Back to conquer SA’s mountains
World champ Nino Schurter is riding the World Cup and Epic
● Finding Nino was becoming a problem. He was lost. He was late. He was Nino Schurter, cross-country cycling’s world champion.
The man is Swiss, where the clocks come from. He spends his days moering through bush on a bike.
How could he possibly not find his way along the paved linear gentility of a Stellenbosch wine estate to the conference room he was supposed to have arrived at what seemed like hours before for a round of media interviews?
You could see angst curdling into worry in the minds of the PR people. Schurter had been on his bike in the great out there with a bunch of civilians — members of Diner’s Club, one of his sponsors — not long before. And now he was nowhere.
Thirty-seven minutes after the appointed hour, there he was, as calm as someone who’s resting pulse is 49 should be, in a polo shirt, jeans and two-tone espadrilles.
His slow smile spread wider than his face. Angst? Worry? Why? It wasn’t as if he had been a callow European rambling the African wilds.
“Stellenbosch is my second home,” Schurter said slowly, smilingly, with amazing grace. Once was lost . . .
Last year, along with all six rounds of the World Cup and the world championship, he won the Cape Epic with Matthias Stirnemann, his first success in four attempts in South Africa’s premier mountain bike race.
Schurter will be back on his bike in Stellenbosch on March 10 for the opening round of this year’s World Cup on the slopes of Coetzenburg mountain, the first time the event has come to South Africa since 2014 — when it was, as it had been the year before, held in Pietermaritzburg.
“It’s a tough one with a lot of steep climbs and not a lot of time to recover,” Schurter said of the route, which harbours testing features like a section of roots and rocks called “Varsity Dropout” and a sharp descent named “Howzit”.
That done, Schurter will be off to the Epic, which has its 20km prologue on Table Mountain on March 18 before disappearing into the dirt tracks of Robertson, Worcester, Wellington and Paarl for seven days, 638km and climbs that amount to 12 930m.
With only 1.73m and 67kg to show for himself, there isn’t a lot to 31-year-old Schurter in physical terms. But he’s worth his weight, and more, in gold.
Schurter won the World Cup five times between 2010 and 2017, seven world championships — including a team triumph — from 2009 to 2017, and he has a full set of Olympic medals: bronze in 2008, silver in 2012 and gold in 2016.
So, how long does it take for his bum to get sore in the saddle?
“Ah, you get used to it.”
It helps that he’s been riding bikes for so long he can’t remember when he was originally let loose on two wheels.
“The first time? That’s difficult to say. But I started racing at seven. For me, it was fun. I never planned to become a professional.”
Is it still fun?
“Always.”
Does he ride a bike to get around at his first home, Flims?
“Sometimes, but I live on a hill . . .” Mountain biking has largely escaped the drug scandals that have ripped the credibility from road racing. Are MTB riders simply more decent than their increasingly tarred and feathered counterparts? Not quite.
“The money is not as big in MTB as it is in road racing, and where there’s more money, more people cheat.
“And a lot of our events are one-day competitions. Recovery is important but not as important as in road racing, where you go for weeks — in tours on the road it’s all about how quickly you can recover.
“We’ve also had people who have cheated but I know I’m clean.”
For me, it was fun. I never planned to become a professional Nino Schurter Cross-country cycling world champion