After a successful professional sporting career, Dougal Allan has taken the reins of the Lake Hāwea Epic. The two-time Coast To Coast and 2024 America’s Cup winner speaks to Christopher Reive about his professional career and why he’s taken over the March event.
In some ways, Dougal Allan is haunted by his final Coast To Coast appearance.
Returning to the famed endurance race from the west coast of the South Island to the east in February 2022 as a two-time champion of the one-day format, Allan had great visions of his swansong in the competition ending with him at the top of the podium.
But events don’t always follow the aspirant’s script.
Due to Covid-19 restrictions, the two-day category of the race was cancelled. While the one-day event – billed as the longest day as athletes race over more than 240km of biking, kayaking and running – went ahead, adverse weather resulted in changes being made to the course. Allan says it made for a weird build-up, and the race he ran was perhaps symbolic of that.
Because things did not go to plan for the two-time champion.
About four hours into what would be 10-hour race, while running over Goat Pass in the Southern Alps, Allan stood awkwardly on a rock and felt “a big crack” go through his foot.
As it turned out, Allan had broken his ankle. But he didn’t know that until well after he had finished the race second to late entry Braden Currie; soaked through by the rain and in immense pain.
“The hope and the dream was to finish my last Coast To Coast and win it, try and win title number three, and on that day I was losing it,” the 40-year-old recalls to the Herald.
“I had a broken ankle to thank for my efforts, and the rain to me was just almost the nail in the coffin, really. It was just a day to forget, but also, as it transpires, the closing of one door when another door was about to open.”
After competing in and completing the Coast To Coast 10 times, Allan had no intention of returning for the 2023 edition. Instead, a new challenge presented itself about six months after the race in 2022 when he got a call from America’s Cup defenders Emirates Team New Zealand about coming to trial for their power unit.
With the America’s Cup protocol allowing the return of cyclors, Team NZ put together a cast of elite athletes to power their AC75.
“The first question asked was, ‘What are your plans for the summer? Are you doing the Coast To Coast?’” Allan recalls
“Had I said ‘yes, I am planning to do another Coast To Coast’ who knows where that conversation would have gone.”
Allan trialled and, by Christmas in 2022, he stepped into another situation he had never expected to find himself in.
Such seemed to be the theme of his professional sporting career.
Allan grew up in Foxton, a small town on the lower west coast of the North Island, and, like many Kiwi kids, played plenty of team sports. At some point he realised that to take those sports further, you needed a certain level of talent he just didn’t have.
He found endurance sport after moving to Dunedin for university, which opened him up to a world of sport where success could be achieved through hard work and consistency. His first multisport race was on the peninsula in Dunedin in 2006. The entry fee was $5 and the race involved mountain biking, running and kayaking. Allan finished second to Ray Hope.
“I can still remember the feeling that day of exhilaration and just ‘this is a sport that I really want to do’, really. Not necessarily as a professional, as it turned out to be, but just to do. I just loved it. I still remember that day vividly,” he says.
“What attracted me to endurance sport was quite a simple formula where the person who worked the hardest generally achieved the success, in a way.”
That race was the catalyst for what would become a professional career, as Allan jumped at opportunities that arose and was able to compete around the world.
“When I started to get into multisport, a big thing for me was it opened my eyes to the world, and I wanted to travel. Travel was a big one for me because I hadn’t travelled. I’d never left. My first time sitting on an airplane was to fly down to Dunedin to go to university,” he reflects.
“Multisport and adventure racing, I saw as an opportunity to see the world in a different way, you know? Like, my mates would go to London and do the classic OE, whereas I was, by that stage, starting to go to places like Abu Dhabi and Brazil and go through jungles and deserts. Quite a simple incentive at the time for me was travel, really.”
At home, he made a name for himself among the top exponents of endurance racing. Among his achievements are winning to one-day Coast To Coast race in 2019 and 2021, and wins in ironman and Xterra triathlons, and he holds the record for fastest male in the Lake Hāwea Epic – a 125km mountain-biking race circumnavigating the lake in Wānaka – at 4h 36m, set in 2012.
When he joined Team NZ for their attempt at defending the America’s Cup for a second time, the idea of working hard to get results was all too familiar for Allan. Joining a group of cyclors that featured fellow elite athletes, mostly coming from non-sailing backgrounds, hard work and friendly competition was exactly what he got.
“The trials were brutal, but then once we were in the team, it stepped up another notch,” Allan recalls.
“One of our weekly sessions, the whiteboard would come out. When our trainer Kim Simperingham would get the whiteboard out, we knew things were going to get pretty spicy, and he would basically use the whiteboard to write our individual scores up as we went through the session so that we could see each other’s power.
“It just became a competitive melting pot where we just got to a point where, by the end of the session, we’re all lying foetal on the ground.”
In Barcelona last year, Allan got the fairytale finish to his professional sporting career that eluded him in the South Island rain two years prior.
A consistent presence on the pedals for Team NZ’s AC75 during racing, Allan recalls the surreal feeling of being towed out on to the racecourse each day – past cheers fans lining the dock, helicopters hovering overhead to film the action, spectator boats in all directions – before putting everything he had into powering the boat.
It was an unexpected final chapter in his professional sporting career as, with confirmation the America’s Cup would be moving forward with batteries rather than human cyclors, Allan’s services were no longer needed.
He says it’s part of the trade-off of being a professional athlete; your job is very much in the hands of other people.
“I think I’ve sort of accepted it. I don’t know if I’ve come to terms with it because it’s all I’ve known for 20 years,” he says of his professional career coming to an end.
“I have accepted the fact that being an athlete is no longer how I make ends meet. But the sports I’ve been involved with over the years are very much still a part of my life. So, I’m still surrounded by the same people, if that makes sense, and still, you know, I get out of bed every day and look forward to going for a run or a bike ride as I always have, it’s just now a hobby rather than a job.”
That love of multisport and endurance will continue into Allan’s next chapter, organising the Lake Hāwea Epic in March.
It’s an event that he has enjoyed as a competitor, and one he hopes to bring back into New Zealand’s endurance calendar, as it has not been run since 2021.
As with his professional career, taking on the management of the event was not planned. But with original directors Aaron and Danielle Nicholson looking for a new owner to take the event forward, Allan felt compelled to be the one to do so.
“I didn’t initially think I would be that keen, but the more I considered it and talked to people around town, the more I realised the Lake Hāwea Epic is loved by so, so many people, certainly in the South Island, but also people in the North Island travel for it.
“It started to feel like a sense of almost obligation, really, because I’d been considered someone who could take the event forward, and I thought that’s probably a bit of a privilege I should give serious thought to.”
It’s an event that has stood out for Allan in the past from an enjoyment point of view, due to its stance around athletes being responsible for themselves when others “almost hold your hand” through preparations and what gear is required.
“The Hāwea Epic has quite a simple approach where there is no compulsory gear list, but it’s made known that you are going into a wilderness area and you’re responsible for yourself in that setting. I think fundamentally that’s such an important message to our world now. Like [if] we just want comfort and we want technology, we could just live there full time. We can have that.
“It’s an event like the Lake Hāwea Epic that gives us an opportunity to step away from comfort and technology and look after ourselves in the outdoors, which is in our DNA, right?
“I get quite philosophical about it, but what I loved about the event and continue to love about this event is the way it does expose people to that opportunity to be responsible for themselves in the outdoors and enjoy all the rewards that come from doing that.”
Christopher Reive joined the Herald sports team in 2017, bringing the same versatility to his coverage as he does to his sports viewing habits.