christison, a former policeman, is one of the noted hard men of multisport. He could double for the quintessential Southern Man, who is so closely linked to the 243km trek from Kumara on the West Coast to Sumner Beach.
"I just loved it on the run. Those conditions suited me down to the ground," Christison said.
He had led off the mountain before, but he vowed and declared he would return a better all-round multisporter after he last competed two years ago.
Christison's improved paddling skills meant he was able to hold off Ussher, Gurney and Christchurch's Neil Gallatly on the swifter flowing run down the Waimakariri Gorge. And he even withstood an unexpected swim an hour into the 67km kayak leg.
"I got hit by a big wave and that was it.
"I thought it would be the end of my chances in the race, but I was lucky that one of the safety jetboats helped me into the shore," Christison said.
"While I was emptying my kayak I kept looking because I was sure Gurney would go paddling by."
No one did. Christison retained a nine-minute buffer from Ussher off the water, with Gurney a further four minutes behind and managed to extend it to 12 minutes by Sumner Beach.
There were surprises when Kristina Strode-Penny trailed four-time champion Jill Westenra (Wellington) and last year's two-day winner Jeanette Wright (Christchurch) by six minutes after the first 55km cycle from Kumara.
There was equal surprise when Strode-Penny powered her way off the mountain run with more than a 15-minute lead over Wright, while Westenra was one who succumbed to the cooler weather.
Strode-Penny, 27, is the Christison of women's adventure races.
She came into prominence with a remarkable win in the length of New Zealand race in 2001, where she finished an equally remarkable sixth overall against the men.
Now part of the supreme Seagate adventure racing team, Strode-Penny proved to be in a league of her own in the conditions, even accounting for some problems on the final 70km cycle to Sumner, where she vomited regularly.
"It was a bit of an ungraceful way to finish, wasn't it?" Strode-Penny said.
Like Christison, Strode-Penny had proved her point with a punishing and powerful performance through the mountains, and once in the lead would never be threatened on the water or the roads.
The waters over Goat Pass had risen so rapidly that she had a much more difficult time.
"Riverbeds that are normally dry were waist-deep and we needed two or more people linking arms to ensure we could get through them."
By 10.30am safety officials on the mountain closed off the Goat Pass course, and by 3.30pm all competitors had been taken off the mountain, either to Klondyke Corner or back to the starting point at Deception Footbridge.
Officials also closed the kayak leg for all competitors who did not make it through to the starting point at Mt White Bridge by 1.45pm, concerned at the flow-on effect of the flooding streams into the river.
Only 45 of the original 143 starters in the one-day world championship would make it to Sumner.
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