N° 016 - TEAM KTM - TONI - TOGO

PAIN Olivier FRA 16/04/1981

Vehicle

MODEL	MAKE
WRF 450	YAMAHA

Olivier Pain: « The terrain quickly reminds you who is in boss”

Olivier Pain has strung together some promising performances but he remains lucid. 28th overall after is first Dakar in 2006 followed by last year’s 16th place finish. With such precedents, Pain can “logically” aim for a top 15 finish in 2008. “You really have to be careful”. The new recruit in the HFP Off Road team is very gifted at keeping things simple: “let it come to you, wait a little to let your instincts take over. The opening Moroccan stages can be very tough and dangerous for both man and machine. You mustn’t wear everything out in the first days with a generous but poorly managed attack.”

Despite these results (6th overall and 1st among the French riders on the last Pharaohs Rally), Olivier Pain is first a rider always looking to improve and secondly someone who is eager to acquire as much experience as he can “All the top riders know how to navigate and are capable of reading the terrain without having to refer too much to the road book”, Olivier says admiringly. “If one day I can manage to couple all that with speed.”

In any case, Olivier Pain does well to hide his potential. Calm, competence, pertinence: he knows that these virtues are vital to master. His serenity is that of a champion. “I don’t think too much about victory”, says Olivier. “I am always looking to learn, to question myself. Those who have won the Dakar didn’t come from out of the blue.”

For now, Olivier Pain thinks of other things: to, once again, make it back to Lake Rose and to return to the intoxicating solitude of the dunes. “It is somewhat similar to what sailors experience when they are alone at sea.” Like them, Olivier knows that the sweetest victory isn’t always what one may have first thought of: “You learn a lot on the Dakar, you learn about life. For example, you learn to listen to your body and not over estimate your strengths. Myself, my best performance, for the moment, is that I have never broken a bone in my body.”

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