HARADH: Local driver Yazeed Al Rajhi took advantage of a miserable stage by South Africa’s Henk Lategan to grab the Dakar Rally lead in the Saudi Arabia desert on Tuesday.
Lategan led the Dakar for the past week, but errors and bad luck on the 357-kilometer ninth stage from Riyadh south-east to Haradh turned his overall lead of more than five minutes over Al Rajhi into a potentially decisive seven-minute deficit.
The rally has effectively two days and 400 kilometers remaining in the dunes of the Empty Quarter. The last day, Friday, is a ceremonial drive to the finish line in Shubaytah.
Al Rajhi, like Lategan, has never won the Dakar. This is the Saudi’s 11th attempt with a best finish of third in 2022. He’d been lying second since last Wednesday. The title race appears to be between only them.
Third-placed Mattias Ekström of Sweden and five-time champion Nasser Al-Attiyah of Qatar were about 25 minutes behind.

“It’s a bit of disaster to be honest,” Lategan said. “About 13 kilometers in we got lost. We thought we missed the waypoint but we actually had it. When we got lost we got one puncture and then toward the end we got another one and the wheel is actually flat. So, it was a messy, messy, messy day for us but it’s not the end of the world, we’re still in it.”
Lategan and navigator Brett Cummings were 11th on the stage and Al Rajhi and Timo Gottschalk third.
“We did a great job like we planned to,” Al Rajhi said. “We pushed well. We enjoyed it, that’s the most important. I hope everything goes well the next two or three days to win the Dakar ... I will fight to win. It won’t be easy.”
Al-Attiyah won the stage ahead of Belgium’s Guillaume de Mévius in under three hours to rise to one minute off third place overall.
His 49th car stage win, and first in the Dakar for Romanian manufacturer Dacia, lifted him to only one behind the record jointly held by Finland’s Ari Vatanen and France’s Stephane Peterhansel.
Sanders cushions motorbike lead
Australian rider Daniel Sanders bolstered his motorbike lead to nearly 15 minutes when closest challenger, Spain’s Tosha Schareina, crashed early.
The back wheel of Schareina’s Honda hit a rock and sent him flying only 20 kilometers in. He resumed racing but the nearly four minutes he finished behind Sanders dropped him in the general standings.
Schareina’s teammate Adrien van Beveren of France remained third, more than 20 minutes behind, while Sanders’ KTM teammate Luciano Benavides of Argentina strengthened his position in fourth place by winning his second successive stage.
Benavides, thanks to collecting time bonuses of nearly five minutes by opening the way, beat Van Beveren by nearly two minutes, and repeated his win into Haradh two years ago. Sanders was third after leading until about 70 kilometers from the end.
“I only got lost a couple of times ... and lost a little bit of time,” Sanders said. “I could have pushed and made some more (time) but it’s not too bad.”

BERLIN: Bundesliga clubs across Germany may be forced to cover the costs of police at certain ‘high-risk’ games, after a German court upheld a ruling in the city state of Bremen.
The federal constitutional court on Tuesday dismissed an appeal by the German Football Leagues (DFL) against the practice of asking clubs to pay additional police costs in ‘high risk’ games.
In 2015, the government in the state of Bremen handed club Werder Bremen a bill of around 400,000 euros ($410,100) relating to the home derby match with neighboring Hamburg.
The DFL has waged a 10-year legal battle to have the fine overturned but suffered a series of legal defeats.
On Tuesday the Karlsruhe-based court dismissed the DFL’s claim that the practice was unconstitutional.
While the ruling only applies to Bremen, one of Germany’s 16 federal states, the decision is likely to have wide-ranging impacts, with other state governments considering following suit.
Police maintain a presence at matches in the professional leagues but around 50 games per year, usually derby fixtures or those with long-standing rivalries, are deemed higher risk.
Bremen’s regional interior minister Ulrich Maeurer welcomed the decision and revealed the state had already billed Werder Bremen around two million euros over the past decade.
Recognizing how the additional costs will cause a burden for clubs, Maeurer floated the idea of a DFL fund for police costs, an idea the governing body has rejected.
The DFL argued areas outside stadiums were the responsibility of the state and should be covered by tax revenue.
The German FA (DFB) on Tuesday said the ruling was “incorrect,” saying it made clubs “liable for security costs in public areas over which they have no control.”
Covering police costs could “threaten the existence” of smaller clubs, the DFB said, adding the ruling “does not improve fan security at all.”
Tuesday’s decision was also criticized by fan groups.
In a statement, fan organization ‘Unsere Kurve’ said it was “shocked” at the decision and said German football contributed around 1.6 billion euros per season in tax revenue.
Spokesperson Thomas Kessen said the organizers of the Oktoberfest, Cologne Carnival and Berlin’s New Years Eve celebrations should now pay police costs, “even if is doubtful whether we as a society would want this.”