DUBAI, 28 December — Shihab Alireza, a Saudi national working for Saudi Aramco as an aircraft pilot, becomes the first Saudi national to successfully completed the adventurous UAE Desert Challenge on a motorcycle.

As part of a two-man team sponsored by United Yousef M. Naghi Electronics, Meireles, MATCO and Sprite, Shihab was one of only 24 competitors out of a starting group of 99 riders to complete all four days of the race. He was also able to place 3rd in his class, a remarkable feat considering this was the first World Championship level race he’d entered.

The UAE Desert Challenge is considered one of the most difficult and competitive events in the series. Most of the 2400-kilometer long race takes place in the Rub-Al-Khali desert, one of the most inhospitable places on earth and home to 700-foot tall dunes, rough salt flats, and scorching heat.

The competition is especially fierce since this is the final round of the series and final point standings in this race determine overall standings for the season. Many of the professional and factory teams such as BMW, Honda, and KTM use this event to debut their latest prototypes and test them in preparation for the famous Paris-Dakar Rally. This year, 200 competitors and 650-service crew from over 30 nations converged to participate in the event.

Shihab and his team worked very hard to achieve this success. It took several months to design and order motorbikes for the event, test them and modify them, register, get visas and licenses, organize support, transportation and logistics. Every weekend Shihab and his teammate Martin Camp, of Lucent Technologies, would ride several hundred kilometers in the desert around the Eastern Province and camp out during the hot summer nights to acclimate and get used to pushing themselves mentally and physically.

The first day of the rally began on Oct. 30, in downtown Abu Dhabi. The stage was 580 kilometers long and was considered a "warm up" stage of mostly fast off road sand tracks and dirt roads. Shihab and Martin finished the day lying around 35th in the standings, unfortunately on the way back to the camp site Martin crashed and was unable to complete the remainder of the rally.

Days two and three took place in the Rub Al-Khali. They were considered the most difficult days where the most competitors would drop out either due to heat exhaustion, mechanical failure, navigational error, crashing out or quitting.

To say it was brutal is an understatement. Those two days covered 1200 kilometers through the heart of the Rub Al-Khali. Towering red dunes, deep soft sand, and punishing heat in the low 40’s (centigrade) would conspire to eliminate over half the riders from the race. It was difficult and exhausting for the competitors to keep going.

In fact during those two days Shihab managed to get lost, then get stuck, then run out of fuel, and then ride 80 kilometers in the dark without a headlight while he navigated off of a road book and GPS while another contestant with a headlight but a broken navigation system lit up the way for both of them!

In spite of all these setbacks Shihab was steadily gaining ground in the race. One of the highlights of the race for the team was when he was able to pass 30 contestants during a particularly difficult 50-kilometer stretch of the race. The fourth and final day of the race was a 500km sprint back to the Polo club in Dubai from the rally’s campsite. It consisted of fast sand highways and dirt roads similar to the first day. When Shihab crossed the finish line he discovered that of the original 99 riders only 24 had managed to complete all 4 days of the rally.

He was also surprised to learn that he had finished third in his class. Despite receiving a medal for finishing the event Shihab stated "After all the effort, money and time that had gone into making our dream of participating in a rally a reality, I found the simple medal I was awarded for finishing to mean so little.

It was the profound sense of satisfaction in overcoming steep odds, of pushing through physical and mental barriers, of hanging on and not giving up… that was the trophy I had been seeking and which I found."