Giniel beats the pain to become the first African to win the Dakar Rally that made its debut in South America this year.

Cycling’s comeback king Lance Armstrong was this week revealed as the inspiration for Giniel de Villiers’s maiden Dakar Rally victory. De Villiers — who also became the first African in the rally’s history to win it — credited an Armstrong quote for helping him race the entire 9500km in pain after injuring himself in the build-up to the event. “I fell off my mountain bike and went to gym afterwards,” explained De Villiers. “Somehow I injured one of the discs in my spine. I ended up with a pinched nerve in my back that left me with a lot of pain in my left leg. “The doctor gave me painkillers and anti-inflammatory tablets and said as long as I could stand on my toes before each stage I’d be fine.” Set for an uncomfortable race, De Villiers remembered a line once uttered by Armstrong: “Pain is temporary. If you give up it lasts for ever.” Having gone on to win the rally, De Villiers confirmed on Wednesday that the pain was just a fading memory. With the event on debut in South America, his victory resulted in another first: that of a win by a diesel-engined car (the VW Touareg). “It’s quite ironic that the first time they took it out of Africa an African won it,” De Villiers said of his win, which followed his second place in 2007. He won four of the 13 stages (one was cancelled because of poor visibility). It’s just as well that the 36-year-old went in with a hard-nosed attitude to the Dakar because it proved one of the toughest ever. After being cancelled hours before the start due to threats of violence in Mauritania in 2008, the organisers decided to run the event in South America this year. This meant the drivers not only had to contend with an unfamiliar course, but also deal with difficult conditions. These included the energy-sapping heat in the Chilean and Argentinian deserts: “In Africa, the heat is normally around 20-25°C. In South America, the temperature was 40°C. “It rose to 60°C in the cockpit and even though we had air-conditioning in the car, it still only took it down to about 45 degrees. “I lost about 2kg during the race and on average I was drinking about six litres of water a day.” De Villiers said other things that made the traditionally tough race even more difficult were the massive dunes, dust and the altitudes (4700m) at which it was run. “It was certainly one of the toughest because it was new to the guys as they knew the Africa course,” he said. “The difference between the two is that there are more wide-open spaces in Africa and less vegetation, so Africa was less physically taxing than South America. “A lot of the privateers struggled. They kept taking 200-hour penalties for not finishing the stages. Some of them finished a couple of months behind us.” The race itself was no less demanding, with De Villiers falling as far back as 41 minutes at one stage to his VW teammate, Spain’s legendary rally driver Carlos Sainz. “I lost 20 minutes on stage nine after I got lost and at the end of the stage I was 12 minutes behind. The next day I got stuck in a hole after following a bike that crashed. “When I tried to get out of that I was pointed straight into a hole. I was stuck in it for 18 minutes and at the end of the day I was 41 minutes behind Carlos.” Stage 12 proved the decider as the Spaniard crashed into a ravine and had to retire from the race. The crash was decisive in more ways than one for De Villiers. It gave him a 2min 35sec lead and prompted the VW team manager to invoke team orders for the rest of the race, with Mark Miller trailing his teammate. This meant De Villiers coasted for the remaining two stages, arriving in Buenos Aires nine minutes ahead of Miller, whose co-driver was South African Ralph Pitchford. “I would have liked to race until the end but the boss told us that all three (remaining) cars had to make it to the finish,” said De Villiers. “I can understand the manufacturer’s point of view, so in reality I probably won by 2min, 35sec.” Knowing beforehand that he would win the race if he just nursed his car home did little to calm De Villiers’s nerves: “The last 30-40km of the 380km liaison stage were the longest of my life. “I kept looking at dials I wouldn’t look at normally. I had to tell myself not to and keep an eye on the road.” With South Africans seemingly bent on carrying all before them on the world stage — think the Proteas in Australia and the SA under-20 soccer side in Rwanda — De Villiers’s victory has been lauded all over the country. He even got a congratulatory letter from the country’s other famous De Villiers — Springbok coach Peter. “It’s a proud moment,” he said. “I’m happy I could have done it for South Africans as well, especially with Ralph.” There has been no financial windfall to go with the win, however. All De Villiers gets is a shiny new trophy to go with, hopefully, a new contract with VW. This is all a far cry from when he used to get klapped by his father Smittie for crashing into buildings and rivers around the family’s fruit farm in Barrydale (in the Western Cape). Having first driven the family tractor at four (he says his whole bodyweight couldn’t push the clutch down at the time), De Villiers graduated to driving his home-built go-kart and beach-buggy. With his father an avid racing fan, De Villiers was taken to rallies and motor racing meetings, where the racing bug bit. Believe it or not, he only started racing competitively after he finished school at Paarl Gym — where one of his classmates was former Bok and current Bulls assistant coach Pieter Rossouw. But he soon made up for lost time by racing on tracks and becoming a very good touring car driver before moving on to rallying. Fittingly for a man whose life motto is: “Life’s too short to drink bad wine”, his favourite pastime is riding his mountain bike around his home in Stellenbosch. “It would be a sin not to with all that beautiful scenery,” he said.

Simnikiwe Xabanisa

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