Swedish National Champ and Kargo Pro MTB ace Emil Lindgren will partner Under-23 team mate Brendon Daivds at this year’s ABSA Cape Epic that gets underway in Cape Town on Sunday. \/\/ Supplied\/ Gameplan Media.<\/span><\/p>\nThe 2015 Epic will be Davids\u2019 debut appearance at the international spectacle while Lindgren\u2019s fourth Cape Epic appearance represents the primary focus the Swedish National Cross Country Champion\u2019s seven week early season stint in South Africa.<\/p>\n
Both however list the UCI MTB World Cup as their primary focus of the 2015 calendar though and hope their Cape Epic effort will hold them in good stead ahead of the opening leg in Czech Republic in May.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m really looking forward to the challenge of the Epic!\u201d says Davids. \u201cIt is such a big event and will require me to take my body to new levels more than once!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThrough Shaun (Peschl) and the Kargo team as well as my coach, Jeroen Swart, we\u2019ve got a really good support structure so we\u2019re definitely going to give it a good tonk!<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m confident the test of the Epic will also benefit us both hugely going forward, especially at the World Cups which is our real focus of the year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Surprisingly the pair only met for the first time on Lindgren\u2019s arrival in South Africa a couple of weeks ago, however the adjustment to racing together has been a relatively simple one.<\/p>\n
\u201cGetting to know Emil and us gelling as a combination has actually been pretty seamless,\u201d says Davids.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Epic is all new to me so I\u2019m really lucky to have someone like Emil to help me through it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere will be patches where I\u2019ll just have to suck it up and push through the pain but Emil was a similar age to what I am now when he did his first Epic so if anyone understands what I\u2019ll be going through, he does!\u201d<\/p>\n
Just as the Mother City appears to have doused a flurry of devastating fires that set much of the Southern Peninsula ablaze for eight long days, the Western Cape\u2019s fire fighters have been sent into overdrive once more as a runaway veld fire saw Jonkershoek break out in flames on Monday 9 March.<\/p>\n
With the fire reportedly nearing a portion of the Cape Epic route, Lindgren and Davids joined fellow cyclists in donating their winning from the Aramex songo.info Champions race to a local cause with the pair choosing to help the local fire fighting effort.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re staying in Stellenbosch and to see the fire go around the mountain towards where we\u2019ll be riding over the next couple of days is pretty scary!\u201d explains Davids.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe trails in Jonkershoek are apparently almost entirely gone and portions of the University had to be evacuated on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has been unbelievable how the whole town has pulled together to try fight the fire though!<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople have been taking food parcels to their local bikes who in turn have then taken the food out to the hungry, tired fire fighters in the mountains.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of the guys such as like Fabian Giger chose to give their winnings to organisations such as songo.info but we felt that the work that the firemen and women to get the fire under control has been unreal!<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery R500, or even just R200, helps at this stage and so that\u2019s who we donated our prize money to,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n
More info is available at www.peschlracing.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Viewed by many as 2015 ABSA Cape Epic \u2018underdogs\u2019, Kargo Pro MTB\u2019s Swedish\/ South African duo of Emil Lindgren and Brendon Davids are confident their recent good run of form in the local cross country scene will stand them in good stead to spring a few surprises at Sunday\u2019s prologue in Cape Town. Lindgren and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":49244,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[76,959,24,4293,4302],"featured_location":[],"class_list":["post-20358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-events","tag-absa-cape-epic","tag-brendon-davids","tag-cape-epic","tag-emil-lindgren","tag-kargo-pro-mtb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikehub.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikehub.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikehub.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikehub.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikehub.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bikehub.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikehub.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bikehub.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikehub.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikehub.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20358"},{"taxonomy":"featured_location","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bikehub.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/featured_location?post=20358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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