Off-Road Warrior

For Dakar Rally Champion Toby Price There’s No Thrill Without Fear. Use His Lessons to Redefine Your Limits 

- Ben Jhoty

Toby Price tosses a pair of crutches on the ground as he lowers himself onto the seat of a picnic table at a café in inner Sydney. He’s recovering from a broken leg suffered in this year’s Dakar Rally.

Injuries are for Price what crowded commutes or electricity bills are for you and me: a fact of life. He’s got a fixed nail and five screws in his leg to go along with the eight screws and three bits of rod in his vertebrae. “I can literally say I’ve got my head screwed on,” he jokes.

Does he though? You have to wonder about a bloke who’s 30 years old and had 29 broken bones.

Price doesn’t know a lot about the accident that led to this latest injury. It was day 4 of this year’s Dakar and Price was pushing hard to make up the seven minutes he’d been told he was trailing by. “I thought seven minutes is a little too much to be giving away in one day so I started riding at the 95 per cent mark,” he says. He remembers gunning down into a dried-up riverbed, feeling a hard, dull thud and then sailing through the air. And that’s it. He woke up the next day in hospital. “I had a very good head knock, good concussion, broken femur and some good pain medication,” says Price, as if he’s reeling off last night’s lotto numbers.

It’s not the first time Price has woken up in hospital. You hope it’ll be the last but you never know. None of us do if we’re honest. “There’s a risk involved in anything you do,” says Price. “Driving to work everyday is risky.”

But that doesn’t stop you from pulling out of your garage each morning and fear won’t stop Price from riding at 95 or even 100 percent next time he feels the need. “The most enjoyable things are always on the other side of fear,” he says. “We only have a short life. You’ve got to make it count.”