Yesterday afternoon, three men in helmets and climbing harnesses were seen clambering over the seventh-floor roof of New York New York in downtown Taipei. They rappelled down the wall, turning left and right to face the small contingent of press photographers trying to create the most precarious angle to lend excitement to their shots.
The climbers were Michael Maddess of the Action Asia Foundation, Robin Dai (
Action Asia Challenge course designer Maddess, who has visited Taiwan more than 10 times in the course of the last two challenges, has nothing but praise for Taiwan as a venue for multidiscipline outdoor sports. But the local sports community has been relatively wary of the new endeavor.
This year, organizers are still in a rush to get the complex race together before the starter's gun goes off at dawn on Nov. 16. But information for local participants has gone on-line much earlier than on previous occasions, with a Chinese-language handbook for the event already available to provide information to locals thinking of participating.
This has been in response to criticism from local teams that they were not given enough time to prepare for the competition, which draws heavily from expatriate communities in Hong Kong and Thailand.
* Details of the race, registration and equipment needed are now online and can be found at www.aachallenge.com and http://www.aachallenge.com/ .
* Teams will race in four categories: men's open, women's open, masters (combined age over 120) and university students and will be expected to provide their own equipment.
* The Taiwan race is the second in the 2003/2004 series of Action Asia Challenge, with races to be held in Brunei (end of January), Malaysia (end of March) and an invitational race for highly ranked teams tentatively scheduled for Dubai at the end of May.
In Taiwan, no effort has been spared to bring Action Asia to a wider community in the face of a high degree of specialization among practitioners of various sports.
"We all want to be an expert," said rock-climbing specialist Robin Dai. "If I am best in my field, I don't want to compete in another discipline where someone else is the expert. So I stick to my patch and protect it from encroachment," Dai said jokingly. He is leading a team of 20 climbers, sponsored by mountaineering store Tin Shan Lou (
Addressing the issue that many Taiwanese, even if they are athletic, are often not familiar with rope skills, Dai said that a two-hour training session on Nov. 8 at Tapaoyan, a well-known rock climbing location in Taipei's Peitou District, would provide basic skills for those who have never abseiled before.
"It will get them over initial fears and during the race they should have no problems," Dai said.
Maddess said he hoped there would also be an introduction to kayaking skills at Fulung on Nov. 15 to give racers a feel for the boats before they took to the oars in earnest.
While the Action Asia Challenge is certainly about competition, Maddess and Dai both want to take the emphasis off winning as the primary goal of the event. There is plenty of room for people with little or no experience of adventure racing, they said, and the course has been designed to allow for different skill levels.
Most of the major obstacles will also have a bypass trail. Though using this will put competitors to the back of the rankings, it still gives them a chance to complete the course.
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