APD | 70-year-old man becomes winner of 1,000-km horse race in Mongolia

By APD writer Alice

Bob Long, 70, an amateur rider from Boise, Idaho, the US, just became the oldest person to win the longest multi-horse race in the world called by Guinness World Records.

“It’s nothing,” he said during a Facebook live stream shortly after crossing the finish line of the Mongol Derby in mid-August. “You just ride 650 miles on a death march.”

The annual race, a grueling 1,000-kilometer competition across the steppes of Mongolia held over 10 days, traces the former mail routes of Genghis Khan with riders changing horses every 40 kilometers, according to the website for the Adventurists, the travel organization behind the contest and other real-world obstacle courses. (Its site says it’s “fighting to make the world less boring.”)

Lara Prior-Palmer, who in 2013 became the youngest person — and first woman — to win the race, at 19, described the event in her recent memoir “Rough Magic” as the “Tour de France on unknown bicycles.”

Long beat out 43 competitors this year, riding about 100 hours in about seven and a half days, on 28 different horses, by his tally.

During his race, he wore an angel pin and carried a photograph his mother had taken of him as a boy with his father and his Shetland pony “Buttons.”

Next week, he will ride in Wyoming to scout a location for his parents’ ashes, which he’s placed in bronze boots, so they can see the Tetons, and be close to his brother, who was killed in an airplane crash.

(ASIA PACIFIC DAILY)