INTERVIEW: Willem Avenant aims to have “the best time of my life” at first Dakar Rally

Willem Avenant has a dream: race the Dakar Rally. Of course, this is easier said than done.

The road to the world’s most iconic rally raid is difficult and perhaps convoluted due to the hoops and requirements that one must fulfill to be accepted by the Amaury Sport Organisation. Ever meticulous, Avenant resolved to not only qualify but unravel the twists and turns, or “decoding” it, so that anyone who wants to take part can have a coherent roadmap to use for reference.

After becoming one of the riders accepted for the 2025 Dakar Rally, Avenant spoke with The Checkered Flag last Friday about his efforts and his Decoding Dakar series.

Dreaming of Dakar

Avenant grew up following the Paris–Dakar Rally in South Africa. Like many others, this sparked a desire to race it himself. Into his adult years, he dabbled in various rallies in his home country as well as North America such as the Kalahari Rally in South Africa and the Sonora Rally. In 2023, he was named the competition director for the Baja Rally, which like Sonora is a cross-country rally in Mexico that many Dakar-bound Americans have used for training.

Besides racing, he specialises in navigation. He honed his skills during the COVID-19 pandemic by working on developing roadbooks before becoming an instructor for navigation schools and camps.

As Avenant continued to build up his experience, his confidence to pursue the Dakar grew until it culminated in him laying the groundwork for a run in 2025. Even with the 2025 race months away and his acceptance letter from the ASO in hand, however, he had to admit that it actually becoming reality still surprises him on occasion.

“Some days I still have to pinch myself a little bit,” Avenant started. “A lot of people decide in their middle age, they want to do Dakar. For me, it’s been like a childhood dream, literally since I can remember, since six years old. It’s like, ‘I want to do that.’ In the last fifteen years, ever since I’ve been a grown up, it’s always formed part of my life. I was like, ‘Okay, if I want to do this, I actually have to get going. I actually have to do it. It’s not just going to happen.’

“Having that acceptance letter, and I’m sure many other people would agree that when you get that feeling of elation, is crazy. I was like, ‘Wow, I’m going,’ and like you said, ‘It’s four months, dude.’ I’m like, ‘Huh?'”

Registration for the 2025 Dakar opened in May while the ASO began giving their thumbs up—or down—in mid-July. Others besides Avenant who got the former include Justin Gerlach, who previously spoke with TCF about striving to make the 2024 race but was rejected, and fellow South African Dwain Barnard. While riders initially turned down can change the organisers’ minds with a strong performance in rallies after July, the two months from applying to the first wave of responses are a tense wait.

“I was definitely nervous to get accepted,” he noted. “There were those nightmares of, ‘What am I going to do if I don’t get accepted?’ I didn’t know that I was going to 100% get accepted. I think none of us knows. But hearing that news, getting that letter was definitely a big relief because then it changed the narrative from ‘Will or can Willem get to Dakar?’ to ‘Willem is going to Dakar’. That helped me mentally a lot.”

Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge

“The drops were so intense that at some point, I was like, ‘When does this stop? It feels like all that’s happening is I’m going down. When am I going up?'”

– Willem Avenant

With 2025 circled on his calendar, Avenant opened talks with the ASO to glean information on what he had to do to qualify. One of the ‘easy’ ways to make it was to enter a World Rally-Raid Championship event and finish, and the org suggested for him to check out the Abu Dhabi Desert Challenge in February.

Competing on a Husqvarna FR 450 for HT Rally Raid, he finished twenty-fifth overall in the Rally2 class.

“I consulted with the ASO all along the way and with my team and I was like, ‘Okay, if we were to paint the perfect picture, how would that look? What steps should I follow?’,” he said. “I went to Abu Dhabi. That was on recommendation of the ASO and recommendation of the team being like, ‘Okay, you need to do this if you want to be accepted.’ I am eternally grateful that I went, because looking at the route, a lot of the riding we’re going to do in the Empty Quarter is going to be in the same area. It’ll be on the Saudi side, but the same area of the desert.”

The ADDC is the second round of the W2RC, held a month after the season-opening Dakar Rally. It is one of three desert rallies on the schedule alongside the Dakar in Saudi Arabia and the season-ending Rallye du Maroc in Morocco. Given the shared profiles, it was a sensible choice for those hoping to race the Dakar to try out. Gerlach, Damien Bataller, Nerimantas Jucius, Iván Merichal, Mykolas Paulavičius, and Gediminas Satkus were also among those who came to Abu Dhabi looking for a 2025 Dakar ticket and succeeded.

Avenant was no stranger to desert races given the Sonora and Baja Rallies—the former an ex-W2RC round—are held in such environments. Well aware that Abu Dhabi offers “100% sand and dunes,” he “trained for it, I prepared for it very specifically, and I was ready for it.” Once he was actually racing, however, all of that went out the window.

“No amount of training can prepare you for the vastness of the Empty Quarter. It is insane. Like, there is nothing,” he revealed. “I think that was the biggest thing for me. You come over a dune and you come over a dune and you come over a dune and every time, it’s literally an ocean of sand and there’s nothing. There’s not a town, there’s no people, there’s not even camels. It was really nice to know that the organisation knows where you are at all times, but at the same time, I wish I had time to stop and take photos and be like, ‘Wow, I’m here.’ The only negative thing of Abu Dhabi is I never got time to take pictures.

“It is a sea of sand. Abu Dhabi specifically, the racing there is famous for being dangerous for two reasons. Number one, the drops of the dunes are pretty severe, and they never stop. After day four, the drops were so intense that at some point, I was like, ‘When does this stop? It feels like all that’s happening is I’m going down. When am I going up?’ The blind dunes are insane in Abu Dhabi.

“The other thing in Abu Dhabi that was interesting is that, and I’ve been cautioned before I went so I knew what to expect, but the sand consistency in Abu Dhabi changes constantly. You have red sand, white sand, yellow sand, and they all work differently. You would go through the different types of sand at least two or three times a day, so you could never really trust the bike or the sand because it kept on changing underneath you. That was interesting. Very, very interesting, but honestly, I really loved it. I really enjoyed getting to know and understand a little bit more about racing in the Middle East.”

Being a World Championship race, the ADDC is far grander and robust than anything Avenant had seen in his seven-plus years of rally riding. This is to be expected out of an event co-sanctioned by the FIM and FIA, but it can still be quite a culture shock.

“I’ve raced rallies since 2017 all over the world, but I’ve never done a World Rally-Raid Championship round,” Avenant began. “It was an eye-opener from the level of competition. The level of competition was so high and so serious. One of the things that was a big takeaway for me from Abu Dhabi was that anybody involved in the organisation would refer to any non-FIM or non-World Rally-Raid Championship race as an amateur rally, and being at these events, I see why. I understand why there’s such a big difference in approach.

“In Abu Dhabi, if you crashed, you had an air ambulance with two advanced life support doctors, not medics, by your side within twelve minutes. In many cases, the organisation would know that you’ve crashed before you knew you crashed because of all the instruments on the bike. To put that in perspective, in New York, it would take an ambulance or a 911 call fifteen minutes to get to you, and in London, it’s longer. Also with airbags, it allows people to push much, much harder.”

Making it all the more unusual, Avenant found himself surrounded by riders who do not exactly share the same background or goals as him. Most competitors will be at a W2RC race in order to compete for the title, which made Avenant feel like a bit of an anomaly because, as he stressed, “I am not a professional racer but I’m also not an amateur. There’s no man’s land in this grey area between a professional and an amateur.”

This was fine at most rallies he does, where racers are competitive but still have a good time with their peers. This was not the case for the highest echelon of rally raid.

“That put me in a weird position because I wasn’t in Abu Dhabi to race. I was in Abu Dhabi to finish and to qualify,” he explained. “One of my team-mates was there to podium. He’s like, ‘I’m here to podium. I will accept the risks.’ I wouldn’t. I have a wife, I have a family, I have a daughter. I don’t care about the podium. I care about the process and about finishing. I think the biggest difference for me between FIM and any other race was that in that case, you’re in the minority. If you go to any other race, we’re all there for the camaraderie, we’re all there for the experience of rally, whereas if you’re in a World Rally-Raid Championship round, you’re there to compete. It’s a question of, ‘Why are you here if you’re not willing to push the limits?’

“That was an eye-opener for me, but at the same time, I learned so much. There’s so much collective experience at these races. There are people that’ve been racing twenty years. One of my team-mates (Kees Koolen) has completed Dakar in every conceivable category—car, bike, quad, side-by-side, and truck. When you get to spend time with somebody like that, just for experience’s sake, it was a very, very interesting experience, not something I was used to, but I’m also glad that I did because now I have a much better frame of reference for Dakar.”

Although a Dakar trip was on the line, he emphasised that he never felt pressed into pushing himself. A high finish certainly would have been welcome, but all he really needed to do was keep his head down, avoid mistakes, and reach the finish. The second item on that list was nulled when he was slapped with a penalty early on, but he otherwise achieved what he hoped.

Even if that meant not riding to his fullest potential, regardless of what others seemed to suggest to him. After finishing thirty-eighth in class in the Prologue, his best stage finish was a twenty-ninth on three occasions in Stages #2, #4, and #5 while the first and third legs saw him place thirty-second and thirty-third, respectively. While nowhere near the leaders, he still reached the end, something that could not be said for nine of his classmates, and within reasonable margin.

“Personally, I’m very good at deciding on a goal and sticking to it,” he commented. “I would say that I had ridden on purpose well below my capabilities because I wanted to finish and not get injured. My personal goals for Abu Dhabi were to finish without penalties which, unfortunately, in the very first speed zone, I got a one-minute penalty because I didn’t hear the ERTF buzzer. That shot that, but I got no waypoint penalties or anything else, so that was the first thing.

“The second thing was to not crash. I did have one crash where I literally just lost concentration for five seconds, which really highlights how dangerous the riding in the dunes are. Literally over five days, I lost concentration for five seconds. I know exactly why I crashed. That was how intense it was that you couldn’t stop focusing. At some point during the race, there was a conversation because again, I consulted the ASO and was like, ‘Listen guys, what’s the deal at Abu Dhabi? Do I just have to finish or do I have to finish well?’ They were like, ‘You have to finish.’ In the middle of the race, listening to other riders, everybody’s talking about speed and pace.

“While I didn’t feel pressure, I went into the race with the mindset that all I have to do is finish. I got there and everybody’s like, ‘Ooh, you have to go faster. You have to go faster.’ At that point, I did feel a little bit anxious because I was like, ‘I thought we just have to finish and now you’re telling me I have to go faster? Why?’

“At that point, I decided to stick to my plan. Because of racing through the years, I’ve learned to stick to my plan rather than listening to other people, but there was definitely not pressure as much as being a little bit anxious because I was worried that I might not ‘go fast enough.'”

He speculates that the ADDC has a time limit for competitors to complete a stage, unlike most rallies where one simply needed to finish it even if they were hours behind everyone else, because “if you cannot make it in the max time, you’re not going to be able to do Dakar.” This, which he described as a “natural selector” to weed out those who are too slow, was critical but not an issue for him as his times were often “one to two hours before the cutoff.”

The ASO also awards bonus points to riders qualifying for Dakar if they finish within 150% of the fastest time, though he had little incentive to push since he had accumulated plenty of points from non-W2RC rallies.

“I tried to drown out the noise, which was difficult because as I said, the level of competition was pretty high,” he stated. “A lot of people were gunning for it. A lot of people were pushing for that. For me, because I had a lot of points from other races, I was okay just finishing.”

Besides racing, Abu Dhabi was a chance for him to meet and interact with Emirati rally fans, whom he had high praise for.

“That was amazing, learning about the culture, understanding a little bit more about how the United Arab Emirates work, and meeting local people there,” Avenant commented. “They were so friendly and so happy to just have people there that it was a really special experience.

“I wasn’t surprised by the dunes. Let’s say that it wasn’t the dunes that impressed me, it was also the people and the culture that really, really impressed me. It was really fun.”

Decoding Dakar

If it wasn’t already obvious, one does not simply walk into Saudi Arabia for the Dakar Rally. While there might be some people who decide on a whim to try it and succeed, those stories are rare and grow scarcer as the ASO continually updates their standards.

Like Avenant with the ADDC and other races under his belt, riders hoping to enter the Dakar enter various rallies to build up their credentials. For 2024, the ASO introduced a system that awards points to those who finish certain races; for example, completing the ADDC and any of the other W2RC rounds since July 2022 earns you twelve points as does the Sonora Rally, while the Baja Rally would net four points as a non-W2RC desert rally spanning at least five days. As Avenant mentioned, bonus points are also handed out for times within 150% of the fastest bike.

Having the most points does not guarantee a spot on the Dakar grid because the ASO also takes into account the qualifications that an applicant lists on their dossier du sélection, though more points obviously does help. Gerlach told TCF the dossier entails questions like asking about the rider’s experience and their motivations.

Avenant mentioned the process of actually applying is “not too difficult,” and is grateful for the ASO’s competitor relations officer Ronan Valverde for guiding him through it.

“I met him in Mexico, we spoke, and I really felt that they really take care in helping you through the process by making it very transparent as to what you need to do,” he commented. “I do think that initially, it feels a bit messy, and then as the process evolves, it gets easier.”

Even though it’s fairly straightforward, Avenant added he’d welcome a refresh to the online registration, branching it off into two sites for newcomers and returning riders.

“That would, I think, declutter a lot of it. But on balance, the ASO I think do a really good job at putting it in place,” opined Avenant. “In all fairness, Dakar’s been running since 1979 or ’78, they’re like the gold standard in the process. I don’t think that I can really criticise it that much, but I would say that a separate portal for Dakar first-timers might be a good idea.”

While signing up is simple enough, the crux of Decoding Dakar is to make the journey itself easier to comprehend. After all, the points system might confuse those who read it the first time around, they might not know which bike or equipment is best to use, or even which race to enter.

Decoding Dakar is presented as a blog on his website, with posts that include discussing the 2025 route, how to obtain an FIM licence and the importance of goggles for riders. He also routinely posts videos and conducts interviews to spread the word. In a sense, it doubles as a diary detailing his own qualifying efforts.

Avenant intends to continue Decoding Dakar beyond 2025.

“I spoke to somebody who said for fifty people he knows who said they’re going to go to Dakar, two made it,” he started. “In my personal experience, that’s very similar. So many people tell me, ‘I’m going to do Dakar,’ and then they don’t. That was very important for me, that when I say I’m going to go and do Dakar, and that’s where the pressure from qualifying came in, I wanted it to be, ‘Yes, I’m going.’

“The legacy of what I want to achieve with Decoding Dakar is, after Decoding Dakar, we will have a website running. That website, I would like to become the go-to place for people preparing for Dakar. The way that I put it on my website is that it would be a roadmap, so if you are really serious, like truly serious about Dakar, these are the steps to follow, this is how much it will cost you, and this is how you go about it. It would kind of just be like putting what I’m documenting this year into an easy, digestible format that people can just go to and at a glance, see the steps, see the timelines, and hopefully that will help other riders get there. That’s my goal. That’s what I want to achieve this year.”

The 2025 Dakar Rally

“If I’m not going to have fun, there’s no point in doing it. Number one is to have the best time of my life while making sure that I finish.”

– Willem Avenant

Scheduled for 3–17 January 2025, the 47th Dakar Rally will be the sixth in Saudi Arabia. Competing in the same country for so long will naturally grow stale, and various racers including Avenant have expressed their interest in having it cross borders. Unfortunately, the Dakar will have to wait a while as the ASO’s Saudi contract runs through 2029 and plans to expand beyond the country yet to bear fruit.

In the meantime, the ASO made various changes to the format to spice things up. Most of the new rules focus on pushing the competitor to the limit, heavily taking place in the Empty Quarter with multiple marathon stages including the return of the two-day, 950-kilometre Chrono Stage. The penultimate leg in particular piques Avenant’s interest.

“The biggest thing for me is the penultimate, second to last 480-kilometre dune stage,” said Avenant. “That keeps me up at night now, even already before I’m going. In Abu Dhabi, our stages were 250 to 280 kilometres and it was tough. It was really hard. Having been to Namibia, riding in Namibia, I can now say with 100% confidence, 480 Ks in the dunes is going to be an insane challenge on a good day.

“To do that, on the second to last stage of Dakar, when your bikes and your bodies are done, I get goosebumps just talking about it. I can’t not finish that stage. I think putting it on the second-to-last stage is one of those really scary things. In the past, it was a question of, you have to make it to the rest stage or a rest day, then after the rest day, you’re going to make it to the finish. That’s always been the Dakar recipe. Now, you have to make it through the rest stage, and then you have to make it through the second to last stage, and then you can finish. That’s really intimidating.”

The Chrono Stage is also something that he is “very excited” for. Introduced in 2024, it is more gruelling than the traditional marathon stage: drivers and riders cannot receive help from their teams, and they must stay overnight in camps with just the bare necessities like military rations and water before resuming the next morning. Avenant feels that with the Dakar stuck in Saudi Arabia for now, it is a step in the right direction for those yearning for the old days.

Other new features include cars and bikes racing on different courses for five stages for safety reasons, allowing them to start simultaneously, and the return of the mass start in which every vehicle begins the last stage at once. The former was experimented with as part of the 2024 Chrono Stage.

“I had wished that when I do Dakar, it can traverse borders again,” he continued. “I like Dakar to be a multi-country race, but I just realised that it’s not going to happen anytime soon, so I might as well do it. With it being a single country race, I think doing stuff like the Chrono Stage is going to put us back on the track of the Dakar of old, making people more equal, bringing it back to the roots. I think that this Chrono Stage, they’re talking about 950 kilometres over two days, it is going to be mixed terrain, it’s not going to be just dunes like it was last year. That stuff, all of the changes I’m excited about.

“I’m very excited about the split course on five stages with not having cars and trucks behind us. As the bikers would know, that’s your worst nightmares. Once those trucks catch you, it’s really, really a nightmare to ride. I think every biker really welcomes the changes of the split courses.”

“The mass start in the last stage, that’s going to be fun as well. I think that, again, throws us back into the Dakar of the 80s. That’ll also be super exciting.”

With such a challenging race on the horizon, Avenant will follow a similar gameplan to Abu Dhabi: finish the race. If that goes well and he decides to return in the future, he will start adding more goals like certain positions.

But for 2025, he is there to have a good time and do something that will be with him forever.

“I train people to go to Dakar,” he began. “I train people how to navigate. I always say that I am not a trained motorcycle rider instructor, because I’m not. Half the time, I just survive on the bike. I’m not a qualified racer. What I know, I’ve learned by riding bikes. That’s very different to somebody, especially in the U.S., that grows up desert racing their whole life.

“That’s part of why I love rally. You can have an edge if you can navigate. With navigation, that is my forte and I’ve trained and taught many people that had finished Dakar who did their first roadbooks with me, and I’ve never gone. I think it’s very important that finishing is one of those things to just cement me in my position as somebody that trains people. I want to have Dakar behind my name, but more so, it’s a lifelong journey for me.

“For me, it is to have fun. As everybody that’s reading this would know, it’s my life savings. It’s everything that I’ve worked for. If I’m not going to have fun, there’s no point in doing it. Number one is to have the best time of my life while making sure that I finish.

“Wherever I finish, I finish. I’ve seen so many people’s Dakars being destroyed by having an idea, thinking they should be top seventy or top eighty or top fifty or top thirty, it doesn’t matter, and then they get to Dakar and they’re not close to where they thought they were going to be. I’ve witnessed firsthand how that destroyed Dakars for friends of mine where they just didn’t enjoy it because they were so upset by their position.

“I think that for this year, it’s to finish. If I go back, you know, then I would have a reference if I finish top fifty or top hundred or top eighty, it doesn’t matter. I know going back that, ‘Okay, now I know what bracket I fall in under Dakar terms,’ and then I can have a clearly defined goal of saying, ‘Okay, if I finish top eighty, next one I want to finish top seventy.’

“But for my first Dakar, it’s to enjoy it and to make lifelong memories.”

Fundraising

Although his ticket to Dakar is punched, Avenant is not guaranteed to start the race just yet. Non-factory riders like him are on the hook for a myriad of expenses to afford the trip such as lodging, travel, and fees that go to the team. Additional down payments must also be sent to the ASO in September and October.

Avenant, along with others who have chatted with TCF about their Dakar débuts like Gerlach and Ace Nilson, project these costs can go over USD$100,000 (€90,275).

“You can certainly do it for cheaper. However, because I have one shot at it, I decided to play the game of minimising my risk of not finishing,” Avenant explained. “For me, that was very important because I want to make sure that I’ve done everything possible so that if I don’t finish, that’s not because of something that was in my control.

“It sounds like a lot of money and it’s not something that makes sense. People would be like, ‘How can you spend $100,000 on a race?’ It doesn’t, but like with anything that is a passion or a drive, it doesn’t make sense [yet] it’s something that is part of you that you just have to do. People spend money on other things that sometimes don’t make sense. Realistically, I’m planning to cover it through savings but also fundraising. There were a lot of added expenses and stuff that I didn’t necessarily think about. Abu Dhabi, I did not budget for because I had believed that I had enough money to cover everything, and then Abu Dhabi came up and so they were like, ‘Okay, you should do Abu Dhabi.’ I was like, ‘Okay, if they’re telling me to do it, I should do it.’ But at the same time, I didn’t plan for that in my budget.”

Like many of his colleagues, Avenant launched a GoFundMe to help raise funds. As of this interview’s publication, it has raised almost $6,000. While corporate sponsorship is more than appreciated, the likelihood of attracting one is “quite small” for amateurs, making crowdfunding the primary avenue.

He also intends to sell t-shirts and even organise a Dakar quiz competition, the latter offering prizes “in excess of $10,000” consisting of “really high-end motorcycle products.

“You will buy a ticket to compete in the event, and the event would be normal Dakar questions and trivia, but also then there would be predictions along Dakar. A simple example is, ‘What do you think what stage is going to be the most difficult for me? What stage do you think I’m going to enjoy the most? What is going to be the maximum temperature during Dakar this year? What’s going to be the toughest stage?’ All of that stuff, we will roll into it and we’ll make it an interactive thing where people can take part throughout Dakar. And then after that, I will draw the winner.

“Those are the fundraising efforts at the moment. Anybody that’s reading this, if they can support me, literally every single dollar helps everyone.”

Interview on YouTube