Mama, the sweetest cheers were the last
On the Tuesday night before the third stage of the 2012 Absa Cape Epic, there were cheers in the dining hall as it was announced the next day would no longer be the longest stage in the history of the race.
Instead of 147km from Robertson to Caledon, that year’s queen stage in the ninth year of the Epic would be 143km. What unbridled joy coursed through us until we were told there would still be 2,900m of climbing. Oh, and there would be a sting in the last 10km. The sting was a silly gambol up a meadow, then down a rocky descent, then, as I wrote at the time, “with the skyscrapers of Caledon in our sight, they sent us up again. ‘This,’ said a man who rode up the final hill with me, ‘is unnecessary’.”
I am sure there would have been similar cheers in the dining hall when a shortening of 2024’s queen stage at the Epic was announced, down from 88km to 73km, with the climbing cut from 3,000m to 2,550m. The queen stage was dead. But, as that other great queen once sang, “Mama, just killed a man”. With temperatures to reach 40°C around Wellington on Thursday, the organisers wisely took a decision so they would not have to call Freddie Mercury’s Mama.
On Wednesday night, Daryl Impey, as he lay beside his teammate David Higgs, said he felt sorry for the race that they were forced to change the route but, it had been a hard first four days of the race. Perhaps it wasn’t a bad thing to have a shorter day. Perhaps they would just go a little quicker. Higgs, his legs encased in oversized gumboots, called compression boots, laughed and told a joke about an insect called Dave.
Compression boots, according to Bicycling magazine, “use intermittent pneumatic compression, which basically means they inflate and deflate to create pressure at different points on the leg, helping to improve blood flow”. This flushes lactic acid from your legs speeding up recovery.
The secret of the finishing or doing well at the Epic is always thinking about tomorrow, the next day. You eat and ride and rest on Wednesday for Thursday and also Friday. You always look to top up energy, ease pain, prepare to get ready to do it all again. It’s that mad, that wise.
But, if you are riding the Epic, you do wonder if you are mad or that wise pretty much most days if you are in the middle or the arse-end of the field.
I’ve been going through memories of 2012, and the madness and wisdom is stark. Stage two was supposed to be the “easy stage” of 2012, 119km and 1,650m of climbing. We rode past a man having an epileptic fit not long after the start. There was a rumour that one man who had been “treated for a heart attack on Monday, did, in fact, have his heart on the other side of his body. It’s a rare syndrome, and when the medics listened, allegedly, for his heartbeat, they would not believe him when he said it was on the other side.”
I cried at the finish of the fourth stage, a day Karl Platt, the five-time winner of the Epic, told me it was a “a “f**king proper day” with “lots of kakking”. On the seventh day and sixth stage, I rested before I should have, falling over “with a gentle flop to the right... a slow, inelegant fall, a result of exhaustion and relief at having come through a tough secondlast day on the Epic”.
That sixth stage was the hardest for me. I had emptied myself the day before. “We’re here to finish, not to win,” Jack Stroucken (my patient and wise partner) told me as I walked on every climb. At the top of the Groenlandberg, Jack fed me an energy gel and I channelled my inner Greg Minnaar on the descent. I don’t think I’ve ever gone faster down a hill.
“As we came into the finish straight, Erica Green, who represented SA at the 1996 and 2000 Olympics in mountain biking, roared at us in delight as we finished in seven hours and 45 minutes, an hour and 15 minutes before the cut-off. She called Jack and me ‘legends’. About 300m later I was a legend. A legend of the fall...”
There was one day left to ride, one day left before I would cheer becoming an Epic finisher. They were the sweetest cheers of all.