WHO ATE ALL THE WINE GUMS?

I PARTICIPATED IN ONE DOUBLE CENTURY where the rain was so vicious for 202km that I had to wear sunglasses just to protect my eyes. I couldn't see anything, but at least my retimas survived a power-wasn.

- BY DAVID MOSELEY

At another DC, a teammate dropped his CO2 bomb while fixing a flat tyre; it bounced off the ground and whizzed past my frontmost part, caressing me fleetingly like a coy wife on honeymoon.

These are vivid memories from South Africa's most unique cycling event (though not as vivid as seeing an all-women team lined up on the roadside for a group pee). But they don't come close to the disaster that was my very first Double Century...

As soon as I rolled out of the Swellendam Showgrounds and onto the road for my DC debut in 2012, the writing was already on the wall: I couldn't clip into my pedals. I turned to my teammate, David Bellairs of Cape Town Cycle Tour fame, and asked – bemused, and somewhat sheepishly – "How do these things clip in?"