Prominent mountain-biker Matt Beers was delighted to win his second road tour of the season after clinching the four-day five-stage Lowveld Tour title in Limpopo yesterday.
Beers, who rides for the NAD Pro mountain-bike outfit, surprised many, including himself, at the beginning of the season when he won the six-stage Mpumalanga Tour in January.
He showed his versatility again yesterday by winning his second road stage race. He said the team’s achievements were gratifying.
Prominent mountain-biker Matt Beers was delighted to win his second road tour of the season after clinching the four-day five-stage Lowveld Tour title yesterday. Photo: Hayden Brown
He gave a lot of the credit for his victory to his teammates – Gawie Combrinck who finished fourth overall, Wessel Botha fifth and Nico Bell sixth – who provided support throughout the tour.
“It’s a great feeling to win, but it’s an even better feeling for the team,” Beers told In the Bunch. “It was more of a team effort and it was a different feeling of success.
“It’s awesome. We always want to do well, but you never know in road races.
“Nico and Gawie just came back from Colombia [having taken part in the La Leyenda del Dorado] and they were super strong in this tour.
“Wessel also did really well and winning wouldn’t have been possible without any of those guys. It worked out really well.”
Combrinck managed to win the 126km second-stage road race, with BCX’s David Maree taking the first stage and Nolan Hoffman the third.
Beers won the “decisive” individual time-trial on the third day, before Reynard Butler, who guest-rode for Office Gurus but belongs to ProTouch, won the criterium on the final day.
NAD Pro only had four riders on the tour while the likes of BCX had seven and this posed challenges, Beers said, but they made the most of their strengths.
“The plan was simply to just get into the breaks. Nico and Gawie took part in this race last year so they knew more or less how it was supposed to be won.
“We just had to cover the moves and mark the guys who were threats on the general classification.”
They managed to do that on the first day already when Beers made it into the breakaway and held a minute gap over the bunch, he recalled.
Beers, Combrinck and Botha then made it into the break on the second day, which Combrinck subsequently won after launching a late attack.
Hoffman won the third road race in a bunch sprint finish, with Beers sixth.
“We pretty much just had to keep marking each other; that was all we could do,” he said.
The team kept their GC ambitions alive until the time-trial on the third day, before which Office Gurus Dylan Girdlestone led the race, milliseconds ahead of Beers.
“The stages were quite short, so it was quite difficult to get rid of many of the guys,” he said.
“It pretty much came down to the time-trial – that was the decider. That was where we got the opportunity to put some good time over the other contestants.
“I knew it would be quite interesting. Dylan and I were neck-and-neck and it was my first time ever riding on a TT bike.
“Thankfully due to my height and the great equipment we have access to, I was able to pull it off. It was a great feeling.
“Nico’s experience came through as he finished second,” he said, adding that the time-trial was the “make or break” element of the race.
Girdlestone finished fifth, just over two minutes behind Beers on the trial. Beers managed to keep that same margin until the conclusion of the tour.
“Dylan was the man I had to watch throughout the whole race,” Beers said.
“Fortunately for us, Gawie was also in the top-three, meaning Dylan had to watch two of us.
“I just had to make sure I stuck to Dylan like a leech,” he added.
Ironically, Beers admitted the time-trial was the “biggest challenge” for him at the tour and he was relieved it “worked out to my favour”.
He finished the tour with a final GC time of 9:54:51, just over two minutes ahead of Girdlestone and more than three minutes ahead of BCX’s Marc Pritzen in third.
