On the 15^th of May, Icebug sponsored Silva Gerber Adventure won Le Grand Tour, which also doubled as the European Adventure Race Championship. The team was captain Björn Rydvall, Mattias Nyström, Aaron Prince and Kristine Lundgren who was borrowed from rival team FJS. A Race Report from Aaron follows.

“This years race was a bit longer than expected, in spite of the organisers shortening the course we were out for 63 hours. The pace at the start was hot, with about 7 teams finishing the inline/orienteering prologue together to head out onto the first 115km mountain bike. In the prologue we were the only team not to take inlines with us, which proved to make no difference as we finished at the same time as all the other lead teams.
Out on the bike we stayed in the leading group for the first 2 hours until we make an embarrassing mistake along with the Daredevils (Denmark) and Herkules amongst other teams, where we lost about 30 minutes. We carried on well though and through a few smart (or lucky) route choices we were able to climb back into a slight lead by the end of the ride.
While we were still in transition the Danes and Polar Pulse arrived so we headed out onto the following inline/trek/kayak section at full noise. Over the following 24 hours or so our lead over the Danes see sawed between 10-20 minutes, while we slowly pulled away from the rest of the field.
On the second night we were able to make a decisive tactical decision when we decided to take a 1 hour sleep during a canoe section. We slept fairly comfortably in a sceptical locals' woodshed as the Danes came by. However this paid off, as we were soon able to catch the Danes trying to fight off the sleepmonster and the cold. The Danes decided to sleep after the following inlines stage and by then we had a lead of nearly 2 hours which we able to build on all the way to the finish. Polar Puls, the early race leaders were third 5 hours behind.
The race was great with friendly organisers. The highlights of the course were the canoe sections in windy rivers and scenic lakes and the climbing sections, which included caving and a flying fox.”