Mannie Heymans, the acknowledged godfather of Namibian cycling, is back at the 2022 Absa Cape Epic. The winner of the inaugural 2004 event, alongside five-time winner Karl Platt, Heymans rides the event for fun these days. Kind of.
“It’s like a holiday for me, now, without the stress of racing. Eight days where I am not busy with all the bike shop and other stuff in Windhoek; I can just ride my bike and enjoy the people.” This is Heymans’ 12th start - he has one DNF to go with his 10 finishes. “I got a call five weeks before the event, to ride for Absa again. So then the task was to find a partner.”
Former professional jockey Genevieve Weber was top of his hit-list. “It took me a while to call her, I must be honest. So it was probably only three weeks before the event. She didn’t say yes immediately…”
Weber is no stranger to the Untamed African Mountain Bike Race; she raced it in 2015 as she made an impressive entry into mountain biking after injury forced her off horses for good. “I was the first female jockey in South Africa; my dad [Kenny Michel] was also a top jockey, and I am built like a jockey, so I was always going to go that way.” The Michel family is not only horse-racing royalty, but Weber’s uncle Bernard owned the Soloped shops that almost exclusively served the 1980s cycling community.
In 2010, Weber broke her C6 and C7 vertebrae in a horse-racing accident and was told she could never do contact sports again. “I spent some years building our family, but as the kids got older and I had a tiny bit more time, I needed to do something. So I got into triathlon, and X-Terra, with the blessing of my doctors. Then, I heard that the UCI Marathon World Champs would be in Pietermaritzburg, in 2014. So I started mountain biking.” And winning. Age-group world champ in PMB, and then again the following year in Italy.
Family and life got in the way of the Absa Cape Epic for a few years, until Mannie came calling… “We do a lot of riding together, I live in Namibia now. And we have a coaching/indoor bike studio we work on together, training riders. I am always quite fit, so it wasn’t really that difficult to say yes.”
At just 1.48cm (four-foot-ten-and-a-bit!) and 48kg, Weber is, arguably, the most climb-ready rider in the 2022 field. “When I was a pro jockey, I had to ride under 50kg, and it was always a struggle. I am older and wiser now, and all the training just makes this my weight. It isn’t a conscious thing like it had to be in the horse-racing days.”
“She is even better on the descents,” says Heymans. So good, that Team Absa Mixed managed to snag the green leader jerseys in the Mixed category on the 24km Prologue in Lourensford. “It was a bit of a surprise, to be honest,” Heymans tries to pretend. But he’s fooling nobody. Earlier, he let slip that he wants to add to his collection of Absa Cape Epic category wins. “Who has won the Absa Cape Epic, and the African jersey, and the Masters and the Mixed? Today we made amateur mistakes, and they got the jersey, but we still have a long way to race” ‘They’ is Costa Rican Sueños Café CBZ Asfalto team, who took the racing to the pair on Stage 1 and took a two-minute lead into Stage 2.
Competition runs in her blood, as it does in Heymans’. Proven when the team clawed back the jersey on the 123-kilometre-long Stage 2 from Lourensford Wine Estate to Elandskloof Farm Cottages, Greyton.
Some people’s holidays…
Karl Platt and Christoph Sauser win NTT Masters category in fine style
