Darren Lill, who came third in The Herald VW Cycle Tour Extreme Challenge mountain bike race, compiled the following race report:
Darren Lill. Photo: Team Cannondale Blend
The Herald VW Cycle Tour race organisers are great in looking after the professional riders in terms of free race entries and accommodation.
The 80km race starts out on district roads, then hops off into the Eastern Cape bush onto the XC course that was used last year for the XC national championships.
It’s a fun, tight twisting single track between thick bush. There’s a small hill that precedes the left hand turn into this section, and everyone goes full tilt wanting to be first into it.
I ended up getting in 3rd behind Gert Heins, James Reid and Matthys Beukes, all three accomplished XC riders. I was surprised to see Matthys losing the wheel of the guys in front, but couldn’t get past him as there was no space to overtake.
Eventually we popped back out onto some district road and headed up the Zuurberg pass, about a 3km climb. James and Gert had around a 40 second lead and I set off past Mathys to close it.
Kevin Evans was on my wheel and we started gaining on the duo ahead. At the top of the climb we hit a right back into technical single track, the first piece being very steep with some rocky drop offs. My Scalpel proved too fast for Kevin down there as I gapped him and closed the gap down to about 15 seconds on James and Gert.
We joined back into the 60km route and somehow a motorbike ended up coming in-between myself and the duo ahead. I could hear him in front of me, but couldn’t see him because of the thick bush. Next thing there he was, stopped right in front of me on a steep downhill.
With nowhere for me to go, I panelled right into the back of him. I jumped back on my bike, then realised my handlebars were horribly skew, so got off to adjust those. Kevin came past me just as I got going again and we set off in pursuit of James and Gert.
I took the lead with my Scalpel eating up the terrain a lot more efficiently than Kevin’s hard tail. In this section of the race one can almost feel lost in the bush with a seemingly endless series of twists and turns, ups and downs.
I’m not sure how many km later it was, but somewhere in this maze we came across a herd of cows, the Eastern Cape
type with the big horns. They wouldn’t get out of our way and instead started running along the single track in front of us.
This went on for a couple of km with me whistling and shouting at them to get out of the way. Eventually the bush opened a bit on the left and most of them pulled off there. I went past and started down a loose slope back into more single track.
I sensed what I initially thought was Kevin trying to come past me on my left where there was clearly no space to do so. Next thing I was being shouldered off my bike by a cow (Kevin said it was a calf, but for sake of argument we’ll call it a teenage cow!)
Either way, it was big and heavy enough to send me flying into a thorn bush! I ended up tangled in there with my bike on top of me. Kevin stopped and helped me out the thorn bush with tears in his eyes from laughing having seen it all unfold. Unfortunately my GoPro battery had died, otherwise it would have made for some funny footage.
Between the crashes and getting stuck behind the cows for so long, James and Gert were long gone and we knew we wouldn’t be able to catch them.
We rode the last 20km of predominantly district road at a steady tempo and sprinted it out for 3rd place.
Results:
1. James Reid
2. Gert Heins
3. Darren Lill
4. Kevin Evans
5. Matthys Beukes
Send your race report to itb@inthebunch.co.za.
