N° 007 - TEAM HFP OFF ROAD YAMAHA
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| YAMAHA |
Michel Marchini: «Finishing in the top 5 would be the best »
This is an amateur who can dare to proclaim some enormous ambitions. Michel Marchini, 7th overall last year and 1st place amateur has only four Dakars to his name but already has experience and knowledge of a veteran knows that he could again come up big this year. “Of course, to finish in the top five would be the best”, the rider from Corsica easily recounts. Yet he hasn’t gotten ahead of himself with his success and gotten “a big head”. His run last year is still in the back of his mind and the native of the Ajaccio knows that he makes progress each year. “Each year, I understand the terrain a little better, I read the road book better, I don’t get lost as much, and I make up time. It is like when you go to sea: the first time, you don’t have a lot of reference points but you pick them up through time”.
He plays things down. In his first Dakar in 2004, he already showed his extraordinary racing abilities. He finished 13th overall and top amateur. “I really gave it everything I had”, he says today. “I lost so much weight.” He remembers two days where he set off “at 12:30 am to finish at 8 pm. Despite that, both times I finished in the top 25.”
To cope with the physical difficulties of the Dakar, Michel Marchini, who still races as a privateer, follows three principles: “eat, sleep and drink.” He knows that endurance can become performance. “The body is like a machine. On the first days you have to remember to eat and sleep, even when you feel you don’t need to. If you don’t, you won’t last.”
Marchini has a lot of support back at home on the ‘Island of Beauty’, where a day doesn’t go by with “10 people” talking to him about the Dakar. According to Michel, the best way to thank them on the African tracks is to “remain focused until the end, do things right with riding over his head.”
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