Over the course of 23 years, covering 3 decades, since I first conceived the idea in 2002 for the Cape Epic, I’ve met so many wonderful people associated with the bike and sport event industry. (Coincidentally, I was reminded of this when reading “The Wubbulous World of Dr Seuss” with my children – one of the chapters is called “Oh, the people you’ll meet”.)
One of the great delights of starting the Nedbank Gravel Burn has been rekindling friendships with people I met many moons ago when we were going through a similar process with the Cape Epic. Doing it for the 2nd time (with a lot more wisdom), has allowed me the privilege of building our network of like-minded people from all over the world – with the ultimate objective being to have fun together with those with shared values.
An example: in 2003, before the first Cape Epic and while we were still frantically marketing the concept, I helped sponsor two young South African riders – Nicholas Qotoyi and Patrick Majeke – to participate in the TransAlp mountain bike stage race across the Alps. At the time, the TransAlp was the world’s foremost mountain bike stage race and it seemed like a good idea to help promote South Africa and the Cape Epic as a viable mountain biking destination. As far as I know, they were the first black Africans to compete in any significant mountain bike race in Europe or for that matter, outside South Africa.
When the then Tour de France team, Team CSC, got wind of what we were doing, they invited Patrick, Nicholas and I to join their hospitality programme at the Alpe d’Huez stage of that year’s Tour (incidentally, 100 years since the first Tour de France was held in 1903).
I met two significant people from the bike industry on Alpe d’Huez who have remained friends to this day. I distinctly remember drinking beers and trying to sell my crazy idea of organising an 8-day mountain bike adventure across South Africa.
One was a South African living in the US, Andy Ording, who was there as the founder and owner of Zipp Wheels, which were the ‘Ultimate Speed Weaponry’ for Team CSC. The other was Gerard Vroomen, co-founder of Cervelo bicycles, also a team sponsor of Team CSC.
Andy, Gerard and I have remained friends over the years; they’ve been sounding boards for ideas I considered for the Cape Epic, now also for Nedbank Gravel Burn, and provided many an introduction to me in the bike industry that helped me on my personal journey. Andy subsequently sold Zipp to SRAM and Gerard sold Cervelo and launched OPEN Cycles along with another friend of mine, Andy Kessler (the former CEO of BMC and International Sales Director for Cervelo).
Andy (Ording) came out to ride the Cape Epic quite a few times.
I’ve ridden OPEN bikes since their first hard tail mountain bike dropped in 2014. It was this super-light hardtail equipped with drop bars that became the forerunner to OPEN’s first gravel bike which achieved huge success – widely regarded as the first production ‘gravel bike’ as we know them today (OPEN’s first proper gravel bike, the UP, for example, won Eurobike’s Gold award already in 2015.)
Andy (Kessler) and Gerard have been very supportive and I consider OPEN a ‘founding friend’ of the Nedbank Gravel Burn. Not a sponsor, per se, but a company that we love working with and which supports our vision. (We would never sign an exclusive sponsorship deal with a bike brand, by the way. We’re working with quite a few for the race – more on this later.)
We bought a fleet of twelve OPEN WI.DE bikes to equip our team so that we had great bikes to test the route back in September last year.
And now the story comes full circle, since Andy (Ording) and Gerard having both entered the inaugural Nedbank Gravel Burn (I could never convince Gerard to ride the Cape Epic, but the Nedbank Gravel Burn seems to have hooked him).
To me, personally, the Nedbank Gravel Burn will feel like a gathering of friends. The presence of Andy and Gerard in the field will only strengthen that.