LA GRANDE ODYSSÉE
Dominic Bliss reports from La Grande Odyssée, a brutal 400km sled-dog race across the French and Swiss Alps
It’s -15°C at the top
of the mountain pass. Minus 20 if you factor in the wind chill. The huskies aren’t bothered in the slightest, though. They’re spending the night here on the Col du Mont Cenis, sleeping outside in nests of straw as the wind picks up and the temperatures drop even further. It’s late January in the French Alps, and this is the high-altitude night-stop, halfway through one of Europe’s biggest sled-dog races, La Grande Odyssée. If the mushers and their dogs have suffered from the cold already, it’s about to get a lot worse.
Hans Lindahl, from Norway, is leading the race, currently just under 13 minutes ahead of his rival, the Spaniard Iker Ozkoidi. With a bitter wind blowing over the pass from Italy, and the loose snow swirling around him, he struggles to peg down the tunnel-shaped tent that will house him and his eight dogs overnight. Every few minutes a brown nose pokes curiously through a loose flap.
Eventually Lindahl settles his canine athletes down for the night. But he is in severe pain, having sliced open his leg with the sharp snow hook he uses to anchor his sled. Later that night, a doctor will patch him up with eight stitches, allowing him to continue the race.
Lined up next to Lindahl are the 13 other mushers and sled-dog teams still competing in the main race. (There are other events over shorter distances.) So far, they have completed seven of the 11 stages which will, at the end of the two-week race, take them over 400 kilometres from Megeve to Villard-de-Lans: across high plateaux, through mountain passes, along twisty forest trails, and up and down alpine ski slopes – all in a region of the Alps called the Haute Maurienne Vanoise. Apart from tonight, when they sleep beneath the stars, the mushers mostly spend each night in their support vans alongside their dogs, who are housed in kennels.
The teams generally comprise two breeds. Most recognisable are the Alaskan huskies, which are tougher, better suited for long-distance dog-sledding, and resilient in lower temperatures. But the leading teams – including Lindahl’s and Ozkoidi’s – favour a type called the Eurohound (or Scandinavian hound), a mixture of Alaskan husky and German pointer, bred exclusively for sled-dog racing. Eurohounds may not relish the cold like the huskies, but they are faster over shorter distances and on the uphill slopes; perfect for the testing terrain of La Grande Odyssée.
The need for speed
And it is extremely testing. Fifty-eightyear-old Lindahl tells me it’s not just the dogs that need to be athletic. On the flat sections he lets his eight-dog team pull him along. When the course rises uphill, though, he eithe
