About

The Australian Three Peaks Race® is part of Tasmania’s sporting and maritime history and occurs biennally over the Easter weekend. This world renowned event captures everything unique about Tasmania, offshore sailing, endurance, wilderness, regional communities and resilience.

It is a non-stop offshore short-handed sailing and endurance mountain running event, commencing at Beauty Point just north of Launceston in Tasmania situated on the Tamar River and finishing in Hobart on the River Derwent. En-route, the running members of each team have to scale Mt Strzelecki, Mt Freycinet and Mt Wellington.

Each race team of five is generally comprised of three sailors and two specialist runners. Often, one of the sailors in the team doubles as a runner should one be unable to continue.

The concept came from the British race, the Three Peaks Yacht Race, one of the oldest extreme multi-sport endurance races in the world, that takes teams from Barmouth in Wales to Fort William in Scotland, along the way climbing the highest mountains in Wales, England and Scotland, being Snowdon, Scafel Pike and Ben Nevis respectively.

For competitors, the Australian race offers an interesting and challenging alternative for the yachting fraternity and a testing new activity for runners, climbers and bush-walkers. It is this unique combination of the two disparate disciplines which provides for such an intriguing event. The course covers 334 nautical miles of short-handed sailing and 133 kilometres of endurance running over three mountains.

The east-coast course around Tasmania affords the best combinations of suitable mountains, coastal centres, accessibility for followers, media crews and the public. It brings significant publicity and exposure to two of the more beautiful National Parks but remote areas of the State, Flinders Island and the Freycinet Peninsula, and takes competitors, supporting groups and the media the length of the beautiful east coast.

For the sailors the course requires a number of significant decisions considering the state of the wind, tide, currents, sand bars and whether to take available short cuts. The runners at Flinders Island need to consider whether to run the clockwise or counter-clockwise course around Mt Strzelecki taking into consideration the time of day with the bush tracks being easier in the daylight or running the road sections with a head wind.

The final run is to the summit of iconic Mt Wellington/kunyani that forms the majestic backdrop to the second oldest city in Australia, the historic City of Hobart.

The race was conducted for 25 years starting on Good Friday each Easter from 1989 until the last race in 2013. It attracted competitors from many countries, particularly Great Britain, New Zealand and the United States but other countries were represented too. There was also a core of dedicated local competitors who turned out each year, often just to “have a go” knowing that they possibly had little chance to win but wanted to experience the many challenges to successfully reach the finish line. Likewise there was a dedicated group of volunteers who each year manned various race controls for long hours maintaining a safety net over the competitors for the three to four day event.

Further general information can be obtained be emailing threepeaks@ryct.org.au.