KEVIN McCALLUM: An epic crash, and the stupidest of them all
The Absa Cape Epic cycle race is a beast that tries to break you, whoever you are
A guy I know told me the other day that the first time we met I was lying in mud, cursing up a blue streak. It was on a Friday near the end of March seven years ago. It was stage five of the 2012 Absa Cape Epic and I had crashed. And I was mad as hell. It was a stupid crash. There are no clever crashes. They are all daft. It wasn’t the first time I had crashed on that Epic, but it was the last. And it was the stupidest of them all. It had been a brute of a day. Overnight rain made the 119km from Caledon to Oak Valley a mudfest. As temperatures dropped, we prayed that they would shorten the stage, but instead they extended the cut-off time so we had longer to suffer. We were about a kilometre from the finish, grinding through the mud. My partner on Team Absa JackMac, Jack Stroucken, was a little in front of me. I decided to jump on the side of the path, thinking it was dryer. It wasn’t, and the tree that was close to the side decided to give me a shove. I fell over gently, getting in...
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