Beat Burry Stander (Specialized) and win the MTN Tulbagh ultra-marathon.

Seeing that Stander knows only one way of racing, namely from the front, this is most likely what the race on Saturday (18 February) will boil down to. It is safe to predict that he will attack the first time that the going gets tough.

By winning the second stage of the DCM Pioneer Trek yesterday (Tuesday, 18 October), Max Knox (Ghost) and Christoph Sauser (Songo.info) proved that you can’t keep a good team down. Kevin Evans and David George from Team 360 Life held onto the leaders jersey after a dominant stage 1 victory.

The winning time for the stage (from Calitzdorp to Riversdale) was 5 hours 23 minutes and 25 seconds.

To become the first rider to complete a hat trick of victories at the MTN Ride Crater Cruise in Parys could be very tempting for many riders, but Kevin Evans (360Life), the most successful rider in the history of the Crater Cruise, is an exception.

‘Naturally I would not mind winning the MTN Ride Crater Cruise for a third time in a row, but on Saturday (8 September) we have ‘bigger fish to fry’.

In the run-up to the Hilton MTB Dirt Fest in KwaZulu-Natal two weeks ago, all and sundry were still very flustered about the fact that any of five riders could potentially still walk away with the MTN National Marathon MTB Series title for 2011. Now there are two…

Five of South Africa’s top mountain bikers, Adrien Niyonshuti and Jacques Janse van Rensburg (both MTN-Qhubeka); Kevin Evans and David George (both 360Life) and Max Knox (Ghost) and Mannie Heymans (Garmin adidas) share the same goal. They all want to be the overall winner of the MTN Ultra-marathon series.

The battle for the overall supremacy in MTN’s National ultra marathon series will start in earnest tomorrow morning when all of the “top dogs” line up at the start for the MTN Gravel Travel event just outside Wellington at Diemersfontein wine farm.

If David George (360Life) wins he will have ensured that he will also take the overall honors as he will have a near unassailable lead. He already won the MTN Attakwas and MTN Tulbagh and was second at the MTN Barberton.

‘Down but not out’. This is probably the best way to describe Adrien Niyonshuti (Team MTN Qhubeka)’s experience last weekend (30-31 August) when he raced against some of the world’s best cross-country riders on the course that had been designed for next year’s London Olympic Games.