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The joke around Cape Town is that the organisers of the Cape Argus Pick n Pay Cycle Tour will be charging Lance Armstrong double the usual entry fee for entering the race late.
They can't make up their mind whether he should be starting in the VA group for veteran riders 30-39 or the OA open group for unseeded riders. LA in OA has a certain ring about it.
The Cycle Tour is pretty much the be-all and end-all of cycling in South Africa - the race everyone wants to do once in their lives.
Even Armstrong was convinced to spend an extra few days in Cape Town to take part in a race that has become a model for how fun rides should be run the world over.
Now Armstrong can finally answer the question every South African would ask him upon finding out he was a cyclist: "Jissie, ou, you ride, hey? So, what's your time for the Argus?"
Yup, it's still unofficially called the Argus despite the best intentions of the organisers and sponsors to change it. It will always be so after the Cape Argus became involved with it years ago.
It has proved to be the best marketing decision anyone in newspapers has ever made in the country. You can't buy that sort of publicity.
On Sunday, God and Dave Bellairs willing, I will record my 10th Cape Argus Pick n Pay Cycle Tour, a decade of Argus riding. I have, however, only got eight times on the official records after the timing bit of my timing chip got tired on the 2005 race and left me somewhere between the start and Green Point.
I have missed just one since an ex-girlfriend, Kara, suggested/challenged me to ride in 2000. It was a nightmare beginning.
I fell over in my new cleats on my Sunn mountain bike (a French tart of a bike) before the race started; got into the wrong group, PG instead of PC, broke my cleat in the start pen, punctured on the Eastern Boulevard and was wired on painkillers for the ligaments I had torn in my ankle playing football three nights before. I finished a few minutes before five hours and utterly hated and loved it.
It's become an addiction, a tradition that I can't grow out of. The race is visually stunning, not too testing (although the inclusion of Boyes Drive sucks) and the finish beside the new stadium in Green Point welcoming. On Sunday, I'll be in a media challenge with some other blokes, some of them even journalists.
Jon Gericke and Gareth Edwards of e.tv are my targets, though. The trash talking has been tough, the training decent leaning to good. Ten Cycle Tours here I come.
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