The biker Jean-Loup Lepan is 24 years old, the bib 76 and a targui tattooed on his left arm. Fred wears the Dakar logo on his right arm. Twenty years apart, father and son live the “human adventure” of rally-raid and perpetuate its legend.
“I have been immersed in the Dakar since I was very young: I was born in 1998, my father left for his first Dakar in 2002, and when you are a kid, you idolize your father”, says “the little one”, mustache and small hoops in the ear.
“I always said to myself that I would like to do it, I found this race a bit crazy and when I saw the images from Saudi Arabia (where the event was set up in 2020, editor’s note), it made me recalled the crazy stories that my father tells me every day, I really wanted to go there”, says the biker from the village of Embreville (Somme, north).
He took out a substantial bank loan, put his job as an education assistant aside to line up last year alongside Sam Sunderland, Ricky Brabec and other pundits he had only seen until then. ‘on TV”.
He finished 29th in motorcycles, a promising debut.
As in 2022, his father is on the trip for the 45th edition which started on Saturday, in order to be by his side, his tent pitched in the middle of the desert in the dusty ground near that of his son in a bivouac where he knows ” almost half of the people,” he says. “The Dakar atmosphere, the human adventure, is still there”, according to him.
– “Crazy welcome” –
Fred plunged into the Dakar fascinated by the Mauritanian desert, “it was the Dakar that made you dream”, the one launched by Thierry Sabine in 1978 and “that we watched on La Cinq, the adventure, something inaccessible “.
In this Dakar, the caravan went from bivouac to bivouac, installed in military airports, he remembers: “We might struggle to drive at night if we got lost, spend three days without seeing our assistance. We were all a bit in trunk-motorcycle mode”, specific category of today’s Dakar, only without assistance, says, inexhaustible, the one who has done nine Dakars and finished 20th, especially in 2005.
From Latin America, where the race relocated in 2009 for security reasons, Fred remembers “the crazy welcome”, “July 9th Avenue in Buenos Aires with a million people, we were accompanied by four police officers there were so many people!”
During his Dakars, “the motorcycles were more or less standing. Now it’s a big machine, more and more professionalized, there is a selection” according to the sports curriculum.
– Photos in full special –
The other selection is financial. Jean-Loup had to pay more than 15,000 euros for registration, to which are added 30,000 euros for the motorcycle and 22,000 for the services of an assistance, tell the Lepans.
So Fred supports Jean-Loup upstream to overcome these obstacles, from training to finding partners to warnings once morest the “complete frustrations of high-level sport”, which Jean-Loup covets.
He also supports him during the race: “I get up at the same time as him, I watch him leave in the morning, I do nothing, but I’m there for him and I know the pressure and the fear before the stage, it’s getting closer.”
It is also necessary to feed the Instagram account with videos and photos, for the family and for the sponsors. “Me, my wife gave me two or three disposable cameras and I stopped in the middle of the special when it was nice to do (some)”, says Fred.
Jean-Loup will not allow himself these deviations. He cherishes the hope of tickling the big names, even if, according to him, the Dakar, “it’s a competition for very few drivers, it’s an adventure for 99% of the others, you need the budget and then the audacity to get started, it takes a lot of time and training”.
Once he has taken up the challenge of his second Dakar, another awaits him: “I am going to work, to repay the dreams I lived with my father.”
