William Mokgopo started out riding his uncle’s bike on the rugged streets of Diepsloot, a township 40 kilometers north of Johannesburg.
“My uncle had this old road bike, it was so big, extra-large, and I was so little I would get into the frame and try peddle on the side.”
At 13 years old, he built his first bike inside a shipping container. Three years later, he was hurtling down the dirt roads of Africa in serious mountain bike (MTB) competitions. In 2020, he hopes to ride for gold in Tokyo.
They call him the Skinny Hulk. The name fits like a glove. Mokgopo, the South African mountain biker, is tall, thin and pumped up with gutsy determination. At the age of 24, he is already the 12th-ranked mountain biker in South Africa; part of a new generation of cyclists from the streets to race for gold at the UCI MTB World Championships, the African Continental MTB Championships, and the UCI MTB World Cup.
“MTB is growing massively. In the future, I think it could be a major sport. It’s coming to schools now and the schools series this year had about 10,000 riders. Even if you look at the black communities, it’s growing. Yesterday we went for an 11-hour ride around Johannesburg and there were about 30 black riders.”
“I think it’s a bit premature to think I will qualify for this year’s Olympics. But the qualifiers are due in May. Even if I make third or second, I still might make it.”
On this early summer morning, Mokgopo, in riding gear, greets with a warm smile outside Number 3080, on a bumpy street in Diepsloot. It’s not easy for cars in this street, but an ideal challenge for training on a bike.
Mokgopo lives in a RDP (Reconstruction and Development Program) house that the government started building for its citizens after the 1994 elections.
“Everyone here used to live in extension one; in shacks. When the houses were allocated, they chose a block of shacks and said those living in shacks from here to here are getting RDP houses. We were given a number and told this was our house. We signed a form, and that was it. I was still at primary school at that time. Before it was the six of us living in the house.”
“The first year that I started getting paid, I extended these other two houses and one in the back here. It was actually just to have a bit of space. It was difficult living together; trying to bath here and trying to do a whole lot of stuff,” he says.
Everything changed when a 13-year-old Mokgopo came across a shipping container.
“It was just up the road from my house. You will see the fencing on the main road. It started with a project called Earn-A-Bike. You would go and choose a bike, then they would strip it down and then you would teach yourself how to build it. Then, when you graduated, that bike that you built would be your own bike,” he says.
Here, Mokgopo came across Simon Nash, Founder of the Diepsloot Mountain Bike Academy, and began to race.
“People didn’t take it seriously. When you are riding a bike in Diepsloot, it looks like you are just doing it for leisure. You are a grown-up still riding a bike, for my neighbors it was stupid. Soccer is the main sport here, so when you are on a bike people are like what are you doing?”
For Mokgopo it was uphill all the way. His school friends tied strings across the road to bring down his bike. Outside a corner store, a group of men would sit on crates and laugh at him as he rode by.
“It would be very tough getting out the township in your riding gear. I would have to take shorts and the minute I got out of town then take them off and go ride my bike. There were guys who would stop me and ask me stupid questions, like what is this hat? What are these pads on your pants; are they for a woman? But now those people who were laughing at me are actually my friends.”
“The other day, I was sitting on the floor at the corner shop and one of the guys came up and said why is The Celebrity, cause that what they call me now, sitting here? One guy said I think even if William has a million rand he will still come and sit here. I always want to show that I still want to be at the level they are.”
One reason for Mokgopo’s smile on this day is a new R70,000 ($4,750) bike, tucked away in his room. Along with competing professionally on the Kargo Pro MTB Team, the first UCI-registered MTB Team in South Africa, Mokgopo is a sports sciences student at the University of Pretoria.
“The tricky thing about MTB is getting the points and staying in front. When you do cross country you need to look at the course. When you are racing it’s a completely different course. Someone might push you off course or the rock you thought you would be jumping from might have moved. It’s always the thought of what’s coming next,” says Mokgopo.
“From our side, William is a one-of–a-kind athlete, he is so complete on and off the bike and many pro athletes can learn from him. The Olympics is very much a reality for William in 2020 and beyond. He is showing improvement every season and also deals with setbacks very well which is a very important aspect for a pro athlete striving to be the best. Making small adjustments to his training regime over the coming seasons will see William gain that consistency that is needed week in, week out for Olympic level racing,” says Shaun Peschl, Team Manager of Kargo MTB.
Cycling isn’t cheap. Mokgopo says it can cost R500,000 (around $34,000) a year to race as a professional for travel alone. His team is fortunate to get their bikes and supplements for free. The latest equipment can make all the difference.
“When I started racing, I had a poor conditioned bike. I remember the academy got me a carbon bike, I could finish second. It just shows from that little change in equipment it can set you moving into that winning stage. It can put you on the podium. The expenses can push people away from the sport. But it depends on the person you are,” he says.
Racing is all about focus, he says.
“I will sit with my eyes open and listen to music. People think I am listening, but I am seeing the course and riding it all the time. It’s getting the feel of the race before even getting to the starting line. I see everything how I want it to be in the race. This is where I have to jump. This is where I need to speed up,” says Mokgopo.
He once spent three weeks in bed with a broken shoulder, after he clipped a motorbike while training on a dirt track.
“I couldn’t even control my fingers. I rode one handed to home in Diepsloot. Overnight it got worse and we had to go to the hospital the next day. But when I went back everything had completely changed. I started coming second and third and ended up winning a race and that was it. I went to bigger races and was introduced to cross country. When you get your first victory that is when the love gets that bit bigger,” he says.
The proof is in the scars. Mokgopo has dozens of them.
“When you fall, the blood looks super cool&#8230; My mom was skeptical; with all the bruises and stitches I have when I come home. She didn’t want me to do it. She doesn’t say much, but you can see she’s very proud. My dad always says he’s very proud of me,” says Mokgopo.
Mokgopo’s dream of a spot in Rio were dashed when he injured his knee at the Cape Epic in March. It took two months to get back on the bike again.
“On Day 4 of the Epic, my knee was in so much pain, but I stuck it out to just finish, positioning was no longer important.”
The injury forced Mokgopo to build a new dream; his plan is now to be the South African champion in 2017, go to the Commonwealth Games in 2018 and to be an Olympic athlete in Tokyo in 2020.
Bumps, bruises, a bike built in a shipping container and friends who used to laugh at him. Mokgopo comes from humble beginnings and hopes to ride his luck all the way to Japan in 2020.

The rugged Road To Tokyo?

Once a month, at full moon, hundreds of hikers don their headlamps and tighten their laces ready for the climb. It’s a long and sapping four kilometers to the summit of Lion’s Head, the outcrop overlooking the rooftops of the suburbs to the east of the city Cape Town. At the top you have an unrivalled panorama of the city bowl; from an imposing misty Table Mountain to the pristine white beaches of Clifton and the blue Atlantic beyond.
On this day, people were there to see more than that. Hundreds packed at the peak of Lion’s Head to see the moon rise in the east and the sunset in the west. It is a rare moment of natural beauty. For Cape Town hikers, a sweaty rite of passage is to bathe in the dusk and then walk in the beams of moonlight.
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Along the route is a tricky chain ladder that is not for the faint of heart. Some turn back, spooked by the dizzy heights. The final stretch is a cruel incline and scramble up the rocks that leaves you puffing.
For one man, this is more than just one of nature’s gifts. In a grey jersey he chooses the rise of the moon as his moment to propose to his love. As he drops on one knee, the crowd catches on. When he does the deed his blushing fiancé says yes; her face is as red as the sunset. The climbers of Lion’s Head break out into applause. This is surely a story for the wedding reception.
Others make the trek with friends, to share a drink. Selfies with yoga poses on the rocks are on their agenda to take in the moment. Another individual makes a Skype call to his family in England, they are impressed he made it up in an hour and a half.
It’s not always the safest place to be on top of a mountain. The weather can be misleading. Winds can gust and blow you off the rocks. Often hikers fall and need to be airlifted to safety.
As the night settles, the headlamps are switched on and a chill wind sets in – it’s time to go. The hundreds of people on top of the summit scramble down. In an instant there is a traffic jam on the rocks as slow as the streets of Lagos. At least the view is good.
All part of a night in Africa, hiking towards the sun and to take in the moonlight. Where else but in Africa?

Between The Sun And  The Moon

It’s the last place I expected to catch a nap, but I did: lying in the dirt, hugging my body against the cold mountain rain on the edge of a cliff. Just behind my rocky makeshift bed was a sheer drop to the village of Quthing, 183 kilometers south of Maseru, the capital of Lesotho. From below, the squawks of chickens and barks of dogs drifted up as people went about their daily lives. In many ways it was a strange place to be, on a mundane day, on the verge of an ancient art discovery.
Hunkered under a rock five meters in front of me is Justine Wintjes, archaeologist and fine arts lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, who is also lying in the dirt. Under her keen eye is a rare rock art panel of stooped over black figures frozen for hundreds of years on the stone. Every now and again, her short cropped hair, black with a stripe of dyed pink fluorescent, bobs up and down as she sketches in the damp.
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“In Africa, you can’t walk two meters without finding an artefact,” she says.
It was because of a journey in the African bush to find lost rock art that Wintjes is on this cliff face in a remote part of southern Lesotho. With her is a pile of black-and-white photographs and dusty diary entries made from a long forgotten expedition 85 years ago. For generations it was buried in the archives in Frankfurt. They called it the Frobenius Expedition, after the German ethnographer Leo Frobenius. For the great grandparents of the people of Quthing the name might mean something, the last time this team climbed these hills on the hunt for rock art was in 1930.
“He only did one exploration in to southern Africa… I was working on a rock art site in northern KwaZulu-Natal [in the] Drakensberg… It was a very broken site and I knew that it had been recorded in the 1940s by people. But there was this earlier copy, which had been recorded by Frobenius. So I looked at that copy and I thought ‘well, if he made one copy, then maybe he made more than one.’”
It was a thought that took Wintjes on a six-year journey, from the hallways of academia in Johannesburg, to the archives of Frankfurt and finally the dirt roads of Lesotho.
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“I went to Frankfurt and I realized that there was this whole archive of photographs, copies and field notes about the site that were really informative. There were two trips made in 1928 and 1930, with quite a large archive and in various southern African countries. It was archaeology and cultures that no one had really looked at in close detail. I realized they had recorded a lot of sites,” she says.
Wintjes brought back piles of the jumbled Frobenius material to Africa where she began to catalogue it. As part of her PhD, she follows in the footsteps of their expedition.
“For its time [Frobenius] was very accurate. Around the same time, you had a lot of people reading into the exotic readings, like the White Lady of the Brandberg. It’s a really popular example of the Europeans looking at the rock art through the European lens, sort of a racist lens, thinking that it can’t be African, that it can’t be San Bushmen, or of African origin. That it had to be Phoenician or exotic to the continent.”
Wintjes and her team may have a host of digital gadgets to help guide them, but they still had to do good old fashioned legwork in Quthing. They needed the help of the people to find the locations.
“Nowadays, because of online digital data, you can do a lot of preparatory fieldwork. Fieldwork on the internet, looking through books, through archival material you have collected digitally. You get a really good sense of where things are. But you are never entirely certain. You get errors in the archival system, or things that are slightly misleading. For example, the two sites that we visited on this trip had the same name in the catalogue, but were in two very different sites. They were not even particularly close,” says Wintjes.
On a mild Saturday morning, the expedition follows up on a lead. They make a breakthrough when 22-year-old Tlhanole Thulo, clad in Basotho blanket and beanie, and his sister Thebane, in jeans and shirt, recognize one of Frobenius’ 85-year-old photographs. It is a chance meeting no internet connection could find. They recognize a river where they played when they grew up – a 20-minute walk from their home in Qomoqomong.
The team’s excitement is palpable as they jump out the vehicle and grab their gear. They follow the siblings along a goat path deeper into the gully. There, hidden behind a giant boulder, is the site. They stand there holding the 1930 photo to see if it fits; a rocky north-east facing overhang hiding a trove of paintings; impossible to see from a distance. Everyone grabs a pile of photographs and starts looking for a match.
“This cave, we call it Halephutha, we know about it from our parents. It shows us how old people were living. Sometimes it can tell us what they ate and how they lived,” says Tlhanole.
Wintjes’ role in African archaeology was as much chance as finding the cave itself. The South African grew up in Canada, studied fine arts and archaeology in Belgium, before coming back to South Africa 10 years ago.
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“To be honest I can’t remember why [I did archaeology]. It was a discipline that I was always interested in, history and pre-history. So it’s about the paintings, but also about the way they have been studied and the way they have been copied; the visual aspect to the rock painting. I just always loved old things. I was fascinated by ruins and abandoned buildings and old stuff.”
“I realized that through rock art I could combine my background in fine arts and archaeology. It was a place where they came together. At that point I felt a little bit schizophrenic. I wasn’t always very sure about what to do with these two very different worlds.”
“It’s a very exciting field particularly in Africa, given the antiquity we have on the continent. But there aren’t enough archaeologists, or art historians. There aren’t enough people interested in these fields. They really are important,” says Wintjes.
So, the team got on with their tasks; taking new photos, drawing sketches of rock art and struggling to geolocate their site under an infrequent GPS signal. So ends the discovery between a rock and a hard to place to find.

The Goat Path To Glory

Before it scraped the skies it had to pay a $4 road toll. The plane that can fly 500 kilometers an hour also caused a traffic jam for Sunday churchgoers as it trundled 40 kilometers from the factory along the N1 highway to the airfield. Amid all the confusion, it also needed a traffic permit and a police escort.
“The person in the toll gate didn’t know what to charge us. We were larger than a car, but the plane only had three wheels. In the end she let us decide. So we paid the maximum [$4] considering we had stopped the entire highway,” says Paul Potgieter Junior, Program Manager of ARHLAC Holdings, which worked with Paramount Group in designing and building the multi-purpose military aircraft.
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“We brought Pretoria to its knees on Sunday church time,” says Ivor Ichikowitz, Executive Chairman of Paramount Group, at the post flight briefing.
Nearly three months later, on a chilly August morning the advanced High-Performance Reconnaissance Light Aircraft (AHRLAC), worth $9 million, soared into the skies on its first public flight.
“This is without doubt a truly historic moment in the South African aerospace and aviation industry. What we have witnessed today has relevance for the whole country and the continent. It marks the rebirth of a dormant industry that has been devoid of innovation for years… this project proves we can build things in Africa and the world is noticing,” says Ichikowitz after the plane lands.
It took four years for 60 engineers and technicians, all African, working 315,000 hours, to do what many thought was crazy.
The ARHLAC can do four jobs in one, cutting costs. It can be fitted for combat, disaster management, intelligence gathering and surveillance within 4 hours.
Along with features like a pusher prop, which allows for unobstructed views in the cockpit, the plane can also carry an 800-kilogram payload; enough for a fighting wild fires from the air. It comes with rugged landing gear for harsh terrain.
“While it’s a terrific feat of South African engineering and a wonderful achievement to have designed, built and flown a new aircraft type, until the details of the proven flight envelope, its handling characteristics, range, payload and endurance are published, it is impossible for anyone to give an independent view of the aircraft,” says Linden Birns, MD of Plane Talking.
Potential customers will also want to know the costs of service plans, its spare parts and its lifespan, an issue all new planes face, says Birns.
“This was the challenge that faced Denel in 1994/95 when it tried to sell Rooivalk to Malaysia and other nations &#8211; the new South Africa had just been born and there was uncertainty about Denel’s future and that it might not be around to support the helicopter in the long term.”
In the near future, Paramount plans to make 30 planes a year. That will amount to a lot of toll fees.
Before it scraped the skies it had to pay a $4 road toll. The plane that can fly 500 kilometers an hour also caused a traffic jam for Sunday churchgoers as it trundled 40 kilometers from the factory along the N1 highway to the airfield. Amid all the confusion, it also needed a traffic permit and a police escort.
“The person in the toll gate didn’t know what to charge us. We were larger than a car, but the plane only had three wheels. In the end she let us decide. So we paid the maximum [$4] considering we had stopped the entire highway,” says Paul Potgieter Junior, Program Manager of ARHLAC Holdings, which worked with Paramount Group in designing and building the multi-purpose military aircraft.
“We brought Pretoria to its knees on Sunday church time,” says Ivor Ichikowitz, Executive Chairman of Paramount Group, at the post
flight briefing.
Nearly three months later, on a chilly August morning the advanced High-Performance Reconnaissance Light Aircraft (AHRLAC), worth $9 million, soared into the skies on its first public flight.
“This is without doubt a truly historic moment in the South African aerospace and aviation industry. What we have witnessed today has relevance for the whole country and the continent. It marks the rebirth of a dormant industry that has been devoid of innovation for years… this project proves we can build things in Africa and the world is noticing,” says Ichikowitz after the plane lands.
It took four years for 60 engineers and technicians, all African, working 315,000 hours, to do what many thought was crazy.
The ARHLAC can do four jobs in one, cutting costs. It can be fitted for combat, disaster management, intelligence gathering and surveillance within 4 hours.
Along with features like a pusher prop, which allows for unobstructed views in the cockpit, the plane can also carry an 800-kilogram payload; enough for a fighting wild fires from the air. It comes with rugged landing gear for harsh terrain.
“While it’s a terrific feat of South African engineering and a wonderful achievement to have designed, built and flown a new aircraft type, until the details of the proven flight envelope, its handling characteristics, range, payload and endurance are published, it is impossible for anyone to give an independent view of the aircraft,” says Linden Birns, MD of Plane Talking.
Potential customers will also want to know the costs of service plans, its spare parts and its lifespan, an issue all new planes face, says Birns.
“This was the challenge that faced Denel in 1994/95 when it tried to sell Rooivalk to Malaysia and other nations &#8211; the new South Africa had just been born and there was uncertainty about Denel’s future and that it might not be around to support the helicopter in the long term.”
In the near future, Paramount plans to make 30 planes a year. That will amount to a lot of toll fees.

Is It A Car? Is It A Plane?

On December 1, 1997, David Kinjah won a cycle race in Kenya on a day that was to change his life and help shape the future winner of the Tour de France.
As Kinjah sat high in the saddle, flushed with victory, Jane Froome walked up with her 12-year-old son, Chris.
“The mum was introducing the boy to the guy who won the race,” says Kinjah.
Froome said she tried to enter her son, but found there was no junior category. She asked Kinjah to train young Chris.
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That moment sowed the seed of a Tour de France victory and turned Kinjah into training a string of Kenyan cyclists.
A week later, Froome went to visit Kinjah in Muguga, his village—a 20-minute drive from Nairobi.
“The mother was a bit unsure and afraid about bringing Chris to the village. Chris was shy and not such a strong rider. But he loved bikes and soon opened up and enjoyed the village life. With time, the mother was now a bit more comfortable with him coming to the village,” says Kinjah.
In the steep hills around the village, Froome gathered the power that was to drive him over the finish line in Paris. By the time he went to school in South Africa, the cycling world was opening up.
“He saw how big a sport cycling is and he connected with what we were doing here. When he came back to Kenya for school holidays he was much more energized and we would spend weeks camping and riding,” says Kinjah.
On July 28, Kinjah and the Safari Simbaz team rode to Muguga, to celebrate Froome’s victory.
“There has been a lot of buzz in the local and international press wanting to know what we are doing after a Kenyan born rider went on to win the tour,” says Kinjah.
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Kinjah, 41, was born in Kenya’s Rift Valley, in the town of Eldoret, where his dad worked as a manager at a textile firm. He was the fourth born in a family of seven. When he was six, the family moved to the coastal town of Mombasa.
“I was never interested in bicycles because I played a lot of table tennis and was an altar boy at a catholic church in Mombasa,” he says.
In his free time, he played beach soccer and volleyball. The only problem was the beach was 20km from home.
In 1994, Kinjah spent $11 pocket money on a BMX bike, so he could pedal to the beach.
“Slowly the other cyclists on the road started to be my competition. I used to ride harder and faster so that they [were] not passing me. I used to enter into all these unofficial competitions on the road,” he says.
Kinjah began fixing and modifying his own bike. His father, who was a manager at a steel factory, helped him with spanners and spares, but that is as far as it went.
“My dad was harsh when I started cycling. He never supported my cycling. But even though my mum did not have money she was curious to see what I was doing with the bike,” he says.
On the road, he met cyclists like Patrick Tindi and Sabry Mohammed, who competed in races in Mombasa.
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“Tindi is one of the guys who had confidence in me and he paid for my ticket to attend my first national race,” he says.
Matthews Maina was another Kenyan cyclist who taught Kinjah racing strategy. Despite this, his first race proved a disaster.
“The race was 120 kilometers but I was naïve and started off very fast and by the 70th kilometer I was burnt out, so I blacked out in a bush,” he says.
Kinjah went on to win national races and competed in the 1995 All Africa Games, in Zimbabwe. He rode professionally in Europe and rode a 2,500km race in Australia.
In 2000, he founded the Safari Simbaz, which trains around 20 youngsters aged between 15 and 23. One day, he hopes to set up an academy with Froome.
For now, Kinjah’s star pupil is covered in Tour de France glory and his once skeptical father is now his number one fan.

Tag: Kilometers

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

The rugged Road To Tokyo?

Between The Sun And The Moon

The Goat Path To Glory

Is It A Car? Is It A Plane?

The Kenyan Who Powered A Shy Boy To Glory