Saint-Petersburg Urban Race
city adventure race	4 -5 June 2005

www.UrbanRace.ru	

The great urban adventures are coming…

Just at the beginning of summer, 4-5 June 2005, Saint-Petersburg for the second time will be hosting the largest scaled Russia’s Saint-Petersburg Urban Race. Some hundreds of multisporters will cross the starting line to complete a long course across all city areas and prove one more time that urban events are sometimes ever harder than natural ones. 
Teams of two will be for as long as almost day and night face-to-face to the city. The course depending on a class will be 60 to 120 km long, with legs along all kind of sceneries like streets and passes, rivers and canals, architectural ensembles, newly built residential areas, industrial sites and forest parks. Teams are supposed to cover the whole course of some successive legs of running, riding bikes and paddling kayaks. On their way there will also be encountered some rope legs, that is bridges, abseils from high buildings, overhanging ascents and a number of other extreme tasks. Contestants the whole event will have to rely only on themselves. Any support crews are strongly disallowed by the race rules.
Saint-Petersburg Urban Race took place for the first time on 5-6 June 2004. Over 200 multisporters have then crossed the starting line. The "simple" class was offered an 80 km long course while total length of legs for "advanced" was as many as 140 km. Altogether there have been 50 checkpoints in various areas of Saint-Petersburg. Contestants were to complete all of them with city map marked with the course and description of checkpoints. A number of checkpoints were placed in absolutely non-trivial areas, e.g. one of the checkpoints sheltered in a polar bear cage of the city Zoo, making contestants climb up an upright stone wall. Uralskij bridge across the Smolenka river, where teams were supposed to go waist-deep to check.
Sometimes on the course contestants needed to complete some rope legs. For example, they were required to ascend up to a checkpoint on top of an old power line support structure nearby Akademicheskaya metro station. To complete another checkpoint on Zheni Yegorovoj street meant a rope descending from the roof of a 15-storey domestic building. This year’s event seems to be no less difficult and exciting.
Adventure races are traditionally classified to «natural» and urban ones. The former have been under way in Russia for the five last years. Red Fox Adventure Race is one of best-known summer multi-sport events. That’s some last years` tendency to organize adventure races in large urban areas. The most popular urban races abroad are City Challenge Cup (Scandinavia) and Wild Onion Cup  (USA). The history of Russian city adventure races started in June 2004.
Saint-Petersburg Urban Race is organized by a initiative group known by its projects «The Saint-Petersburg PhotoCross» (www.photocross.spb.ru) and «Bubble Baba Challenge» (annual swimming on inflatable dolls contest down rapids on river Vuoksa; www.bbch.ru). 

For detailed information please refer to:
Аlexey Yavich, the race director
Mobile: +7 (812) 957-8189
E-mail: info@urbanrace.spb.ru 
ICQ: 5-472-627
Web: www.urbanrace.ru