Alexandre is a peculiar guy and this has been demonstrated minutes after winning the ‘Touareg’ in the quad category. Still with emotion on the surface, the French ‘rider’ summed up the essence of the toughest rally-raid in the world and of the quad category with one sentence, detracting from his own victory. «A Dakar, you don’t really win, but the others lose it» concluded the French. And he is not without reason after a race in which the main favorites have been falling while Giroud, with a firm step, was heading towards a historic victory, both globally and personally.
Manuel Andujar started as the great favorite to get the ‘Touareg’ on quads after winning the Dakar in 2021. However, the start of the Argentine ‘rider’ was quite discreet, so the weight of the race has fallen into the hands of Pablo Copetti, also Argentine despite competing under the United States flag. Between the two seemed to walk the game during the first week of the race, but always with the figure of Alexandre Giroud present in the photo. And little by little the protagonists of this snapshot left the total protagonism to the French ‘rider’.
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In fact, Manuel Andujar said goodbye to his options to revalidate the title in the sixth stage. After ASO’s controversial decision to make motorcycles and quads compete on the same terrain that cars, ‘Side by Side’ and trucks had ridden on the previous day, it cost the Argentine ‘rider’ the race. In one of the deep ruts generated by a truck, Andujar suffered a serious accident at high speed. In the antepenultimate stage of the rally, Pablo Copetti also had to retire after breaking the engine of his ‘cuatri’, leaving Alexandre Giroud free to conquer the ‘Touareg’ in Jeddah.
Globally, Alexandre Giroud’s ‘Touareg’ ends South America and Eastern Europe’s duopoly among quadricycles. Since the quad category came to have its own general in 2009, the victories have been shared between South American riders such as the Patronelli brothers, Ignacio Casale, Nicolas Cavigliasso or Manuel Andujar and ‘riders’ from the easternmost region of the old continent such as Josef Machacek , Rafal Sonik or Sergey Karyakin. Far from these two ‘schools’, Giroud has placed France at the top of the category after a Dakar in which Alexandre has won two stages.
In the end, breed comes to the greyhound, since Alexandre Giroud’s father was a true pioneer in the Dakar. In fact, David Giroud was the first rider to finish the Dakar on a quad in the 1997 edition, just 25 years ago. At that time, the quads competed embedded in the motorcycle classification, so David couldn’t win a ‘Touareg’ despite finishing in 50th place overall as the best quad rider. Now, a quarter of a century later, the Giroud family already has the ‘Touareg’ that the Dakar owed them, in a perfect tribute from Alexandre to his father, since David lost his life last year after contracting COVID.