Transcontinental Race No. 6 - TCR6 - #TCRN06 - 2018

For the non FB-ers

Well this I feel will be my last post on here after I feel badly let down and hung out to dry and left to fend for myself. There is a basic requirement for a racers safety and I feel that I have not had any warnings at all from race control, dot watchers, fellow racers and forum members. As you are pretty much aware I've been the majority of times cycling through the night and bedding down in shelters around 6am sometimes later sometimes earlier due to suffering very badly from heat stroke earlier in the race for which I have only just recovered from.

I am absolutely furious that even though this has been common knowledge for quite some time on here no warnings were issued to me by race control, fellow riders, dot watchers or other forum users. Yesterday I begun cycling around 11am from Jajce and cycled through a solid 24hrs to be able to make cp4 and the climb before a forcast storm was due to arrive at 6pm this evening.

To my absolute horror I encountered continuous dog attacks for around 45miles continuous miles all the way up to the base climb going up to the CP. At night the street dogs turn into very ferrocious pack animals that chase a cyclist down. I had this continues street after street town after town for around 5 to 6hrs. At one point in one of the larger towns I had 10dogs chasing me at once with two being alsatians. That was terrifying as if I had got caught and brought down off the bike I would have been attacked by ten dogs. Every inch of my body would have been ravage causing life changing injuries. I was on a last climb before the base when one dog managed to get me as it was on an up hill and i did not have enough speed to escape. It inflicted 4 puncture wounds and some scrapes to my left ankle but I managed to limp up to CP4.
I feel i should have had prior warning of this and that route had been taken by many riders and it should have been marked as dangerous by race control.

My girlfriend Natasha then found several threads and posts talking about these vicious ferral dogs in the area but none of this information was passed onto me. It is the duty of race control to keep a racer safe and even though the race had finished I had not seen any warnings about this when it was on. Failing this it should also be the duty of fellow racers to make sure race control follow up this issues and get the warnings out. My route should have had a night time ban on it. I will be taking this up with race control upon my return to the UK. It is apparently common knowledge about these dog attacks so why would I not know through here or race control. I have had many many problems along the way but I have had to overcome these on a day basis and now jyst to get this far but I feel my safety has been put in jeopardy.

If its not been hard enough being on the road for this long which has caused tremendous stress to my family not to mention natasha the basic right of racer safety has been neglected.