Cape Town Cycle Tour

It is now one of the world’s leading cycle events, but when Bill Mylrea, John Stegmann and Louis de Waal first proposed the Argus Tour, it was meant to be a protest ride to ‘encourage’ the city council to think about bicycles as part of its urban planning, and look after cyclists on the (by 1978 standards) busy roads. As such, the event failed spectacularly for decades, but what a wonderful deviation from those goals it has become. The irony is that cycling has become so big in South Africa, thanks to the Cape Town Cycle Tour, that those dreamy objectives are now being realised across the city in the form of bike lanes, and cycle safety projects within and beyond the city limits.