The plains rolling away from the Bot River are bitter and dry at the end of summer. A brush-cut of hard stalks is all that remains of the past crop. Beneath a young crop of pines, a bicycle tyre cuts deep into the loose white sand, and the going is slow.
At the top of a steep track, the pines step back to make room for a small white house. It is not much — the door is rotting, a windowpane is broken — but the walls are clean and the garden bursting with colour. A thick green stand of pelargoniums lines a handmade fence; the red flowers dance in contrast.
From inside the home, a battery-powered radio speaker distorts as it forces an amorous saxophone solo into the dead Overberg air, raising the spirits of a long line of mountain bikers slowly sweating past. The lady who paid for the batteries stands grinning in her garden. Her top front teeth have long since been removed, and two glorious white incisors flank a pink tongue. Her tough hands clap a slow hard rhythm, the sort that would have quickly bruised my weaker hands, but she keeps smacking them together.
All I can muster in return is a slight dip of my head. She nods and her grin becomes even broader. Her rhythm doesn’t alter.
This was last Saturday, and during the past week we had ridden more than 500km. It was midday and we back markers were not quite halfway through a particularly hard stage on the Absa Cape Epic, a very long mountain-bike race.
Waking in Elgin at 5am that morning, my cellphone alarm clock was the soundtrack to my nightmare.
Pulling on my riding kit, I quivered as I unzipped my tent. Pushing a piece of toast around my breakfast plate, I tried to tell my team-mate Justin that I would be pulling out of the race. I had hardly eaten during three long days of riding, and the prospect of nine more hours on my bike had me sick with dread.
I didn’t say anything.
The Cape Epic is marketed as one of the toughest mountain-bike stage races in the world. Some call it the Tour de France of mountain biking. The race began in 2004 as the brainchild of mountain biker, IT pro and event director Kevin Vermaak. It was then an eight-day off-road ride from Knysna to Cape Town. The route has changed shape from year to year, focusing more recently on the mountains close to Cape Town and stringing together some of the most hardcore mountain biking in the country.
Lofty ambitions
Every year thousands of mountain bikers all over the world rush to get an entry — both on a first-come, first-served and a lottery basis — but only 600 come away smiling, and each of these will choose a team-mate with whom they will train intensively for months.
Team-mates hold up each others’ lofty ambitions and they become inseparable by the time they set off in March to ride about 700km, climbing about 15?000m into the sky, over eight days.
Now the race is a major logistical operation and a slick publicity machine, hauling in profit through tightly managed branding rights and giving it power equal to the world’s top cycling events, so attracting the world’s top mountain-bike stage racers.
For a year the course designer Leon Evans pieces together hundreds of kilometres of trails, begging from and negotiating with scores of landowners. Some of these begrudgingly allow their land to be used, others jump at the opportunity to market their valley and go to great lengths to open trails never before ridden.
This year the parallel valleys of Tulbagh and Witzenberg hosted stages one to three. The owner of a farm called Saronsberg had a massive tract of land cleared and planted with grass so the Cape Epic could set up a sprawling race village to service mountain bikers, media, sponsors and fans.
Witzenberg locals led Evans to a treacherous old wagon trail, traversing the high mountains separating the two valleys. But this had grown thick with fynbos decades ago and was all but forgotten. By the time we got there on our bikes, 15km of virgin trail was ready to be climbed on the morning of stage two, and raced down at the end of the 104km-long day.
Incapacitated
The next day the entire circus hit the road. The mountain bikers set off for a 125km ride to Worcester, probably the hardest day in the race’s history, while trucks, medics, the massage team, caterers and a long line of camper vans took a more direct route to the Little Karoo, where they re-established themselves on Worcester Gymnasium’s cricket pitch.
It was high on a plateau between these two towns that I sat down in a bush and said to Justin, ‘I can’t do it.” I had been incapacitated by a stomach infection. This was just one struggle among the hundreds of teams battling along the course, but for Justin and me, my words were devastating.
‘That’s bad news, bru,” he said, a feeble understatement. The two of us, like everyone else riding, had been training like men possessed for six months. Our long-suffering girlfriends had looked after us and we had borrowed money, emotional support, time and understanding from everyone around us.
Such support and teamwork is at the core of a challenge like the Cape Epic. Without it, there would nothing to build the motivation on. Without a stadium packed with cheering Worcester Gymnasium schoolchildren, I would not have climbed back on my bike to ride stage four with a blue number board — officially a non-finisher after I pulled out the day before.
Without Justin’s patient encouragement as I ran into the bushes with a roll of toilet paper every 15km on stage five, I would not have made it over the big, wild Groenlandberg to reach Elgin. Without the grinning woman spurring us across the Bot River plains, I would not have finished stage six.
The biggest race in the world
Without years of support from his sponsors and Swiss team-mate Christoph Sauser, Burry Stander would not have been the first South African proudly to top the Cape Epic podium at the end of the final stage in Lourensford last Sunday.
‘This is probably the biggest race in the world from a South African’s perspective,” Stander said the day after finishing.
‘For eight days you and your partner are together 24/7 and it becomes emotional. You go up and down. But this has been my dream for four years.”
Evans, however, clearly expects a lot from his mountain bikers: ‘In retrospect, this year it was more like a five-day stage race rather than an eight-day Epic, as such. There were three very short days that just weren’t up to Epic standard.”
Because of his tough routes, he is considered among riders to be mean. ‘If there’s a hill that needs to be ridden to get from one place to another, then so be it. I don’t design the landscape,” he said dryly.
One of these hills, a treacherous descent, and failed brakes saw his son Kevin crashing out with a broken collarbone on stage one, ending an eight-month campaign to win the event.
‘His shoulder will recover and he’ll be back, but he’s very disappointed about dropping out. It’s a beast of a sport, and he’s had bad luck before. It’s always been that kind of event.
‘I don’t even know how some of these guys get into the event,” Evans said, referring to the many riders with less than average technical skills and the fact that cyclists don’t need to qualify to enter the Epic. But they eventually all get blue numbers and at some point drop out.
He offers only a small concession: ‘I think anyone who finished this year can probably call themselves a mountain biker.”