Punching Above Weight
To continue from where I left off with the Willie Engelbrecht post, it was a few weeks later that a similar encounter occurred. While hanging out laundry in the brakkish surrounds of a southern Italian hotel, I got chatting to the coach of a rival team who looked vaguely familiar. Like before, he enquired about my accent and enthused about South Africa. Turned out this guy was Heiko Salzwedel, the legendary German coach.
Heiko was heading up the Great Britain squad when we met and he related to me the trips he had made to South Africa with the Australian National Team in the mid-1990s. Loved the place, he said, before going on to talk about the 1993 Rapport Toer and how his former German team were instructed not to talk to him as their coaching staff regarded him as a traitor! He asked about Willie Engelbrecht, the Beneke brothers and Andrew Mclean, who lost that tour on the final day into Nelspruit before heading off to Belgium to ride for a team there.
When I told him that Andrew was still racing at a high level, Heiko smiled broadly, visibly impressed.
'Mclean was a tough rider, eh? Very good at that stage race in Cape Town (Giro del Capo). When I brought my Giant-ZVVZ team to that race in 1997, we had our team photo taken at the entrance to the Waterfront and got fined by the police!'
