After becoming just the second Australian to win a Dakar Rally title in the great race’s rich history, Daniel ‘Chucky’ Sanders was shown a picture of himself as a wide-eyed five-year-old kid proudly astride the peewee bike he’d been given that Christmas morning as his present.
What did that lovely snap of him at his family’s Yarra Valley farm make him think now that, quarter-of-a-century on, he’d just joined the pantheon of Australia’s motor sport greats by winning the most demanding race of them all?
“Wow!” he told SBS Sport at the Shubaytah bivouac where he was being feted for one of the great wire-to-wire victories in the 7700km, two-week Saudi Arabian slog.
“That Christmas morning out in the paddock when Santa dropped off that bike, it was pretty special – and I’m still smiling like that right now!”
That cherubic kid from Three Bridges, Victoria, already with the name “Chucky” emblazoned on his first motor bike?
“He’s definitely achieved everything that he dreamed to do,” mused an emotional Sanders.
“He wanted to race as a kid and make it a job through high school, and we’re now here racing around the world. It’s been a lot of hard work and dedication, and I’m glad I went through all that, all those struggles, and pushed myself to the limit to get to where I’m right now.”
Where Sanders is right now is in that elite club of Aussie motorsport greats who’ve beaten the best in the world in the biggest events – think drivers like Jack Brabham and Alan Jones, motorcyclists Mick Doohan, Casey Stoner and Toby Price, the double Dakar champ whose two-wheel tracks he’s following through the dunes.
“It’s the biggest race in the world for motorbikes and off-road, so to win the Six Days International Enduro and then now the Dakar, it’s just ticked off all the goals for my career and everything I’ve wanted to achieve,” Sanders smiled.
After such a gruelling fortnight battling through the dunes and the rocks, and just 24 hours after he’d taken a high-speed tumble in the penultimate stage with victory in sight, it was easy to imagine why ‘Sanders of the desert’ might, at 30, think he’d done everything, because victories are painfully earned in his endurance profession.
In previous Dakars, for instance, he’s suffered a fractured wrist and elbow, food poisoning, agony from a thorn stuck in a muscle in his arm and more from a broken leg that was still healing.
He’d even had a bee stinging him inside his racing helmet, which he was better positioned to cope with than most as his main hobby outside bike racing happens to be, er, beekeeping on his Victorian farm.
But rather than being a closing chapter for ‘Sanders of the Desert’, who’s been a serial off-road winner since taking the world junior FIM title as a 20-year-old, Dakar could yet be the platform for him to win a senior global crown in this year’s five-race FIM world rally-raid championship.
No Australian has won that title in its brief existence but Sanders has now won two of the races – last year’s rally of Morocco and now Dakar – back-to-back and such was the dominant way the Red Bull KTM rider became the first since Marc Coma 16 years ago to lead the Dakar from gun to tape that he looks unstoppable.
But that’s all he ever really wanted since he began bombing around the family farm and neighbouring countryside on bikes that got gradually more powerful over the years. These days, he toddles round on a tractor there for the quiet life.
That nickname? He got it because of an unfortunate childhood habit of throwing up after eating too much and overdosing on milk.
“Someone would say ‘he’s chucked up again… he’s Chuck’ and it stuck,” he’s previously explained.
“It’s what my parents called me, then what all my friends and teachers would call me – Chuck. When I was a teenager, I even asked my mum to change my name officially to Chuck! But she said no.”
Good decision, mum. Everyone knows her boy now, anyway – and the only ones feeling sick will doubtless be Chucky’s distant pursuers.
