There’s an ancient joke, where a tourist is visiting New York City, and asks an old jazz hipster: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” And the hipster replies: “Practice, man, practice!”
If you were asking Jordan Strachan how to get to the Dakar Rally, he might tell you: “Hard work.” That’s how he managed to get to the starting line of the world’s most notorious rally raid race this year, and that’s how he played out his race, and that’s how he’ll get there again.
Strachan isn’t a household name in Canada, not even among motorcyclists, but Jordan is from a dirt-racing family. His dad and his uncle both raced before him, and Jordan has been racing himself since he was kindergarten-aged; he’s done some motocross for training, but mostly focused on enduro and hard enduro events like Outliers before shifting his focus to rally raid. He challenged the Sonora Rally in 2022 and had a massive crash that broke his back, keeping him from racing for a year. But it wasn’t enough to keep him away; he recovered and made it to the Baja Rally in 2024, and won the Malle Moto class, doing all his own wrenching while he raced.
It was a tough victory, but worth it: “The Baja Rally is the best training you could have for Dakar,” he says, because of all the rocky sections they faced.
The romantic depiction of the Dakar is always a biker cresting a sand dune, but in reality, this year’s event saw them pounding out a lot of rocky terrain as well, says Strachan—although, at the Dakar Rally, you have to be ready for anything the organizers, the terrain or your own machine throws at you.
Strachan was riding a Kove 450 Rally this year. Kove is a Chinese company with a broad line of bikes that includes rally raid replica motorcycles aimed at real-world riders, not just elite alien-talent pros. They’ve been at Dakar for a while now with a good record of finishing—and increasingly, a good record of sponsoring lesser-known riders like Strachan. He went to Dakar with help from Kove Canada this year, not as an official factory rider, but receiving help from the big-shot team mechanics as needed.
And he needed some help, but it wasn’t the bike’s fault. To race Dakar, riders must festoon their machine with all sorts of electronic navigation equipment, safety beacons and the like. Third-party rally raid specialists installed that stuff on Strachan’s bike, but it wasn’t done right. That came back to bite the Canadian racer. He was handling the grind of racing hundreds of klicks and working on the bike OK, but he ended up losing massive amounts of time to weird electrical malfunctions.
“I just took every stage day-by-day,” he says. “The hardest part was the electrical gremlins that I kept having.” He says he’s meticulous with his bike preparation and couldn’t figure out why his machine kept blowing fuses.
In the 2025 race, riders outside the elite class were using electronic roadbooks for navigation, not old-school paper roadbooks that work mechanically. Strachan’s bike had to have properly functioning electronics, or he couldn’t race. Even though Strachan was keeping a good pace while he was mobile, he was losing more and more time with electric woes, and it all came to a head on Stage 8. He was out of fuses, only saved because another rider passing by had his own set of extras to bail him out. At that point, Strachan says it looked like he might not finish the race.
With his bike on the verge of a complete shut-down, Strachan found that the team that had installed all the electrical accessories had crossed wires inside the navigation tower that were turning the harness into a melted mess.
“I took my Leatherman and I just cut all the wires, left them open to atmosphere… I bypassed all my main relays, and it was just enough to get me back. And just as I got back, the bike died completely, melted the rest of the wiring.”
At that point, he called the Kove team, and they got the wiring sorted in-house. Life was better from there on. It’s a good thing he’s spent his life working as a rancher, a miner and a general hands-on kind of guy, Strachan says—that practical lifestyle is what got him across the finish line, pushing through as the problems arose.
It’s too bad about the issues; Strachan finished 57th in the Rally2 class, and 67th overall in the bike category. The wiring didn’t just cause him trouble on the trails, it also cost him a lot of time on the scoresheet. Still, his finish was very respectable, and shows that he’s capable of more, if he could just get the scratch together to fund it all.
The Dakar is an expensive race, and even with sponsorship help, it took a lot of hard work at the coal mine to pay for it all (literally—Strachan works as a millwright in a B.C. coal mine to pay his bills). He’s been couch-surfing instead of buying a house; to get this far, he’s had to be all in. And he wants to go farther; Strachan is hoping to return for the 2026 Dakar race, and just finished a stretch of desert riding down in the U.S. to start training. He’s also working on improving his physical fitness along with his riding skills. He’s returning to the Baja Rally again this fall, and from there, maybe Dakar again, if he can afford it. And if he doesn’t have issues that eat away at his race time like the electrical woes this year, he figures he can do a lot better.
“Top 30 is my goal. I think I can train for it; I don’t think I’m there yet. I know that with proper training and proper support, I could probably get there,” he says. “I’d be satisfied with that. If you’re a top-20 guy, you’re borderline racing full-time.”
And for now, that’s not Strachan; he still has a day job and it sounds like he doesn’t plan on leaving that for a life at the races, although his boss at the mine is doing what he can to help the racing efforts. But hopefully, he’s able to juggle both successfully and, in 2026, show us exactly how well he can do.
