It’s been a long, hard ride to reach the top
LUTHANDO Kaka carries the tattoos of a cyclist.
These, however, were applied not with ink and needles, but painfully acquired through frequent mishap.
Tattoo is cycling slang for the scars where skin has met tar, and they are in abundance around the right elbow of the newly appointed captain of Team Bonitas.
Kaka, now 27, was a late starter in the sport, taking it up just 10 years ago when he bought his first road bike for R1 000.
He had to save up for that, working parttime while still at school in the Cape Peninsula township of Khayelitsha, where he lived with his stay-at-home mom and plumber stepfather.
Before that his only wheels had been a BMX.
In his early days of racing he would cycle 30km from home to the start, and then make the trek back afterwards.
“I didn’t mind that — I think that’s good for you. It makes you work for something,” says Johannesburg-based Kaka, whose role as captain is to ensure that the team races to support the right rider on any given day.
“I don’t have to be the race-winner — I’m the all-rounder. But when you’re an allrounder you get to become everyone’s workhorse. I help the climbers and I help the sprinters.”
One of Kaka's most memorable performances was during the 2010 Argus Cycle Tour when, about 50km out, he initiated the game-changing break of about 15 riders — including Lance Armstrong — which ultimately helped veteran teammate Malcolm Langer to triumph.
Bonitas won the race again this year, with Herman Fouche crossing the line first. “This year we want to win the 94.7,” he says.
Kaka’s talent was first spotted by the Velokhaya cycling academy — the same programme also helped Songezo Jim — and in only his second year of racing he was picked for the national team that
The doping cheats are getting caught and that’s what the sport of cycling needs
competed at the Commonwealth Youth Games in Australia in 2004. That event turned out to be another proud moment for Kaka, helping countryman Juan van Heerden to the silver medal.
The trip to Bendigo, about 150km north west of Melbourne, was the first time Kaka had flown on an aircraft, but the sport has taken him many places since then.
Velokhaya organised him a spot in the Danish Glued Marstrand-Horsens team, racing in Europe for two years before returning home and quickly impressing Langer, who invited him to join the team.
Kaka is hopeful that Daryl Impey’s good showing at this year’s Tour de France will help boost cycling in South Africa, and he is even more confident that drugs are being stamped out.
“Doping is like white-collar crime in business . . . (but) the cheats are getting caught and that’s what the sport needs.”
Kaka admits he enjoys sharing the same name as the famous Brazilian footballer.
“It always gets me through passport control easier,” he says. “They ask me what I’m here for and I tell them I’m here for sport and point out my name is Kaka and they let me through.”
But it wasn’t always an advantage. “Kaka in Xhosa doesn’t mean something nice — like in Afrikaans. I had to have a lot of fights at school,” he recalls with a smile.
“Now it’s an internationally acclaimed surname.”