Roof of Africa THIRD WIN

This years Roof of Africa Rally had a new format, new terrain, new riders but thankfully the same winner, me!

This is the third time I’ve ridden this three day race in the Malooti mountains in Lesotho. Its a similar format to Red Bull Romaniacs but the terrain is totally different. The roof is all about rocks, big rocks, little rocks and thousands of round rocks that roll around under the bike and make it really hard work to get up the mountain passes. I was again racing with the Brother, Broadlink KTM team on the weapon of choice a KTM300XCW.

This year I had a harder time of it, in the past I have been able to run away and hide out front from the start but with the change of format making it easier for the first two days I had little or no chance to clear off. After the first 100km day there was only two minutes between 1st and 5th, after day two there was ten minutes between first and 6th so it wasn’t until the truly extreme mountain climbs towards the end of the last day that I was able to get a good lead going. I pulled ten minutes on one climb up to around 3000m and once the guys could no longer see me I was able to stretch my lead to about twenty minutes.

I had some tough times on this years ride, I dropped it at around fifty kph on the tar seal “round the houses” section, I drowned my bike in a river and had a scary high speed crash in the last ten kilometres. All that made it much better when I got finish at the top of one of the many ugly rock infested climbs that the Roof is famous for.

The South African enduro fans were again out in force and made the last climb a joy to ride. I could hear the crowd shouting from almost a kilometre away and crossing the finish line was a huge feeling of relief, success and exhaustion!