The Year That Wasn't But We Made It Happen Anyway

How did that happen? Will our grandchildren believe us? Filter out the almost overwhelming doom and gloom from the most miserable year in recent memory, and there’s actually quite a lot to be cheerful about – if you ride a bike.

- Tim Brink

Queen Elizabeth II, reflecting on the most challenging year she’d ever faced, officially and personally: “1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an annus horribilis.”

2020: “Hold my beer.”

Cycling matters were going swimmingly in early March of 2020. The Cape Town Cycle Tour was a wind-free success, Team NTT was winning a race or two, Wout van Aert was back after his horrific 2019 TdF crash, and Remco Evenepoel was continuing to plough a Merckx-esque win-everything furrow through professional cycling.

We crowned a new SA road champ in the slender shape of sprinter Ryan Gibbons, who would carry the national flag on his back to the Champs-Élysées six months later. Daryl Impey and Ashleigh Moolman-Pasio had carried their exemplary 2019 form into the new year. The stage was set for a great South African Absa Cape Epic, with a clutch of local teams in with a chance of winning stages and overall.

And then, cough by dry cough, Covid’s destructive tendrils started suffocating sport, and the world in general. The Cape Epic was the first major cycling casualty, forced to cancel less than 12 hours before the riders were due to line up for their UCT time trial…

If ‘holding my beer’ was a sport, Covid was to become the undisputed world champion – virtually overnight, and uncontested for months.