SPORT PICTORIAL
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Four magical days in the NSW Central Tablelands reinstated the Australian 4-Day Enduro as the country’s premier off-road event. ANDY WIGAN
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iKAPTURE & IAN HANCOCK
n 1977, the first team Australia ever sent to the International Six-Days Enduro (ISDE) returned from Czechoslovakia with their tails between their legs, having posted a 100% DNF-rate. It was a damn tough ISDE that year, but the result remained an embarrassment to Australia’s proud off-road fraternity, and it gave the Cessnock Motorcycle Club an idea: to create an event back home that’d prepare our riders and support crew for the notoriously torrid ISDE. And that’s how the Australian 4-Day Enduro (A4DE) was conceived and born – in Cessnock, over the Easter holiday break of 1978. Of the 125 riders who entered, just 43 completed the saturated course, with Victoria’s Norm Watts – father of former WEC and GNCC champ, Shane – the inaugural winner. “The 4-Day”, as it became known, has been a regular fixture on the off-road race calendar ever since, and is regarded as Australia’s premier off-road event. Back in the ’80s, it attracted international greats such as America’s Dick Burleson and Europe’s Joachim Sauer and SvenEric Jonsson, with Mika Ahola, Juha Salminen, David Knight, Joel Smets and Antoine Meo all competing in more recent years. And Australia’s Shane Watts, Glenn Kearney, Stefan Merriman, Jake Stapleton and Josh Strang have all made a point of returning from their WEC or GNCC gigs to race the thing over the years. But the 4-Day isn’t only about the elite, and the fact that the Vets (over 35s) and Masters (over 45s) classes are religiously oversubscribed reinforces the point: if there’s one event each year that Australia’s enduro die-hards will dust themselves off to be part of, it’s the 4-Day. So, late last year, when the Oyster Bay Motorcycle Club finally got the go-ahead from Motorcycling Australia to run the 4-Day in Portland, they knew they were up against it. Aside from facing a tight timeframe, the club was also battling subdued entry numbers in the wake of the 2009 4-Day in Orange – an event that barely satisfied the 4-Day’s minimum requirements for trail and special tests, and left a trail of disgruntled competitors. Indignant at suggestions the Orange 4-Day had even tarnished the event’s reputation, a who’s who in Aussie enduro circles emerged to lend a hand for 2010. And together with the tenacious crew from the Oyster Bay and Central Tablelands Motorcycle Clubs, they built and staged one of the best 4-Days of all time. There might not have been any internationals on the Portland bill, but the depth of talent made picking a winner a tall order. Smart money had Stefan Merriman as the man to beat. A four-time WEC champ, Merriman hadn’t ridden the 4-Day since 2007, and looked like he was prepared to give his left nut to turn the 25