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This is Africa
by Tom Southam | 09/03/09
The minivan brakes and swerves and I look out the window, an old Jaguar with six passengers crammed on the backseat drives up the hard shoulder like township royalty, completely oblivious to the traffic hazard they present. I look out at the scene; a filthy spewing flatbed truck with 12 farm hands crowded on the back passes us. There are people everywhere, alongside the highway, across fields, on the streets. Bunches of kids in white shirts and backpacks head en masse to school. A man ignores traffic and stands fixing his upturned BMX on the cement central reservation of a four-lane highway.
The sights that greet me leave me in no doubt as to where I am; TIA baby, This Is Africa, and it is worlds away from my safe European home. The strange thing about being way down in South Africa is that soon after passing the crazy shantys that surround Cape Town airport, the land opens up into picture postcard rolling hills and lush green vineyards. Where grand colonial buildings and pristine Mercedes & BMWs are in absolute abundance, and I get the feeling the standard of living is really rather nice.
Or I would if I could get past my liberal guilt about how perfectly nice the nice bits are, and how amazingly bad life must be at the other end of the spectrum. All these eccentricities that leave me somewhat amused are sadly forced on by intense poverty. Maybe it’s just being a child of the eighties or maybe I really have been listening to too much U2 lately, whichever way I reside myself to not being here on a mission to do anything but race my bike, and possibly writing about it.
Even the races here are a whole other trip that can leave you feeling like an observer of something if not a little mad, then at least very different. Despite the Tour of Boland not being an ‘international’ race, Rapha Condor and several other foreign teams got a start. This in contrary of course to the rules set by the road commission dictating that a national race can only have three foreign teams. The race organiser, who is of course the president of the road commission, overturned this rule. T.I.A. and we love it, because we were lucky enough to have the opportunity to do a real African race rather than just the upcoming Giro Del Capo, which, by comparison is a civilised European visitor.
Despite looking beautiful, the Western Cape really is a savage place for bike races at this time of year. The heat is intense, arriving in the mid forties by lunch time and if that wasn’t enough, the wind likes to blow in sixty or seventy kilometre an hour gusts from all directions. They say no one gets sick on the Cape because the wind is so strong it blows all the germs away, I say you have to be careful taking a piss stop, as it could get messy.
The stages all seemed to start at a spot where the organiser decided to pull up and stop on the road that particular morning, maybe by a farm shop, maybe just by a nice looking stretch of dirt. Either way it was the first race I’ve done where a pig and some dudes selling boxes of grapes have been the only spectators. The terrain itself is hard, the roads exposed and mostly straight, constantly dipping and rising and on the kind of surface that makes you feel very heavy legged indeed. The wind means it’s a constant battle for echelons and the South African pro teams are all impressively well organised when it comes to riding as a unit all day long. This combined with heat means that it is mentally exhausting to try to stay in contention at the front all day and not get caught out.
The couple of times we were close to being caught out though we were saved by the even more efficient German lead out express that would quickly organise the second echelon (made up mostly of the foreigners who didn’t know where the crosswinds would come), but was a lot faster than the first so swiftly put paid to the locals and their element of surprise.
When we did find ourselves getting out of the gutter and into the hills, things were equally as difficult. My old team mate, Tiaan Kiannemayer, was ramping up his Giro form with some very impressive riding up to Saturday’s summit finish. 31km/h is not a speed I do often going uphill and I nearly fell off when I took a look down at my computer and saw how fast we were going. It’s always hard to convince yourself at the best of times that everyone else is hurting as much as you, but in the first races of the year my mind seems certain that the sum of hurt, speed and lack of oxygen is greater than its parts.
As it was, I managed to fight off the demons of early season mental mind games, early morning starts, and salty dehydration to finish off the race in a pretty good way. We all in fact have come away satisfied with our acclimatisation, not just to the challenges of the Cape’s heat and wind, but also to the intimacies of real South African racing. Where the race distances are published in the handbook with an approximate distance (+/- 15km), the oncoming trucks don’t stop, but instead swing into the dirt opposite and shower you with red sand, and the race directors briefing is a ten minute stand up comedy routine, mercilessly taking the piss out of any poor rider unlucky enough to draw attention to himself.
TIA baby, TIA, and if I can leave the wrestling match with my conscience alone a while and not spend too long sampling the excellent local wine, I dare say this could be a racing trip that is not only successful but also rather enjoyable.
