Her head cradled in a crash helmet, Dania Akeel’s voice crackles throughthe intercom above the roar of the engine and the rush of wind through thewindowless cabin of her rugged, black UTV.
“We’re so lucky,” Akeel tells CNN Sport. “I mean, look at this place, it’sso beautiful.”
The Saudi beauty grasps the wheel, deftly navigating the vehicle past rocksand Joshua trees along a winding dirt track, blasting it past the rustingshell of a long-abandoned pick-up across the dry sand.
“We get to do this for a living, right?” continues 34-year-old Akeel,reflecting on her chosen profession as she prepares for her second tilt atthe infamous Dakar Rally, one of the world’s longest and most demandingendurance races.
Barely over two years ago, the Jeddah-born athlete had never even triedthis type of racing. Not only that, Akeel also hails from a country inwhich women have only been allowed to drive on public roads since 2018.
The Dakar
‘The Dakar’ began life in 1978 as the Paris-Dakar Rally. It ran annuallyfrom France to Senegal until 2007 but when the 2008 event was cancelled dueto security concerns, the rally was transplanted across the Atlantic, andran through South America until 2020, when it moved again, to Saudi Arabia.
Today there are five major vehicle categories in the rally: cars,motorbikes, trucks, UTVs and quad bikes.
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Akeel’s interest in motor vehicles goes back much farther than the arrivalof this world-famous rally in her home country.
“I had a big interest in cars when I was younger,” she tells CNN. “Itwasn’t necessarily cars, actually, it was anything that could that I coulddrive and that included bicycles.
“You know, I just love movement. I love being outdoors. I just love how itfelt to communicate to the machine, to get it to go from A to B.”
Her childhood was spent trying all kinds of different modes of transport.
“I started driving things like go karts at a young age, and things likequad bikes,” she explains. “When I was a bit older, I drove two wheeleddirt bikes.