BRAVE NEW WORLDS

For most of us the possibility of riding a World Championship seems very far away, but for one member of staff at Cycling Weekly’s publishers it became a reality. Vern Pitt charts the story of how a near 40-year-old journalist got to race against the world’s best, in his garage

-  Vern Pitt

Founded in 1841, Wynberg Boys’ High School sits in a leafy suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. It’s a school with a rich sporting heritage with many international cricketers and rugby players among its alumni – most notably Jacques Kallis, considered to be one of the best cricketers of all time. An Eddy Merckx in whites. In the hallways there is an honours board with Kallis’s name among the long list of notables.

In the mid-1990s 13-year-old Aaron Borrill, now tech editor at Cycling Weekly sister publication CyclingNews, looked up at that wall forlornly. “My sport was cricket; I discovered very early on I wasn’t good enough for that,” he explains. “I look up at this thing and I didn’t think I would ever get my name on this board. There’s Jacques Kallis and all these crazy names of famous sports stars, and now my name is going on there… If somebody told me right then that 26 years later, when you’re approaching 40, you’re going to go on that, I wouldn’t have thought it would be possible. It just shows that you’re never too old to achieve something.”

The reason Borrill is being added to that list is that he represented South Africa at the eSports World Championships last month.

An amateur who only took up cycling 10 years ago he was now battling it out with pro riders on 19% climbs from his garage.

We wondered what it was like to race as an amateur against some of the best in the world. Only in eSports does that happen on a regular basis. How do you even get to do that? Borrill’s journey to the Worlds is one of reluctance, perseverance and eventually satisfaction – sort of.