Ballito mountain bikers bring home three silver medals from SA Enduro Champs
Amber Cole, Troy Cole and Christopher Mason were the local triumvirate, all of whom race for the Sugar Rats Club.
Three of Ballito’s best young mountain bikers recently took on the South African Enduro Championships, all securing silver medals in the process.
Amber Cole (16), Troy Cole (13) and Christopher Mason (12) were the local triumvirate, all of whom race for the Sugar Rats Club.
They travelled to Nelspruit for the event, facing off against the country’s best cyclists in their age groups on September 17 and 18.
“It’s really tough! You need to have a combination of speed, technical skills and control if you want to do well on most enduro courses,” said Amber.
Enduro is one of four main mountain biking disciplines, alongside XCO (cross-country), marathon and downhill.
It is something of a mix of the other three, asking riders to show speed across five or six short stages, which are set at different points on a long course to test endurance too.
This leads to a situation where riders might be on the course for five hours, but their actual time for scoring purposes is less than 20 minutes.
“In my age group we do the full course, so six stages over 34km. There were a few tricky passages, one of which I fell on during a warm-up session, so I had to remain focused,” she said.
Amber led the youth female section over the first stage, but ultimately lost out to gold medalist Danika Botha.
Her time of 20:38 was also good enough for fifth overall among all women on the day, including the elite age group.
Troy’s sub-junior category was one of the closest fought in the whole event, with him and Daniel Uys fighting tooth and nail for each stage.
“It was so tight the whole time, where I would win back a few seconds and then Daniel would take it on the next stage, it was a good test,” he said.
Eventually, Troy finished just nine seconds behind Uys with a time of 17:42.
In Christoper’s sprog event, the race covered five stages instead of six owing to upper limits on distance for the youngsters.
He lost a few seconds early on, but fought back well to finish just 20 seconds off of first to grab Ballito’s third silver medal in a time of 18:08.
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