Good news: the Paris-Dakar has been cancelled this year. Unfortunately only one of many rallies involving motorbikes, cars, and trucks running through African countries, the Paris-Dakar has become somewhat infamous for reasons other than its disastrous ecological impact.

Since at least 1988, there have been many local victims of the race, mostly African children imprudent enough to want to cross the roads of their villages when the rally’s trucks where coming through. The official counts of local victims are probably under the actual numbers: victims other than rally drivers are rarely even named.

The speeches of rally organisers and participants are equally sickening, as they pretend  (with little evidence to show except for a ridiculous number of water pumps randomly given to villages) to have an enormous positive impact on the countries whose livestock they destroy probably even more frequently than they kill children on the roads.

It comes rather as a joy, then, that the 2008 edition of the rally has been cancelled. Interestingly enough, the self-styled ‘adventurers’ have not ceded out of a realisation of the damage they wreck on their passage, but rather out of fear of an Al-Qaeda retaliation.

In French: a great video of the fictitious “Dakar-Paris” rally, where African racers explain how the death of a few European boys under their wheels shouldn’t get in the way of “the sport”...