The Farther, the Better : LaPorte Loves Marathon Motorcycling

When Danny LaPorte was in his 20s, he rode motocross, winning the world 250cc championship in Europe when he was 25. The farthest he rode at one time was about 40 miles. The fastest he went was 50-60 m.p.h.

Now, in his 30s, LaPorte rides motorcycles in marathons. He recently rode more than 3,000 miles in the Paris-to-Dakar Rally across northern Africa, sometimes across uncharted desert roads at speeds approaching 130 m.p.h.

Last December, with Larry Roeseler of Mission Viejo and Ted Hunnicutt of Moorpark, LaPorte rode a Team Green Kawasaki to the team’s third victory in the Baja 1000. And a few weeks before that, he rode the 3,500-mile Pharaohs Rally in Egypt, which began and ended near the pyramids, outside Cairo.

“You wouldn’t believe how big these races are in Europe and Japan,” LaPorte said after returning home to Redondo Beach. “Even the Baja races, which aren’t all that big in the U.S., are considered major events in the rest of the world, bigger than any race in America except the Indy 500. For the Paris-Dakar, there were 110 hours of TV shown in Europe.

“Teams have major international sponsors . . . just like Formula One teams.”

LaPorte had intended to ride the full 5,709 miles from the Chateau de Vincennes, near Paris, to the port city of Dakar on the coast of Senegal. But he encountered something he wouldn’t have found in the ocean--an irrigation ditch. He crashed at about 70 m.p.h. and was air-lifted to a Paris hospital with a bruised chest, facial injuries and a concussion.

“I don’t remember a thing about it,” LaPorte said. “Luckily, a Suzuki rider was near me and saw me crash. We were about 40 miles out of Agadez, in the middle of Niger, which is basically as far away from civilization as you can get.

“It was the eighth day and we’d been riding more than 300 miles a day. We had just crossed the Erg du Teneres (a desolate unmarked region of rolling sand dunes) and were heading out of Agadez toward Tillia and Timbuktu. Dust was laying in the trails, the way a tule fog hugs the ground in the San Joaquin Valley, and they tell me I hit an irrigation ditch and pitched off the bike. I don’t know.

“I do know that I had incredible medical service. Almost as soon as I crashed, they had a helicopter pick me up and take me to Agadez, where I regained consciousness, and right away they transfered me to a plane to Paris. Ten hours after the accident, I was in a Paris hospital. I was there seven days before they would let me come home.”

Irrigation ditches aren’t the only hazards of racing across the featureless deserts of Africa.

Charles Cabannes, a Frenchman who drove a support truck for former Formula One driver Jacky Ickx’s Citroen team, was killed by a sniper as he rolled through the village of Kadaouane, Mali. Rally organizers said that several trucks apparently had been blocked near the village before the shooting.

Kadaouane is an abandoned village that was once home to a group of Tuaregs, Berber-speaking nomads who roam the Sahara across Mali, Niger, southern Algeria and Libya. Competitors were warned before the rally started that crossing the region might be dangerous because of civil strife, but the Malian government promised them safe passage.

“It was scary after the shooting,” LaPorte said. “After each day’s stage, the races usually end near an airplane runway where provisions can be brought in on transport planes. To try and secure the area, the organizers tried to fence it off each night, but one night in Mauritania, a bunch of natives tried to break into the compound and there was a lot of shooting. I was lucky I didn’t get shot.”

Cabannes’ death was the 26th since Paris-to-Dakar was started in 1979 by Thierry Sabine, who was killed in a helicopter crash in 1986.

LaPorte had a scare in the Pharaohs Rally, too, when drivers and riders were stopped by a military unit near the Egypt-Libya border in a town called Siwa on the edge of the Sand Sea of Calanscio.

“The Middle East, even before the war, wasn’t a good place to admit you were an American, so when they asked what country I was from, I said ‘France! France!’ ” said LaPorte, who speaks French and whose wife is French. “They were all armed and looked serious, so I kept telling them we were all French. All I wanted to do was get out of there.

“Finally they let us go, and I looked down and noticed a little American flag decal on the front of my cycle. I almost fainted thinking about what they might have done if they’d noticed it.”

LaPorte was the only American in both the Pharaohs and Paris-to-Dakar rallys. In both he rode a factory-prepared 800cc twin prototype--a cross between a street bike and a dirt bike--for Yamaha of France.

He had ridden eight days before his accident, including the prologue from Paris to Clermont. After the carnival ferried across the Mediterranean Sea to Tripoli, the real racing started, 4,000 miles of barren stretches of the Libyan desert, Niger, northern Mali and Mauritania before reaching Dakar.

“I’ve never seen anything like the desert in southern Libya,” said LaPorte, who grew up in Yucca Valley on the edge of Southern California’s Mojave Desert. “There are huge rock cliffs and dunes that make it look like a dried up Grand Canyon with dunes in the bottom.

“We rode two full days, nearly a thousand miles, crossing nothing but dunes. It was kind of scary out there when you were alone and lost contact with the other riders or cars. Most of the time we rode in a pack for security reasons, but once in a while a guy would try going one way around a dune maybe a hundred feet high when the rest of the guys went the other way. It might be an hour or two, or even longer, before you got around it and you just hoped you either saw someone or saw their tracks.

“Compared to the California desert, it is a lot more desolate. Even dunes down near Glamis (in Imperial County) look like an oasis compared to the Sahara, and it’s so big. There is nothing but rocks and sand--no cactus, wildflowers, weeds, nothing--for a thousand miles or more.”

Then there is the quicksand.

“I’d seen a lot of sand, really soft sand, riding in Baja, but I wasn’t prepared for quicksand. It was everything I was told. It looks like a dry lake, like El Mirage, and you think you can take a high-speed shortcut across it, like you would a dry lake. But underneath the sand is water and once you roll into it, you’re stuck. You can get out, but the bike will eventually disappear.

“Quicksand areas are marked on the route books, but if you’re not concentrating, they look tempting and when you’ve been riding five or six hours at racing speeds, it’s easy to forget.”

Unlike Baja or races in Nevada and California, there is no pre-running in marathon rallys. Drivers and riders receive route books, which include visual checkpoints--where there are any--or compass readings similar to those used in ocean races. Sometimes they can be confusing, as LaPorte discovered during the Pharaohs Rally.

“I had a good chance to win. I won five of 11 stages, more than anyone else, but I missed a checkpoint on the second day and was disqualified on a technicality. The organizers changed the route book the night before, and our team missed the briefing. They put in a new checkpoint that I missed because I didn’t know about it. I still kept riding and got a lot of headlines when I won the last stage that ended in front of the Sphinx.”

Italian Allesandro de Petri won the Pharaohs motorcycle class, but like LaPorte, he fell and dropped out of Paris-Dakar with back injuries.

“I was disappointed I didn’t finish in Dakar, but I wasn’t hurt too bad and our team won,” LaPorte said. “My teammate, Stephane Peterhansel of France, won and it was the first time Yamaha won in 11 years.”

The Paris-Dakar expedition is like a rolling bivouac. Besides the competitors--275 cars and trucks, and 101 motorcycles--there is a support group that includes 30 planes and helicopters that carry food, officials, mechanics, spare parts, reporters and medical personnel.

A major sponsor is L’Equipe, the French sports daily, and one Fokker 27 plane is loaded with telephones, telex and fax machines, photocopiers and microcomputers for the reporters. The writers and photographers move in 50 four-wheel-drive vehicles, with three helicopters for reconnaissance.

The medical team includes 36 doctors, four planes, two ambulance helicopters and 15 trucks loaded with medical supplies.

The Economist of London estimated that the total expenditure for last year’s rally was $100 million.

LaPorte has been home less than two weeks, recuperating from his crash, but he is eager to get back on his bike and go trail riding in the Mojave to prepare for his next adventure.

“There are a couple of races coming up that I don’t want to miss--the Masters of Teneres in Tunisia in March and the Moroccan Rally after that,” he said. “Of course, the politics of war may change either of them. Morocco is the most enjoyable because the country is so beautiful, and it’s one place in Africa where they love Americans.

“There is a new one coming up, Paris to Moscow to Beijing, that I’d love to ride in but they aren’t allowing motorcycles. Maybe I can get a ride in a car. That would be OK, but I’d rather be on a bike.”

The Paris-Moscow-Beijing race is scheduled for Sept. 1-27. The route will include a high-speed section on the highway between Paris and Moscow, followed by special stages across the steppes of inner Mongolia in the Soviet Union and China with long runs across three major deserts: the Karakum in the Soviet Union, the Taklamakan and the Gobi in China.

The Taklamakan is known as “the desert from which no one returns.”

“It’s supposed to be 16,000 kilometers in 27 days, and from what I’ve heard about it, I want to be there,” LaPorte said. “I love that kind of racing.”