With less than two weeks to go until the Absa Cape Epic, Qhubeka is pleased to introduce you to some more of the amazing people who will be tackling the event for us or fundraising for Qhubeka. If you missed it, here are the first and second posts we published, showcasing some of our other teams for 2016.
Thomas Geissel and Geir Ole Reiakvam
Thomas and Geir Ole are Team 4 wheels for Qhubeka and are riding their first Epic together in 2016. Thomas (50) is German and Geir Ole (40) is Norwegian. “It is our goal to ride and finish Cape Epic, one of the toughest MTB races worldwide. An additional incentive and honor for us is to support with this project the idea of Qhubeka, to help children, to give them mobility on two wheels for better access to education, the key to live self-determined,” say Thomas and Geir Ole.
Marc and Filip – Team Money & Steel
Marc (50) and Filip (48), one of two Belgian teams riding for Qhubeka, have been lifelong friends. This is their first Absa Cape Epic. In fact, they have never raced a multiple stage mountain bike race before, although they are experienced race bikers and have ridden several races all over Europe. They realized that they had climbed almost every mountain in Europe with their race bikes and decided was time for something new.
Filip is a bank director for the BKCP bank and Marc works in the metal industry and is the owner of a manufacturing company. That’s the reason they choose ‘Money and Steel’ as the name for their team as one works in ‘money’ and the other one works in ‘steel’.
“The ‘Money’ we will give to Qhubeka, and the ‘Steel’ stands for a steely resilience which we will need if they want to finish the Epic!” they say. “We applied to the Qhubeka invitation for the Epic and were thrilled to be chosen. Qhubeka is very well known after the splendid achievements Team MTN-Qhubeka (now Team Dimension Data for Qhubeka) had in the Tour de France of 2015. The choice to support Qhubeka was obvious for us because they both like what Qhubeka stands for and admire the outstanding work they do.”
You can follow and support Team Money & Steel on their blog, Moneyandsteel.wordpress.com. 
Additional teams supporting Qhubeka
The following teams have decided to support Qhubeka, despite not being official Qhubeka entries in the Absa Cape Epic. We are thrilled and grateful for their support!
Dirk Pauling and Thomas Oberli
“Dirk and I are ABSA Cape Epic riders in 2016,” says Thomas. “We entered the race through charity supporting the Cape Leopard Trust. In the 2009, 2010 and 2013 Cape Epic races, we supported the Big Tree Foundation. Part of the amount we transferred was used to buy bicycles for children. Over the past three Absa Cape Epic we raced, this support has become a tradition. Since Big Tree is not an official charity anymore, I am happy to announce that we will support Qhubeka with your efforts to offer bikes to kids. At the moment, I think it is safe to say that we will be able to transfer R50 000.00.”
You can follow Dirk and Thomas at bike2help.ch.
Aurélien Veyssier and Olivier Cornil
“We are two mountain bikers living in Paris, France, preparing our first participation for the Absa Cape Epic in March 2016. When we searched for information about Cape Epic and South Africa, we discovered the social aspect of the race. We didn’t know that the event took place near townships and that there were so many disadvantaged people in Cape town.”
Aurélien and Olivier decided to think about what they could do to help. “We didn’t want only raise money, we wanted to find a concrete way to help. We decided to raise money to give 10 bikes to South African children after reading an article about World Bicycle Relief (WBR) in the french MTB magazine VeloVert.” Aurélien and Olivier knew about Qhubeka because of Team Dimension Data for Qhubeka, but they hadn’t realised that Qhubeka was part of WBR.”
You can follow Aurélien and Olivier on Facebook and their website, as well as taking a look at their English brochure.
Lentine and Bud
Lentine, from Skratch Labs, and Bud, from Oakley, have raised funds for 40 bicycles for Qhubeka programmes and are not planning on stopping there!
Explaining their motivation, they write: “We hope that by accepting the challenge of racing Cape Epic, we inspire women around the world to want to get out on their bikes. But we know that through this experience we actually have the power to PUT women on bikes. We’ve partnered with World Bicycle Relief/Qhubeka and Trek Bicycles to visit several grassroots projects in South Africa that share the power of bicycles with women and their communities; it is our goal to deliver 65 bicycles to these projects in the backyard of the prestigious Cape Epic, significantly boosting their efforts, and capturing the stories of how bicycles are helping women to be a epic, everyday on film.”
You can find out more about them on their website, Epic Everyday, on Instagram or at Lentine’s blog.
