Rick Sealock

WHILE SPENDING NEARLY six days slogging his way to victory in the wilds of Borneo, Isaac Wilson never imagined that the toughest part of the Eco-Challenge Sabah 2000 adventure race was yet to come. But there he was, laid up in a Kota Kinabalu hotel room with a fever approaching 105 degrees, while the other members of Team Salomon collected a $55,000 prize. "I was going through incredible chills, just burning up inside, and then shivering so hard I thought I was going to throw my back out," says Wilson. The 30-year-old was but one of many hospitalized after the August race by the potentially deadly

infection leptospirosis. At press time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had confirmed seven lepto sufferers (of a suspected 25 cases among American competitors) and was working with the World Health Organization to contact the 161 Eco-Challenge racers who live outside the States.

Athletes and organizers alike knew something like this could happen: In the 1994 Raid Gauloises, also held in Borneo, New Zealander Steve Gurney nearly died after contracting the same infection. (Apparently undaunted by his first bout with lepto, Gurney believes he contracted it again this year, at the ELF Authentic Adventure race in Brazil.) Eco-Challenge supervising producer Lisa Hennessy—who, incidentally, caught whooping cough while scouting locations in Borneo—stands behind the choice of the host country. "When people are competing in these races, they know the risks," she says. "They know they're going to be traversing places where no other people have traversed before. And that's part of the appeal."

Fortunately, after an aggressive course of antibiotics and a week of suffering in his hotel room, Wilson is fine, as are the rest of the masochists who competed in this year's event. What's more, Wilson's ready to race again. "Only when somebody comes close to dying do we really take notice," he says. "Everything else, we're conditioned to just suffer through." What follows is a physician's chart of hard-core nasties that have historically taken up residence in the adventure-racing ranks.