InjuryWang: What happens when you try to 'hug' a moving car on the Mongol Rally?
Now that we've got this newfangled blog we thought it should be endowed with one of our more memorable Injurywangs originally posted in November 2010:
Here at the Adventurists we have had some stomach churning feedback from teams, rife with ridiculous shenanigans and shocking tales. This week, we reassure ourselves that there is never one step too far, following Team ‘Unprofessionals’ self-inflicted injury in the middle of Mongolia on the 2009 Mongol Rally.
We shall call this incident - What happens when you try to hug the bonnet of a moving car?
These boys tackled 9,000 miles from Europe to Asia through some of the hardest terrains in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Russia to cross the finish line in Ulaan Baator. This was followed by a celebratory session at a shooting range, but it was this incident in Mongolia subsequently crowned as 'most stupid thing they did on the Rally'.
Here's Mike Davision recounting the car-hugging experiment...
“Somewhere in Mongolia... the idea had been to have my team mate Matt run in slow motion towards the car as it crept forward, they would embrace, and the whole thing would be cut to sappy music in our video. I drove and the first take went well, though our cameraman missed it. So we rolled again with me filming. This was a mistake.
“My other team mate (ducking below dashboard line so as not to be seen on video) misjudged his speed slightly and, essentially, ran his friend down with the car at 30 Mph. In his defense, Matt was no better - despite shouting quite clearly ‘uh, this is going to hurt’ he decided that instead of jumping out of the way, he would continue and try to clear it. He jumped too late, caught his knee on a spotlight and rolled, gazelle like into the windscreen. Shaun stopped. I considered our options.
“To this day it amazes me how something so simple could go so seriously wrong, so quickly. Thankfully the only damage was a nasty cut to Matt’s knee (patched up and now an awesome scar), a smashed windscreen (duct taped to help the laminate hold) and a feeling of immense stupidity for everyone involved. It could have been a lot worse. The Siberian Tigers we convoyed with laughed their heads off for several long minutes. And yes, it’s all on video .... skip the YouTube embed below to around 3m45s to see the Wang itself, enjoy:
If you think you have something more outrageous than this edition of the world famous 'InjuryWang' we would love to hear about it. Don’t tone it down and don’t keep any tales untold, we want the full monty - email it to media@theadventurists.com with any pictures and video that go with it.
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