Or, more accurately, you heard it here first if you're not fluent in French.

The Heroes Legend website has a press release today that salutes the guys who took part in this years event. Hubert Auriol himself confesses that they made this years event a lot more difficult than previous years.

Every so often, you come across a little tool in a little corner of the Internet and you wondered how you ever managed without it. Google was once such a tool - I recall hitting google back in the day when it boasted of having more than a billion web pages indexed. Now it's got closer to 10 billion.

Anyway, this little tool is called Babel Fish - after that remarkable little translating fish in Hitch Hikers Guid to the Galaxy. Copy and paste the text you want to translate, select the language you want to translate from and to, and hit the button. French becomes English, Chinese becomes Arabic, it truly is a work of art.

The Missus has been very busy Babelling away, studiously translating and reading every single scrap of news published on the Heroes Legend website. They do the press releases in French and only a fraction of them are re-published in English.

The thing about Hubert Auriol, apart from his legendary cheshire-cat grin is that he's a racer. He was the first guy ever to win Dakar both on a bike and in a car. He is arguably the best race director that the Paris-Dakar ever had. It is entirely possible that Hubert Auriol had a bit of a falling out with ASO about their plans to turn Dakar into a brand rather than a destination. He left ASO, taking a lot of people with him, and started up Heroes Legend - a race more in keeping with what Thierry Sabine had envisaged.

The bivouacs for instance. They are deliberately placed as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get. Away from airports, cities and civilisation generally. For Auriol, Dakar is about adventure and discovery - not about TV ratings and how easy it is to fly in the senior management of corporate sponsors for a tour of the bivouac on the rest day without them having to take a lot of time out of their busy diaries.

The fact that he is a racer is important. For him, it wasn't about the numbers, the insurance premiums or the TV coverage. It was about the race. It was about ordinary people, amateur privateers, going from Paris to Dakar. So, where ASO cut and run, Auriol shrugged and - with classic French defiance - decided to run the rally in spite of the security fears in Mauritania.

The bivouacs were visited in Mauritania by Government Ministers, Police and Army chiefs. Mauritania pulled out all the stops to make sure that everything went well, and they praised Hubert Auriol for having the courage of his convictions and running the event.

Anyway, this was to be the last Heroes Legend - those competing forces of affordability for privateers nd the huge logistic cost of running the race meant that it was losing money. The cancellation of the 2008 Dakar gave even more uncertainty.

So, tucked away at the bottom of the press release was a little snippet from the Man himself:

"Après le succès de cette troisième édition et à la demande générale, Hubert Auriol et son équipe vont rapidement préparer la quatrième Légende des Héros."

Which Babel Fish reliably assures us is:

"After success of this third edition and with the general request, Hubert Auriol and his team quickly will prepare the fourth Legend of the Heroes."

Armed with this piece of knowledge, with the hammer-assisted precision engineering going on to rally-prepare the little PR3 and - crucially - with an outstandingly genius plan from The Missus on how we can fund this whilst still making sure that we raise a Lot of Money for Barnardos at the same time, it looks like we'll be going to Dakar after all.

It's funny how things work out. This whole thing has taken on a momentum and a life of its own and, everywhere I look, green lights appear. Big green lights next to road signs which all point to Dakar.

I'm going to Dakar. And you're going with me.

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