Race #19. In the 36th week of 2026. That makes it official – Team Zonke has now surpassed an average of a race every two weeks.

If you’re looking for Mom and Dad, they’re somewhere on the black market trying to pawn a kidney to fund this shindig 😂 If you’re looking for one of our kids? They’re on a motorbike. Obviously. Where else would they be?

Nineteen races. Nineteen sets of entries, fuel, tyres, spares, packing, unpacking, washing gear that will never, ever be the colour it was when we bought it. Nineteen early mornings. Nineteen ‘have you got your gloves?’ ‘Yes.’ (They do not have their gloves.) The cost is massive. The reward is massive-er.

Truth be told… we wouldn’t have it any other way. Mostly.

GXCC remains a firm favourite series for us, quite simply because of the number of entrants we can include. Not every series has space for the whole circus. GXCC does. Which means more of our kids get to line up, more of them get to ride, more of them get to be part of something.

And for a team like ours, that will always matter more than a trophy. Team Zonke isn’t about one star rider and a support crew. It’s about every child who has had their life disrupted, fractured, turned upside down, getting a helmet, a number and a place on the start line. Same as everybody else.

This race saw J555, J99, C264, C265, C299, C342, 667 and C899 all lining up in Delmas. Eight Neon Ninjas. One very muddy weekend. And, across the board, good results.

But. (There’s always a but, isn’t there?)

This was not a straightforward weekend. Not weather-wise. Not mud-wise. And, sadly, not in terms of how some people chose to race.

Two of our riders came out with Mamma T the night before to set up our race village. Gazebos, tents, chairs, bike stands, the cooler box, the snack box, the second snack box (essential), the whole operation.

And goodness me. The storm.

I don’t think I can do it justice in words. It was insane. Wind coming at us sideways. Rain that didn’t so much fall as attack. At one point I genuinely thought we were all about to be blown right away. It was kak cold too.

Mamma T in the Volvo writing an ad not just for packing space but also off-roading capabilities – withnessing around us, other vehicles getting properly stuck. Wheels spinning. People pushing. Egos taking strain. We left, without so much as unpacking a thing.

We sat in the car, looking at the pitts turning to soup, and we just knew.. the next day was going to be interesting. “Come with a tow rope and a sense of humour” I wrote back home.

If you’ve never tried to set up a race village in a storm with your significant other and an entire football team of psyched up kids mulling about you kids, here’s a little summary of the experience: you hold one corner of a gazebo. The wind holds the other three. The wind wins. You have a domestic. There’s a lot of screaming. Theres a lot of laughing. You regroup. You laugh. You try again. You eat a snack from the second snack box because morale matters.

The kids were absolute troopers. Not a single complaint. Okay, a few complaints. But very cheerful complaints. And they stuck it out, because that’s what this team does.

An overwhelm the senses would be the best way to explain it. Challenged in body, mind and soul on this day. Wind. Rain. Mud. Cheating. It was all a lot.

The intense storm had moved off, but it left its friend behind a blistering blustering unrelenting wind that made lots feel impossible.The race village that was supposed to be a race village was more of a race… huddle. Behind the car. Holding onto things.

And the mud. Oh, the mud. So. Much. Mud. Mud on the bikes. Mud on the riders. Mud on the parents. Mud in places that I will not be discussing in a public blog. If you saw a Neon Ninja that day and thought, ‘is that one of theirs?’ The honest answer was: who knows, they were all brown.
But here’s the thing.
The kids loved the track.

Loved it. Every slippery, sloppy, bit of it. It was tough, it was messy, and it asked a lot of them, and they rose to it. Because that’s what cross country is meant to be. You don’t get to choose the conditions. You ride what’s in front of you.

And our riders completed the entire track. Every section. Every lap. Every forest. The whole thing, as it was laid out.
Which, as it turns out, puts them in a minority.

Because unlike a good number of their competitors, our kids rode the course they were given. And they really, genuinely enjoyed it. You could see it on their (muddy) faces when they came in. Exhausted, filthy, grinning.

That should be the whole story. Kids, bikes, mud, joy.

It isn’t.

This was a very sad state of affairs.

A number of riders cut the track. Not a wobble off the line in the mud. Not an honest mistake. Cut it. Skipped sections. Went through barrier tape. Took the shorter, easier, faster way round and rejoined further on, as if nobody would notice.

Thankfully, Team Zonke kids took the high road. They rode the full track, and before anyone asks, yes, that’s confirmed by GPS. And they, aligned with the rules and regulations, reported what they had seen.

Did doing the right thing cost them places?
Yes.

Am I so frikken proud they held their own anyway.

Definitely yes.

Am I still furious that officials failed to penalise the riders who cut the track.

Very yes.

The kids who followed the rules finished behind the kids who didn’t. Which is a hard pill to swallow with multiple evidences proving that this was the case. But this is life. And it’s unfair. And we continue.

And whilst we remain steadfast on the fact that we do not race for podiums – we do race for what is right. And when J555 was hit by a rider coming out of a forest section – that rider who had cut the track, and on re-entering, without checking, rode straight into J555 in the middle of the track – well that’s when it became about much more than cheating.

A sizable crash. His helmet damaged. His bike damaged. And J555 injured. Caused by a rider cheating.

To be very clear – J555 was exactly where he was supposed to be. On the track. Riding the course. Doing everything right. And he got hurt because someone else decided the rules didn’t apply to them, and then didn’t even look before coming back on.

This is not a ‘racing incident’. This is not ‘just motorsport’. This is the predictable outcome of letting people ride wherever they like and rejoin wherever they like with zero consequences. Track cutting isn’t only a fairness problem. It’s a safety problem. Somebody coming back onto a track at an angle nobody expects, at a point nobody is watching, is how children get hurt.

And a child did.

We remain deeply upset by the fact that this type of endangerment was allowed to occur. Upset. Angry. Frustrated. Pick one. We’re all of them. We’ve pushed back at authorities and been met with a sloppy ‘everyone was doing it’ kinda response – they weren’t… our kids didn’t which is how they got inured and lost places. But I digress.

It could have been so much worse. Thankfully it wasn’t. But we cannot and will not stand for this type of thing.

For Team Zonke, riding has never just been riding. It’s a microcosm of life. Everything you need to learn about being a decent human shows up, at some point, on a race track. Patience. Resilience. Falling down and getting back up. Losing gracefully. Winning humbly. And doing the right thing when nobody’s watching.

Especially when nobody’s watching.

It is essential to us that we maintain the highest level of ethics and rule-abiding at all times. Not most times. Not when it’s convenient. All times. We spend huge amounts of time teaching our riders right from wrong. Coaching them on the relevant MSA rules. Going through them. Asking questions. Making sure they understand not just what the rule is, but why it’s there. And then making sure they stick to it.

Is it the fastest way to the podium? Not always. As Delmas proved.

But I think it would be safe to say that anybody who has come into contact with a Neon Ninja would confirm that they are upstanding little humans who live out these values. On the track and off it. They’re not perfect. Lord knows they’re not perfect. But they are honest. And they know that a result you cheated for isn’t a result. It’s just a trophy with a lie on it.

So it was genuinely saddening to see some really shifty behaviour from our peers at this race.

What remains utterly baffling to me is what parents think they are teaching their children when the condone and encourage this ‘win at all costs’ type of behaviour. Like, really. What’s the plan? What’s the life lesson? ‘Rules are for other people’? ‘Winning matters more than how you win’? ‘If you don’t get caught, it didn’t happen’?

Being truthful and honest and following the rules is such a fundamental life skill. It’s not a motorsport thing. It’s a human thing. These are kids. They will grow up and go to work and sign contracts and drive on roads and make promises. What they learn on a track at ten or twelve or fourteen doesn’t stay on the track.

I am, however, very hopeful that the officials have woken up to the need to police this properly. Noticing is the first step. Now it needs to be acted on.

We’re going to have some tough decisions to make in the upcoming months- we don’t want to penalise our kids for things adults are allowing, but if rules are not enforced consistently, this becomes a safety issue more than anything else. And where the safety of our riders is in question we have no alternative but to protect the children by taking our entries elsewhere. We need to ensure that the relevant officials are making consistent applications of the prevailing rules and regulations and upholding safety at all times. These are the uncomfortable decisions that responsible adults have to make when there’s a possibility that children aren’t safe.

We love this series. We love the inclusivity of it, the community of it, the mud of it. We don’t want to leave.

But we won’t trade our kids’ safety, or their values, for a start line.

Race #19, done. Bikes washed (sort of). Gear soaking (forever). Kidney still pending sale.

See you at Race #20. Hopefully on a properly policed track.