Chris Willemse: Riding the cycling craze

Chris Willemse admits he was a hothead at times in his youth. But being bold and self-assured led him to succeed after he left school in Std 8 to pursue a career in cycling and later open a cycling business.

Nearly five decades later Willemse’s name is synonymous with cycling. He remains the only cyclist to have won the SA schools, SA junior and SA senior cycling titles and his business, Chris Willemse Cycles, was a market leader. 

“I never thought we would make it that big,” Willemse tells the FM. He uses plural personal pronouns when speaking about his business to include his son and two daughters. “We were blessed,” he says.

That drive for success can be traced to a tough upbringing. As a boy, he says, his family didn’t have much so he had to be “an operator” and a “schemer”.

At the age of 15 he delivered newspapers on his bicycle in the mornings and sold them on street corners twice a week in the evenings. As a result, he fell in love with his bike and with cycling.

He also devoured the newspapers he sold, visiting the Cape Times offices in Burg Street, Cape Town, to read about cycling in other parts of the country and the world. “I was mad about cycling. I would read what the guys were doing in Joburg, what they were doing overseas. I was very interested in the sport.”

At the time, Willemse was a decent rugby player but it was cycling and its individualism that won out and took him overseas. During SA’s sports isolation in apartheid, Willemse competed abroad under a false name — until he was busted in 1975 and had to return home.

He began to work for Peugeot Cycles, for which he also raced. He lost that job when he “got into a fight with my MD. Before I knew it, I had floored him.”

It wasn’t the only time his fists got him into trouble. At a cycling event in Oudtshoorn he punched a referee and was banned from the sport.

“I used to be very short-tempered and got into a lot of fights,” he says. He regrets it today. “I hurt a lot of people. But it also made me a strong character and I think it was because I left school so early and had to fight for myself my entire life.”

After leaving Peugeot, Willemse knew he could not work for a boss, so he took the plunge and opened his own business. Then a chance encounter in Taiwan with a top SA businessman led to greater things, just as the cycling wave was taking off.

Willemse had gone to Taiwan to explore opportunities to import bicycles. He ran into an acquaintance, former Western Province rugby player Danie Roux, who introduced him to Whitey Basson, then building his retail empire.

At the time, Willemse was hoping to buy about a dozen bicycles at a time, but it turned out he needed to buy an entire container load. “I didn’t have that kind of money,” Willemse recalls. He told the story to Basson and Roux over dinner and Basson asked him to pick out bicycles he needed to buy for his children back home.

Three months later and back in SA, Roux called Willemse. Basson wanted to see him.

“I went through to his office and he asked me if I had storage space. I asked him: ‘For what?’ He said my container was being delivered the following week. I asked: ‘What container?’ He said: ‘I ordered you a container full of bicycles.’ I told him I didn’t have money and he just told me the container was being delivered and I could pay him off because the bikes would sell,” Willemse says.

Basson’s belief in and support of Willemse allowed him to cut out the middlemen. By importing containers full of bicycles, Willemse was able to take his business to a higher level. He says it was the beginning of a long relationship with Basson, who had also started small with a few Shoprite stores.

Willemse has since sold Chris Willemse Cycles to Cycle Lab owner MoreCorp, but he and his family are still involved and work in the business.

“Everyone warned me, you’re in corporate now. But until this day, we haven’t had one issue with them. The guys are amazing. We run the business like we used to,” says Willemse, now a calmer man whose hotheadedness is in the past.