You can?t picture him spending his half-time break feeding the entire crowd with a couple of snoek and half a loaf of bread, or completing a gentle stroll from the V&A Waterfront to Robben Island and back. Miracles, by and large, are the work of the angelic, the divine, the spiritually pure; not thickset prop forwards with a healthy appetite for a drink and a fondness for throwing a punch. But in less than three months from now, it would appear, the miraculous gets a new exponent, for Robbie Kempson looks set to take on and conquer the Absa Cape Epic.

Today?s media launch will unveil more details of a race that?s grown from hare-brained lunacy to world-class mountain bike challenge in just five years, chiselled into the sport?s calendar as the foremost team challenge mountain biking has to offer. And when the race rolls into Knysna for the March 28 prologue that gets this year?s edition underway, haunted men and women in severe lycra will form the thrust of a peleton faced with nine days of what they?d term a challenge, and what the Geneva Convention would doubtless call human rights abuse.

But the lean of frame and vacant of gaze will be offset this year by two men who slot into the cycling mould much as Stephen Hawking would a rugby XV. And leading the unlikely duo is Kempson, the dark enforcer of every team he played for, a brutal combination of powerful (and technically astute) scrummager, and hard man with a practised mean streak. Ask Toutai Kefu about the hardest punch he ever took, and Special K is your man.

Kempson?s a complex character, though — he?s both Springbok tough and pianist, nocturnal wild child and wine connoisseur, fiery tempered and a pillar of chivalry. I?ve spent enough time on the golf course, at wine farms and laying waste to assorted bars to know him better than most; and so pronounced with gleeful confidence that Kempson, having announced his intention to take on the Epic, would make it to the obituary pages and no more.

More fool me. Of all his assorted qualities (pouring red wine over white shirts being a particular trademark), determination is foremost amongst them — dogged, insistent, two fingers to the world determination. And so this weekend past, after more chiselled celebrities had long since stepped quietly down from their intentions to race this year, Kempson took on a four day training course, and while he might not have enjoyed every moment (K has a turn of phrase Jane Austen never quite matched when the mood takes him), the big man got through it. Absa Cape Epic, here he comes.

And with him, another of sport?s bigger men: cricket?s bucket-handed all-rounder, Brian McMillan. 40 has come and gone, and Mac?s midlife crisis has metamorphosed not as a 19-year-old secretary and a Ferrari, but instead as a desire to take on and tame the Epic. Together with his son Ryan, Big Mac has been up and down the peninsula on a bike that, as with Kempson, looks almost comical beneath a heaving frame; the training?s paid off, however, and both men are well set to grind their way through the nine relentless days the Epic will demand of those silly enough to participate this year.

There?s still a monumental road ahead (road in the very broadest sense — half the terrain in store hasn?t been seen since the glaciers cleared), but the key to taming the Epic is in the training, and Kempson in particular has caused many words to be choked down already. The charity they?re riding for, the Big Tree Foundation, supported by Absa and Toyota, will be the beneficiaries; when Special K and Big Mac do complete their miracle, as I?m now fairly certain both men will, inspiration will spill over beyond the race. After all, if a beer-drinking prop forward and a middle-aged cricketer of equally generous proportions can take on the world?s fiercest mountain bike challenge and get out alive, surely there?s nothing the rest of us can?t take on?

  • Contact Dan at dan@metropolis.co.za