What if Team MTN-Qhubeka were to sign Chris Froome?

[Agteros]

The Thread title is deliberately very misleading...

I fix.

fix 2

[rpedro]

Surely some of the guys in the list must have been in discussion with MTN. And with the points they hold MTN could be in the tour as early as next year (2013).....

 

Anycase just me dreaming :-D

['Dale]

Cool dream, rpedro!

[arendoog]

Surely some of the guys in the list must have been in discussion with MTN. And with the points they hold MTN could be in the tour as early as next year (2013).....

 

Anycase just me dreaming :-D

MTN want a black cycling team in tdf, not a white only team who are all african born and bred . Nice DREAM !

[Danger Dassie]

Cycling is showing a lot of growth and interest on the continent, much like running and soccer. Given the parallel between cycling as a sport as well as transport, it makes perfect sense.

Riders from Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Eritrea have shown massive potential with the right support. These guys have been able to show performances under conditions that'd make most of us give up at the beginning.

 

From the launch/gala dinner it was stated;

 

The goal is to have an African team at TdF within the next 3-5 years. Comprising of an approximate mix of 60/40 - 70/30 percent African/Euro pro riders, possibly developing the team closer to a 100% African rider profile.

 

http://www.qhubeka.org/2012/2012/06/mtn-to-pursue-tour-de-france-dream-with-mtn-qhubeka/

[rpedro]

MTN want a black cycling team in tdf, not a white only team who are all african born and bred . Nice DREAM !

 

I will respond to your post in a few years time. Its going to go something like "I told u so !!!" . Just kidding my fellow african.

[arendoog]

 

 

I will respond to your post in a few years time. Its going to go something like "I told u so !!!" . Just kidding my fellow african.

If it comes out of a black mouth it is called a suggestion.If it comes out of a white mouth it is called a racist remark.Let me fetch the polish ,i might just make that team

[Danger Dassie]

If it comes out of a black mouth it is called a suggestion.If it comes out of a white mouth it is called a racist remark.Let me fetch the polish ,i might just make that team

 

If you remove that chip, you'll find they have a definite plan based around performance, regardless of race. It has to be, to gain entry to the TdF.

The black riders on that team have earned their place as much as anyone.

Most likely anyone of them will ride you of their wheel.

[rpedro]

If it comes out of a black mouth it is called a suggestion.If it comes out of a white mouth it is called a racist remark.Let me fetch the polish ,i might just make that team

 

No need for polish and yada yada......if your legs can do the talking then you will be in the MTN dream team.

[Wez-O]

The kits has been approved by the UCI and they will race in Europe next yr and Hopefully at the TDF in 2014. But only half the team is from RSA rest is up North. This is what i am told how true this is not 100% sure.

Interesting, thanks.

[Wez-O]

MTN want a black cycling team in tdf, not a white only team who are all african born and bred . Nice DREAM !

How about MTN just enter the best 6 South African riders irrespective of colour (who cares about riders from the rest of Africa, except perhaps a mountain goat from Kenya) and then add three old timer international riders with a lot of tour experiance such as a Horner or Voigt. Sorted!

[Azonic]

Now that would be something if Team MTN-Qhubeka had to sign:

• Chris Froome
  
• Darryl Impey
  
• Robert Hunter
  
• John-Lee Augustyn
  
• Burry Stander (we must get a MTBiker in the team to keep Sagan honest :-)
  
• Reinard Janse van Rensburg
  
• Darren Lill
  
• ........
  

 

1. JLA doesn't ride Pro anymore.

2. Would be a HUGE move backwards for Froome to ride for MTN. Anything but the worlds top two teams would be a move backwards.

[Shebeen]

http://www.hauterout...aute_route_2012

 

 

Cycling enthusiasts from all over the globe will come together on the start line of the Haute Route in Geneva on 19th August 2012. Lawyers from England, doctors from Brazil, even an Olympic medallist from New Zealand, will be among 600 riders who will test themselves to the very limits for the World’s highest and toughest cyclosportive.

Among the participants is a team of seven unique cyclists: The Kenyan Riders. These dedicated individuals have a dream to be the first black African team to participate in the most prestigious professional cycling races over the next few years. As an important milestone towards this goal, the Haute Route will provide the team with vital experience of a multi-stage event in the mountains. Aged between 24-29, the Kenyan Riders will scale 21,000m during the seven-day event from Geneva to Nice between 19th and 25th August 2012.

http://www.hauteroute.org/images/hauteroute_2012/Kenyan_Riders_1_web.jpg

In 2006, visionary entrepreneur Nicholas Leong from Singapore arrived in the tiny village of Iten in Western Kenya to start recruiting cyclists. Iten is famous for producing some of the greatest distance running champions of all time, and Leong wanted to see if was possible to nurture this hub of talent to perform on two wheels. Emulating the same successful training techniques that had been used in the region to develop running talent, he put together a training programme using culturally relevant methods. The result is a fascinating project built on the belief and determination that one day the Kenyan Riders will make the start line – and hopefully the podium - of the world’s most famous professional cycling race.

Speaking about the 7 riders who will take on the 780km Haute Route challenge in August, Leong described the make up of the team, “We have a multi-tribal team. Most come from rural areas and none of them completed secondary school. These are hard men... they have dug 10 meter boreholes with their hands and simple tools, hauled 90kg sacks of corn up hills, endured abandonment and deaths in their families, and generally experienced deprivation throughout their lives.” Almost all of them use a bicycle, the basic 1-geared Black Mamba, in some capacity in their daily lives.

 

 

 

http://www.kenyanriders.com/

 

http://www.telegraph...um-Cycling.html

 

Here's an interesting fact: despite being recognised through their distance running as among the finest endurance athletes on the planet, no Kenyan or Ethiopian has ever ridden the Tour de France. In fact, no Kenyan, Ethiopian or black African of any nation has ever become a professional cyclist.

 

Team GB's prodigious success in the saddle in Beijing drew a degree of rather measly sniping along these lines. It seems unfair to disparage the achievements of individual athletes, who can only beat the field in front of them. But the fact remains. Africans don't cycle - and for a variety of reasons, mainly to do with habit and tradition, but also things like start-up costs and prohibitively expensive racing technology.

 

For the first time, however, there is a suggestion this might not always be the case. Last month two amateur Kenyan cyclists, Zakayo Nderi, a shoe-shiner by trade, and Samwel Myangi, a 24-year-old bicycle taxi rider, performed a time trial on the Alpe D'Huez, a blue chip Tour stage finish. This is a serious test: 13.8km at an average gradient of 7.9% with 21 hairpin bends.

 

Zakayo and Myangi rode in a traditional Thursday morning mass time-trial. After a hugely promising 46-minute opening stab, they emerged with best times of 42 minutes for Zackary and 43 minutes for Myangi. These would have placed the riders comfortably within the top 50 in the 2004 Tour de France time trial, five minutes down on Lance Armstrong's winning mark that year.

 

At this point it's worth stressing a few things about the two riders. Neither had ever been to Europe before. It had taken an exhausting 18-month struggle just to secure 20-day visas to enter the country. Neither has had any coaching - either in terms of physical conditioning or the technical business of the bike itself. These are complete amateurs. Their only previous cycling experience involved riding around pot-holed Kenyan roads on the infamous Black Mamba bike, a 20kg beast with no gears.

 

As novice first attempts, the times on the Alpe are stunning. Not to mention a huge fillip for the driving force behind getting them there, Nicholas Leong, a cycling enthusiast and long-time Tour de France follower. "I'm doing this as a fan," he says of a project that has so far eaten up all his savings from his primary career as a commercial photographer. It's a process that has also involved a great deal of faith.

 

"I'd seen the first black players turning up in English football and the first black African athletes winning marathons in the 1990s," he says. "I always expected an African to turn up in cycling and it didn't happen."

 

Leong's inspiration ultimately came from the Singapore marathon. The men's race has been won by a Kenyan runner for the past six years. In 2006 13 of the first 15 places were filled by Kenyans, who were in town as part of their annual tour of the global road-racing circuit.

 

The day after the race Leong bought an air ticket to Nairobi, gambling, correctly, that the runners he had seen would be leaving on the same plane: "I said to them, 'wherever you're going, I'm coming with you'."

 

Fortunately, his companions on the flight were from Eldoret, a town that sits 2100 metres above sea level and has provided the rump of Kenya's recent distance running talent. It was there that Leong began trying to lure some of the town's amateur runners into the switch to cycling. "I wasted a lot of time doing that," he says. 'They weren't interested."

 

In the end he came across a local cycling club whose members staged ad hoc races. Leong picked out the four most talented riders and offered to train them for a couple of months in Singapore ("I just gave them a bike and said 'ride as fast as you can'"). Eventually the two quickest, Zakayo and Myangi, were taken to France for their shot at the Alpe.

 

Zakayo's English is halting. He says training has been "very difficult" but "exciting" and that he "would like to compete in the Tour de France, that is my dream".

 

Dreams have been important in all this. Before meeting Leong Zakayo would get up at 5am and train on his own, cycling 50km before doing a full day's work as a shoe-shine. He had no clear purpose in mind. Shortly before Leong arrived his wife had had a dream that someone would come and take him away on a mission. And so it proved.

 

The brief spell in Singapore saw the Kenyans sit on a proper racing bike for the first time. "It was much faster than a Black Mamba," Zakayo chuckles. "It felt really good. At first I did have some crashes. It was just so fast."

 

Before the time trial Zakayo had another dream, one in which he killed a lion. If the lion wasn't exactly slain this time around, it certainly ought to be looking slightly warily over its shoulder. "I can go faster, definitely, much faster," he says, matter-of-factly. "Now I know the course I can go much faster. It was all new for me before. Next time I will be much better."

 

Leong's goal is to set up a permanent presence in Kenya, an academy with regular competitions, which might act as a feeder system for professional teams. For that to happen he needs sponsors, coaches, anybody with expertise who might be willing to take a punt on a stunning novice performance in France.

 

"I started this because the people with the most potential have not been given the chance to cycle," he says. "There's so much talent there, even if it's not this generation of riders who manage to do something amazing, maybe the next will."

 

Leong is certainly a trailblazer. And one, perhaps, with the tide of history on his side.

 

By way of an example: the first ever Singapore marathon was won by Britain's Ray Crabbe in 1982. It was 15 years before Africans began to compete. In 2006 a Kenyan, Elijah Mbogo, won it in a time over 23 minutes quicker than Crabbe's.

 

Cycling, you have been warned.

 

 

edit:font size

Edited July 24, 2012 by The Dictator

[gummibear]

Now that would be something if Team MTN-Qhubeka had to sign:

• Chris Froome
  
• Darryl Impey
  
• Robert Hunter
  
• John-Lee Augustyn
  
• Burry Stander (we must get a MTBiker in the team to keep Sagan honest :-)
  
• Reinard Janse van Rensburg
  
• Darren Lill
  
• ........
  

 

They would need a huge budget for the salaries alone.

[Andymann]

http://www.hauterout...aute_route_2012

 

 

 

 

Cycling enthusiasts from all over the globe will come together on the start line of the Haute Route in Geneva on 19th August 2012. Lawyers from England, doctors from Brazil, even an Olympic medallist from New Zealand, will be among 600 riders who will test themselves to the very limits for the World’s highest and toughest cyclosportive.

Among the participants is a team of seven unique cyclists: The Kenyan Riders. These dedicated individuals have a dream to be the first black African team to participate in the most prestigious professional cycling races over the next few years. As an important milestone towards this goal, the Haute Route will provide the team with vital experience of a multi-stage event in the mountains. Aged between 24-29, the Kenyan Riders will scale 21,000m during the seven-day event from Geneva to Nice between 19th and 25th August 2012.

http://www.hauteroute.org/images/hauteroute_2012/Kenyan_Riders_1_web.jpg

In 2006, visionary entrepreneur Nicholas Leong from Singapore arrived in the tiny village of Iten in Western Kenya to start recruiting cyclists. Iten is famous for producing some of the greatest distance running champions of all time, and Leong wanted to see if was possible to nurture this hub of talent to perform on two wheels. Emulating the same successful training techniques that had been used in the region to develop running talent, he put together a training programme using culturally relevant methods. The result is a fascinating project built on the belief and determination that one day the Kenyan Riders will make the start line – and hopefully the podium - of the world’s most famous professional cycling race.

Speaking about the 7 riders who will take on the 780km Haute Route challenge in August, Leong described the make up of the team, “We have a multi-tribal team. Most come from rural areas and none of them completed secondary school. These are hard men... they have dug 10 meter boreholes with their hands and simple tools, hauled 90kg sacks of corn up hills, endured abandonment and deaths in their families, and generally experienced deprivation throughout their lives.” Almost all of them use a bicycle, the basic 1-geared Black Mamba, in some capacity in their daily lives.

 

 

 

http://www.kenyanriders.com/

 

http://www.telegraph...um-Cycling.html

 

Here's an interesting fact: despite being recognised through their distance running as among the finest endurance athletes on the planet, no Kenyan or Ethiopian has ever ridden the Tour de France. In fact, no Kenyan, Ethiopian or black African of any nation has ever become a professional cyclist.

 

Team GB's prodigious success in the saddle in Beijing drew a degree of rather measly sniping along these lines. It seems unfair to disparage the achievements of individual athletes, who can only beat the field in front of them. But the fact remains. Africans don't cycle - and for a variety of reasons, mainly to do with habit and tradition, but also things like start-up costs and prohibitively expensive racing technology.

 

For the first time, however, there is a suggestion this might not always be the case. Last month two amateur Kenyan cyclists, Zakayo Nderi, a shoe-shiner by trade, and Samwel Myangi, a 24-year-old bicycle taxi rider, performed a time trial on the Alpe D'Huez, a blue chip Tour stage finish. This is a serious test: 13.8km at an average gradient of 7.9% with 21 hairpin bends.

 

Zakayo and Myangi rode in a traditional Thursday morning mass time-trial. After a hugely promising 46-minute opening stab, they emerged with best times of 42 minutes for Zackary and 43 minutes for Myangi. These would have placed the riders comfortably within the top 50 in the 2004 Tour de France time trial, five minutes down on Lance Armstrong's winning mark that year.

 

At this point it's worth stressing a few things about the two riders. Neither had ever been to Europe before. It had taken an exhausting 18-month struggle just to secure 20-day visas to enter the country. Neither has had any coaching - either in terms of physical conditioning or the technical business of the bike itself. These are complete amateurs. Their only previous cycling experience involved riding around pot-holed Kenyan roads on the infamous Black Mamba bike, a 20kg beast with no gears.

 

As novice first attempts, the times on the Alpe are stunning. Not to mention a huge fillip for the driving force behind getting them there, Nicholas Leong, a cycling enthusiast and long-time Tour de France follower. "I'm doing this as a fan," he says of a project that has so far eaten up all his savings from his primary career as a commercial photographer. It's a process that has also involved a great deal of faith.

 

"I'd seen the first black players turning up in English football and the first black African athletes winning marathons in the 1990s," he says. "I always expected an African to turn up in cycling and it didn't happen."

 

Leong's inspiration ultimately came from the Singapore marathon. The men's race has been won by a Kenyan runner for the past six years. In 2006 13 of the first 15 places were filled by Kenyans, who were in town as part of their annual tour of the global road-racing circuit.

 

The day after the race Leong bought an air ticket to Nairobi, gambling, correctly, that the runners he had seen would be leaving on the same plane: "I said to them, 'wherever you're going, I'm coming with you'."

 

Fortunately, his companions on the flight were from Eldoret, a town that sits 2100 metres above sea level and has provided the rump of Kenya's recent distance running talent. It was there that Leong began trying to lure some of the town's amateur runners into the switch to cycling. "I wasted a lot of time doing that," he says. 'They weren't interested."

 

In the end he came across a local cycling club whose members staged ad hoc races. Leong picked out the four most talented riders and offered to train them for a couple of months in Singapore ("I just gave them a bike and said 'ride as fast as you can'"). Eventually the two quickest, Zakayo and Myangi, were taken to France for their shot at the Alpe.

 

Zakayo's English is halting. He says training has been "very difficult" but "exciting" and that he "would like to compete in the Tour de France, that is my dream".

 

Dreams have been important in all this. Before meeting Leong Zakayo would get up at 5am and train on his own, cycling 50km before doing a full day's work as a shoe-shine. He had no clear purpose in mind. Shortly before Leong arrived his wife had had a dream that someone would come and take him away on a mission. And so it proved.

 

The brief spell in Singapore saw the Kenyans sit on a proper racing bike for the first time. "It was much faster than a Black Mamba," Zakayo chuckles. "It felt really good. At first I did have some crashes. It was just so fast."

 

Before the time trial Zakayo had another dream, one in which he killed a lion. If the lion wasn't exactly slain this time around, it certainly ought to be looking slightly warily over its shoulder. "I can go faster, definitely, much faster," he says, matter-of-factly. "Now I know the course I can go much faster. It was all new for me before. Next time I will be much better."

 

Leong's goal is to set up a permanent presence in Kenya, an academy with regular competitions, which might act as a feeder system for professional teams. For that to happen he needs sponsors, coaches, anybody with expertise who might be willing to take a punt on a stunning novice performance in France.

 

"I started this because the people with the most potential have not been given the chance to cycle," he says. "There's so much talent there, even if it's not this generation of riders who manage to do something amazing, maybe the next will."

 

Leong is certainly a trailblazer. And one, perhaps, with the tide of history on his side.

 

By way of an example: the first ever Singapore marathon was won by Britain's Ray Crabbe in 1982. It was 15 years before Africans began to compete. In 2006 a Kenyan, Elijah Mbogo, won it in a time over 23 minutes quicker than Crabbe's.

 

Cycling, you have been warned.

 

 

edit:font size

 

Cool Runnings anyone???? I for one don't give a **** what colour they are - if we can get an SA team to the TDF, there will be no passengers on that team so everyone who is there will deserve their place...

Edited July 24, 2012 by Andymann

[mallo]

Doug has the dream and UCI/ASO has mentioned it as a possibility in the near future.Finances from MTN is a done deal and NO NO NO it is not for a BLACk SQUAD but a South African/African based team who will need international expertise and riders as well.

 

This will happen soon.