The organizers of the World Team Challenge say Citrus County has an ideal mixture of terrain for the corporate teams to race.
By DAWN REISS
Published December 4, 2005
Some of the better known winners of CBS' hit shows Survivor and Amazing Race are coming to Citrus County this week as part of an international corporate adventure challenge that donates money to charity.
The curly haired Survivor: Africa winner, Ethan Zohn; Tina Wesson, winner of Survivor: The Australian Outback in spring 2001; Burton Roberts, the 14th survivor voted off in the Pearl Island series; and Brennan Swain, who wo n Amazing Race 1 , will be celebrity competitors in World Team Challenge, a two-day adventure race event on Friday and Saturday, said John Hazan, World Team Challenge Course director.
World Team Challenge, an outdoor adventure Super Bowl of sorts, is run by Challenger World, an international company based in London that develops corporate team building competitions. Companies pay Challenger World to enter five- to seven-person teams to compete in international events, Hazan said.
"It is an intelligent sport mixture of mind, body and spirit," Hazan said. "It's adventure racing style with orienteering, canoeing and mountain biking. Within these challenges there are a lot of levels of strategy. It's a lot more than purely running from point A to point B."
A total of 27 teams, the top finishers from four "feeder" events - the Microsoft UK Challenge, the Cisco City Challenge held in London, the Cisco Europe Challenge held in Belgium and a U.S. Challenge held in Asheville, N.C., in October - will compete, Challenger World public relations manager Kate Bickford wrote in an e-mail.
The Survivor/Amazing Race celebrity participants are from a team that St. Jude Children's Research Hospital entered at the U.S. Challenge. International corporate teams competing in Citrus will include Airbus (UK), Scania (Sweden), Hewlett Packard (Spain), Accenture (UK), Cisco Systems (USA) IBM (Germany), Vodafone (Hungary) and Washington Group International (USA).
The founder of Challenger World is Mark Burnett, the Emmy-winning producer of Survivor and The Apprentice , said Mary Craven, Citrus County tourist development manager, who helped bring the event to Florida.
Money from the Challenge will be donated to Dreamflight, a charity that sends seriously ill children to Disney World, Hazan said. Hazan did not know how much money is expected to be raised.
The teams will be all male or coed. Each has four members and one alternate, Hazan said.
Competitors will register and check into the Plantation Inn on Thursday. Five stages that will last from two to five hours each will be held a different times and locations across Citrus County on Friday and Saturday.
Most locations and events are a secret. The only publicly known event will be at 8:15 p.m. Friday on the baseball fields at Whispering Pines Park in Inverness. Hazan said the locations and types of events are secret to make the race more exciting for the participants.
At an event held in Wales, the participants had to play a version of Monopoly. Participants accrued properties by visiting various locations. Each property was worth different amount depending on the terrain and the difficulty of the challenge: cycling, wading through water, running up a hill.
Craven and Hazan were unsure of the economic impact this event will have on Citrus County.
Hazan estimates that Challenger World is spending about $400,000 in lodging, course preparation and a television crew that will videotape the event and later released it to various international media markets, including OLN in the United States and ESPN in Europe, according to a World Team Challenge news release.
The Citrus County Tourist Development Council and Citrus County Economic Development Council are hosts of the event and have paid a combined total of $50,000, Craven said.
"The primary reason is not the immediate impact of having people stay here, but the marketing impact, the benefits of having this event filmed and broadcast all over the world," she said.
Challenger World selected Citrus after Craven met Andrew Finan, managing director of Challenger UK Ltd., at an International Adventure Travel Show in Chicago in January 2004, she said. Craven was promoting Citrus County in a booth when she met Finan.
Craven eventually gave Finan and Hazan an in-person overview of the county in April 2004.
They airboated on lakes and the Gulf, hiked through the Withlacoochee State Forest and flew over the county in a helicopter. The event was initially planned for October 2005. After last year's hurricanes, the event coordinators agreed to postpone it until December, after hurricane season ends.
Hazan, who designed the course with operations manager Mark Cunningham, said the lack of hills, the waterlogged land, and vast forest, combined with a strong selection of bike, canoe and other rental shops and hotels, make it an ideal location to compete.
"You might not think Citrus County has challenging terrain, but it does," Hazan said. "These teams are from all across the world and people are used to European terrain. This is nothing like what these guys have seen before."
