Five-time winner Nasser Al-Attiyah and co-driver Edouard Boulanger put their Dacia Sandrider through its paces during the prologue of the Dakar Rally in Bisha, Saudi Arabia, on Jan 3. AP
BISHA, Saudi Arabia — Television loves the Dakar Rally with its dramatic images of cars, motorbikes and trucks ploughing through the blood-red sands and dunes of Saudi Arabia.
But television doesn't show the whole picture, veering its lens away from the camp of 3,500 people, six planes, 11 helicopters, 100 trucks and 70 buses — the gigantic logistical machine that moves a mini-city in the desert from stage to stage and keeps the show, figuratively, on the road.
Set up under tight security on a 25-hectare (250,000 square meters) sand plain in the Bisha region in the southwest of the country, the Dakar start bivouac was bustling in the early days of the 2025 edition of the grueling cross-country race.
Night and day, generators chunter away next to white tarpaulin structures as large as aircraft hangars. Trucks fill the cisterns of the 200 or so toilets and showers, while others sprinkle water on the roads to settle the dust raised by the constant stream of vehicles.
Roaring sandstorms whip up around the sea of small camping tents, in which most of the inhabitants of this itinerant community sleep. No five-star hotels here.
The tent that makes up the canteen is a massive 1,600 sq m and sits next to a games arcade, sports fields, two shops and a stage with a giant screen.
It's a whole self-contained little world, situated far from any city, which has to be transported throughout the 12 stages.
"The basic mission is to put in place the people and resources, so that each service, customer and competitor can operate and experience the event under the best possible conditions," Guillaume Kleszcz, logistics director for the ASO organization, told reporters.
On each Dakar, the organizers have to provide around 10 bivouacs that follow the competitors as they make their way across the arduous terrain of the Arabian Peninsula, where the competition has pitched its tent since 2020.
Almost every day, a new mini-city will have to be created from scratch amid the sand and stones.
French driver Sebastien Loeb and Belgian co-driver Fabian Lurquin try to get their car moving again after a crash during the third stage of the Dakar Rally between Bisha and Al-Henakiyah on Jan 7. AFP
Double the effort
"Each site (bivouac) takes around 10 days to set up," says Arnaud Calestroupat, Dakar logistics manager. "First we level the ground, then we install the structures, the electrics."
As much as possible, the logistics team duplicates what it can to get as far ahead as possible in the assembly of each site.
For example, there are two race control centers. The one used in the first bivouac goes directly to bivouac three, while its duplicate in bivouac two is sent to bivouac four, and so on.
Similarly, the catering tent, which will serve up in the region of 100,000 meals over the duration of the rally, has four different iterations that alternate with each other at each staging post.
Thanks to these rotations, the organizers can stay almost two bivouacs ahead of the actual race.
Each bivouac is structured in the same way.
"In the center is the technical area, which is the work area," says Calestroupat.
"Opposite that is the living area, which is accessible to everyone, where everyone can meet and get together. And around these two large areas will be all the paddocks."
The paddock is where the teams have their living quarters.
Not everything can be cloned, however, starting with the people.
At each change of bivouac, 500 people, including organizers, press and teams, are moved at dawn by specially chartered planes, so that they can be at the finish point, several hundred kilometers away, even before the start of the race.
As for the television production team, they must have finished their work by early evening to pack up the equipment and transport it overnight by truck to the next location.
There, it is immediately re-installed so that it is ready to go again when the cars and bikes start the next morning.
The gigantic scale of this operation requires an army of men and women: out of the 3,500 people usually accommodated at a bivouac, the organization and the various service providers account for some 800 to 900 people.
But, none of this will be seen on television, which will focus instead on the men and women bravely throwing their vehicles across the dunes in a bid to win the rally.
And nobody would have it any other way.
AFP
