LE TRIBUT

Where shall I begin, but on the road where we met each other…

Cycling can be a very lonely sport at times for the most part, you spend hours and hours training all by yourself. I once read about Lance Armstrong training in the mountains in America in torrential rain, there were no team-mates, no friends, just him and the elements and his bike. It was one such afternoon in autumn under the shade of trees on a mountain pass that I first saw Ian Gallard with his team mates, Kevin Green, Mark Blewitt and David McGinley dressed in red, white and blue, their Sopex colours. This small outfit of dedicated cyclists were everywhere and performed well 90% of the time. Ian Gallard was the obvious choice to approach first as he was outgoing, easy to get along with and had no “airs and graces”. He was also eager to teach anyone who was serious and meant to ride.

With Mark Blewitt it was business as usual, he had no time to waste on stragglers, David McGinley was the consummate Englishman…stuck up; and if you were not good enough then it was better to stay at home. And then there was the quiet Kevin Green, well he just didn’t say much.

The former three all stayed near to where I stayed, so access to them was easy. At the time whites and coloureds (bi-racials) were not really seen to compete together or did not belong to the same Cycling Unions, as for ethnic blacks well that’s just another story altogether.

Most of the ‘coloured’ riders were registered with SACOS (South African Chamber of Sport). For years to come it would seem that for the darker skinned group it was like riding into a block head wind when trying to make it to the professional scene.

South Africa was moving out of its racial tension and though the wheels of change turn slow, cycling was still the most integrated sport at the time. A lot of the politics at the time in cycling was based on pride and to some extent class distinctions.

For me, I had no time to waste on such superfluous attitudes, I would train, race and be the best or one of the best, and the way to do that was to train with the best. Sopex to me was the very best of the pro-am teams and gave the professionals a run for their money on more than one occasion. I did not mince my words and made my feelings known to these four guys and soon if I wasn’t training with one or two of them, I was training with the whole team. To this day, I am in gratitude, largely because of Ian Gallard. As years went by Mark Blewitt and I would become really great friends, David warmed up to me as who could resist it when I got under their skin.

Kevin was always quiet, and he stayed the furtherest in Paarl, so that was that.

An anecdote:

One day Ian Gallard decided it was time for him and I to race on the University of Cape Town tandem. He thought it was a great idea and we would do really well, we were both le grimpeurs, and he was just strong like an ox generally. That afternoon I did a warm up ride from my house to his, on my first real racing bike. We changed bikes at Ian’s home and were off on the tandem. We had great hopes, after just one kilometer Ian Gallard and Sebastian Engelbrecht broke the Cannondale Aluminium frame in half. I wonder if he remembers that? We laughed but we were quite annoyed too. That was the end of our tandem dream and we concentrated on what we did best, riding alone on our own bicycles.

We would train for hours and hours and just talk about women, bicycles and sex, not necessary in that order either. So I just want to say thank you to Ian, as there is always more to write but we will leave it for another day.