Active Hobo

Simon Stofberg joins the Breakaway for an honest conversation about fatherhood, fitness, and finding your way back — three and a half months in. Also in this episode: Gallows 2026, the XCO Western Cape Schools League, a young Wellington rider's miraculous recovery. # === CHAPTERS =================================== 0:00 Intro 0:28 What's on today: Gallows, XCO schools, and the Giro 1:29 Simon Stof...

Daniyal Matthews is the 2025 SA National Road Champion and African track champion — and the first person of colour in over a decade to win the Elite Men's national road race in South Africa. He races with 7Eleven Cliqq Roadbike Philippines, riding Elves bikes, and is competing at UCI Continental level. He grew up in Cape Town's Southern Suburbs, started racing on the track at age eight because his...

Massimiliano "Masi" Ambrosi is South Africa's 2025 Under-23 XCO Champion, a privateer racing the UCI World Cup circuit on pure belief and a support structure built from scratch. In this conversation, he walks us through the full arc: growing up in Johannesburg on motorbikes, the deal his dad made with him to keep his school average above 75% or lose the bike, seven years with Trek from a borrowed...

They couldn't hold Sabastian Sawe's marathon pace for more than 300 metres. That's where this one starts. From there, Episode 16 gets into how good women's cycling actually is, whether Cape Epic made the right call shortening the elite women's route to match TSS rather than distance (the feedback from the elite ladies themselves is unanimous), and why the Femme Series matters to what The Active Ho...

Join David Jenkins and Orphan Street Clothing Shop founder Matt Kieser for a wide-ranging conversation about what it actually takes to build a third space in a sport that already has plenty of bike shops. They go deep on the OSCS story — from its Orphan Street origins through the move to Sea Point — the cycling community that grew up around it, Thursday rides and Cape Town Cycle Tour traditions, t...

Garden Route Giro, the race that's been years in the making, finally happened — and we rode every stage. Mossel Bay to Wilderness. Six days. Nearly 700 kilometres through mountain passes, Klein Karoo desert, and some of the most staggering gravel road on earth. We raced it, we filmed it, and we got humbled by it. This episode is the full debrief — what the racing felt like from inside the peloton,...

René Haselbacher — Tour de France sprinter turned Cape Town kit maker and Double Century winner. At 21, René Haselbacher lined up at Paris-Roubaix on 23mm tyres, with no idea what cobblestones could do to a body. Four years later he was chasing Mario Cipollini's wheel at the Giro d'Italia, finishing third on two stages. Then came the Tour de France — the prologue ramp under the Eiffel Tower, a bre...

Join us as we take an in-depth view into the life that was is and will be with the South African icon in cycling - Ryan Gibbons. He has led out greats like Tadej Pogacar, competed in all the world tours and swept up local honours at home in South Africa. We start with a statement as Ryan shows Dave what real out the saddle sprint form looks like and settles into a beautiful trip around the Peninsu...

In September 2025, Tyler Jacobs became the first South African woman to ever win a medal at the UCI Mountain Bike World Championships short track race. Three years earlier, she was getting dropped by her dad and her brothers on Sunday rides and crying about having to go. Tyler is 21. She rides for Liv Factory Racing out of the United States, trains out of Stellenbosch with coach Barry Austin, and...

Errin Mackridge was told after the 2024 UCI World Championships that she was an embarrassment to South Africa. She was 17, racing at her first Worlds, and she didn't finish. The people who said it weren't racing. They were typing. She has six national titles now. Four on the mountain bike, two on the road. She is the reigning Junior South African Road Race Champion — a title she's won in back-to-b...

In 2023, Shanae Williams qualified for the Olympic pathway with a silver at the African Games. Then she got sick. Pushed through. Her heart gave in. Doctors pulled her out of training for six months — and she spent that time asking herself whether she wanted to do any of this ever again. She's now the 2025 Africa Elite Women's Triathlon Champion over Olympic distance, the 2025 Africa Sprint Champi...

Wout van Aert won his first Paris-Roubaix — and we watched it unfold on a big screen at the start of a gravel stage race in the middle of the Klein Karoo. That tells you everything about this episode. This is The Breakaway's Garden Route Giro special edition. Recorded live from the stage 2 finish line at the inaugural GRG, with riders, locals, and dogs walking through shot. We break down how Van A...

In this episode of The Active Hobo Podcast, Maddy talks about training out of Ballito, the day her chain came off at SA Road Champs and she still won, what it's like lining up against 66 girls on a European start line, and why she's skipping university to chase a UCI World Cup dream. At her first SA Championships, Madison Bateson didn't know it was the SA Champs. She thought it was a regular KZN r...

She was a law student at Rhodes University when she drew some cartoons to win a bicycle. That bicycle changed everything. Tegan Phillips is an adventurer, ultra-endurance cyclist, comic artist, and content creator who has spent the last decade doing the things most people only talk about — cycling through Africa with her family, completing a solo triathlon around New Zealand's South Island, and at...

This episode opens in a place none of us wanted to go. Another cyclist lost on South African roads. Dave, Cam and Sarah speak honestly about what that means as riders, as parents, as a community — and what actually needs to change for the laws to protect us. Then: Tadej Pogačar wins the Tour of Flanders and becomes the first rider in history to win four consecutive Monuments. The crew breaks down...

He failed most of his subjects, raced mountain bikes on three different pro teams, and still never had the breakthrough he dreamed of. So at 23 years old, with R15,000 and a plan scribbled after six months of marketing studies, Jurgens Uys walked away from everything he knew — and started making socks. Ten years later, Versus Socks has sold over 6 million pairs, employs more than 50 people, and ru...

This week's Breakaway hits a nerve. Dave opens up about something a lot of cyclists won't say out loud — the moment a week off the bike becomes two, then a month, then you're not sure how to come back. Sarah breaks down the coaching side: patience, accountability, and why consistency beats intensity every time. It's the conversation you didn't know you needed. From there, the crew recaps Sarah's f...

He was given a 10-year life expectancy at eight months old. At 19, Jason van't Slot became the first person with cystic fibrosis to finish the Absa Cape Epic — the toughest mountain bike stage race on the planet. But this isn't just a story about cycling. It's about what it means to live inside a body that fights you every single day — chains around your chest, breathing like you're pulling air th...

Winning a Cape Epic stage isn't just about fitness — it's about surviving the first 10 minutes, holding position through blind corners on rocky single track, and then having enough left to produce 1,000-watt kicks on grass after 4,000 kilojoules of work. In this breakdown, performance coach Reece McDonald pulls back the curtain on exactly what it took to win Stage 1 and Stage 6 of Cape Epic 2025....

She calls it "ruthlessly brave." Others might call it reckless. Jess Meniere has built her life around one principle - put your hand up first, figure it out later. And the consequences have been spectacular. In this episode of the Femme Series, Jess sits down with David to talk about what it really costs to chase a creative life in South African sport. From running the 13 Peaks with no training an...

For 23 years, no all-South African team had ever stood on the top step of the Cape Epic. On Sunday, Matt Beers and Tristan Nortje of Toyota Specialized Imbuko changed that - and the entire finish line held its breath counting down the seconds. This episode is a full Cape Epic 2026 debrief from the people who lived it. Sully was behind the camera on the back of a motorbike. Cam Roach finished in th...

She calls it "ruthlessly brave." Others might call it reckless. Jess Meniere has built her life around one principle - put your hand up first, figure it out later. And the consequences have been spectacular. In this episode of the Femme Series, Jess sits down with David to talk about what it really costs to chase a creative life in South African sport. From running the 13 Peaks with no training an...

He went to Joburg for one ride. He got dropped by a world-tour cyclist, skipped a robot or two, and came back a convert. That's where Episode 10 begins — and it only gets bigger from there. Cape Epic is underway, and the stories coming out of those trails are exactly why this race is unlike anything else on earth. Dean Hoff and Kevin Benke ran 30 kilometres with their bikes after a mechanical dest...

You've seen the numbers on the packet. 2:1 ratio. 60 grams. 90 grams per hour. Multiple transportable carbohydrates. But what does any of it actually mean — and how do you use it without blowing up your stomach on race day? In Part 2 with Reece McDonald — head of performance at Embukos and Science to Sport partner — we sit down and break race-day nutrition into language that anyone can understand....

💬 What sport or activity changed the direction of your life? Tell us in the comments. 🔔 Subscribe — this series is just getting started. 🎙️ The Active Hobo — Stories That Matter 📍 Cape Town, South Africa Over 400 career victories. Three Cape Town Cycle Tour wins. Eight gold medals in a single national track championship. Seven wins in his first season in Belgium, as a teenager from Joburg who d...