Canada’s Jaus Neigum has been declared the winner of Caterpillar’s Global Operator Challenge, a year-long event that took place in several regional stages all around the world and culminated in the grand finals at Conexpo in Las Vegas earlier this month.
According to Caterpillar, the event that ran for 12 months saw over 10,000 operators from 30 countries participating in local operator challenges held by 70 Cat dealers worldwide. “Less than 100 semi-finalists proving their mettle at the local level met on four different continents to compete in the regional championships held in late 2019. In the end, nine showed their superior mastery of not only the machine but also the technology inside to earn a spot in the finals,” said Cat.
The finals on the Global Operator Challenge took place on March 10 inside “Operator Stadium” at Caterpillar’s outdoor Conexpo Festival Grounds exhibit. Broken into three teams of three – Team Americas, Team Europe and Team Asia – the nine finalists competed individually and as teams as they faced three different skills challenges.
The event kicked off at 9:30am with the “Load & Carry” challenge, where each operator used the Cat 962M wheel loader with Production Measurement technology to load and move material through specified locations in the course. The “Control to a Tee” challenge began with operators teeing off using a Cat 302 mini excavator then navigating a course before sinking a putt with the golf ball. During the final “In the Trenches” challenge, operators showed off their trenching skills using a Cat 325 excavator equipped with Grade with 2D technology.
Finals scoring was based on speed, accuracy and operating best practices with penalties imposed for errors. Awards were presented to the overall event champion, the individual with the lowest time in each skills challenge and the team with the lowest combined score.
Neigum, the Americas West champion who has over 20 years of experience as an operator, was crowned the Global Operator Challenge Champion with an overall low-time score of 16:28 for all three events.
“I’m walking on air right now. This was absolutely amazing. What a great experience and Caterpillar should be so proud with what they’ve done here today. They made history,” Neigum said.
In second place with a combined time of 18:02 was Thomas Murphy the Europe champion from Ireland. Third place went to Sebastian Behr of Germany with a combined time of 20:30.
Several other individual and team awards were presented in the event, including for the “Load & Carry” section (Neigum), the “Control to a Tee” (Murphy) and “In the Trenches” sections (Neigum). Team Europe was declared the champion team with the lowest combined team average time of 20:49 and was represented by Murphy, Behr and Bruno Grossen.
Apart the winners, the other finalists were Ben Sandy – Americas East Champion; Marcio Verissimo – South American Champion; and Hiroyuki Harada, Yuji Tanaka and Wilfren Jimenez, all Asia Champions.