git-svn: cloning from svn.apache.org

What can be done to speed up cloning from svn.apache.org?  It's a
Subversion repository with over 700,000 revisions.  Many projects
stored there started their life in some of the later revisions, and
the forward-scanning part of git-svn takes ages.

I wonder if it were faster to search history backwards, starting with
the specified path, similar to what "svn log" does?