Tosha: “When I was in the air, I saw a tree out of the corner of my eye and said, ‘Hmm, don’t hit the tree.’ The airbag will save us.”

“Our mission today was to win. We knew we were going to be fifth. We were in a very good position to attack, so we did that.” Tosha Chalayna said as she arrived at the AlUla bivouac as the new winner of the third stage of the 2026 Dakar. This allowed him to take an important step forward in the overall standings to fully participate in the battle to win the world’s toughest race. Shalayna is in second place, 1 minute 07 seconds behind the leader Saunders.However, while the track has to be opened for the first half of tomorrow’s marathon stage, it will have to be opened for tomorrow’s stage 4 without any mechanical support from the team at the end of the special. I might have been able to reach it if I had made more cuts or been in the lead in the overall standings, but I was unable to reach it due to a very dangerous and strong fall, and I was able to escape safely from there.

“The mission was to win, and at this stage it was also the mission to be the leader. But, well, the crash made it a little bit more complicated for me, and it dusted me up a little bit, but, well, that’s no excuse, because at the end of the day it’s all pilots’ problems.”commented.

“When it comes to fall, it’s all about live shows. I was pushing it, but it felt good, but something seemed to have happened, so I landed right next to the shade of a tree, and there were rocks, roots, and something not very nice, and before I knew it, it was already up in the air. But hey, it’s a live thing.”he said that the Spanish media present at Dakar 2026, among them MDs.

“I landed right next to a tree in the shade, and there were rocks, roots, and not-so-good things, and before I knew it, I was already in the air.”

Tosha Shalayna

“When I was in the air, I saw a tree out of the corner of my eye and said, ‘Oh, I hope I don’t hit it.’ In the end, I don’t know if I hit it or not, but I didn’t notice. The airbag, in other words, saves us. It saves us all, and, well, things can always happen, but it helps tremendously.” In an interview with this newspaper, he revealed that the accident could have been much worse.

“I feel fine, actually, I’m fine, I mean, I just got up right away and I mean, I didn’t have my bike, I didn’t have it, so I was surprised, and, oh my gosh. “I saw my visor fall to the ground and I put my hand on my head.”he added about that, explaining how he was able to get up and accelerate again so quickly and what he thought when he fell.

“Well, it’s survival. The first thing is to get back up as soon as you fall, if you can, of course. Then you’ll know if you’re okay or not. And then you go to the bike and, first of all, you pick it up. We’ve already seen that everything is fine, the handlebars were bent, but like all previous falls, it’s time to carry on,” he commented.

saved in the first place

“Of course, I can’t say that things went smoothly in the first few days. Of course we wanted to win the prologue and we didn’t, but we knew that we had to be a little more calm in the first few days. This is not just a World Cup race, it’s only five days and there are 14 days, so we had to take it step by step. So today we understood that we were in a position to achieve that, it was going to be a complicated stage, and we did that.”

Marathon stage open track

“Of course, the Dakar with complicated navigation, but tomorrow the philosophy will change a little, but not for me or for everyone. In the end it is a marathon stage, protect the bike and body, try not to fall, get to the tent as completely as possible and I don’t have to do any work on the bike. That’s the goal in the end. Of course I can’t lose a lot of time, but I’ll try to arrive in good condition and arrive at the bivouac in the second half of the marathon stage with everything it should be. ”

Importance of bonuses when opening a track

“Of course, it’s very helpful because we have a bonus. We don’t know exactly how far we’re going to go per kilometer, but we have to take advantage of it and that’s the mission now. When you open a track, you try to open it from start to finish, so when you open it and waste time wondering which road to take, try to get that bonus.”

He is good at opening the track and attacking

“Yes, I remember in Argentina we won a stage with an open track and no bonus. So this is very different terrain, more sand, the track looks better, so I don’t want to say anything either. But, well, we’ll see what happens tomorrow, it’ll be a different terrain again, I think we’ll probably get off the rocks a little bit, so we’ll see.”

Did you want to attack an open track on stage 4 or would stage 5 be better?

“At the end of the day, we go from day to day. You can keep everything in your head, you can follow what the organization says a little bit, but at the end of the day every stage is difficult. So yesterday we looked at the position we were in and thought, ‘Today is the time to attack,’ but it’s not like we had that in mind from home.”

They will sleep in tents wearing sleeping bags and eating military rations.

“How do you deal with this? Well, make the most of today’s day and night, eat as much as you can, rest as much as you can, and try to get to tomorrow as best you can.”

We don’t bring any food to the Bibo shelter.

“You can take things with you. I mean, you can take everything you carry with you, but in the end you have to carry it 400 kilometers (on a bike). So I don’t think you’ll carry anything beyond energy bars and gels.”