Assessing the Cape Epic Prologue Results: Can They Predict the Final GC Standings?

by | Apr 8, 2024 | Bike Race Reports, Bike, Bike Events & Racing, Featured, Sports

How much do the Cape Epic Prologue results have to say about a team’s final GC standings after 7 gruelling mountain bike stages?

The 2024 Absa Cape Epic delivered a brilliant show of racing from Prologue to Finale. Our local hero Matthew Beers earned his 3rd title with American, Howard Grotts, while the Ghost Factory Racing team of Anne Terpstra and Nicole Koller clean swept the stage results (but not by large margins) to inscribe their names into the history books as Cape Epic winners of the UCI Women’s category.

Assessing The Cape Epic Prologue Results: Can They Predict The Final Gc Standings?
The time trial style Prologue pits teams against each other with no reference for how you’re doing compared to others during the race and thus should be a great indicator of who the strongest teams truly are. Photo by Nick Muzik/Cape Epic

The racing at this iconic event has evolved over the years from a strategic and slower paced affair to full-gas racing out the start chute of every stage.

The Prologue is a unique stage in the race as it is the only stage based on a time trial. Teams go out all guns blazing on the prologue but what effect does this have on them in the long run?

Attrition at Cape Epic is real

Normally, there are around 720 teams that starts the Prologue which took place at Lourensford Wine Estate this year.

At the end of Stage 7, the stats looked like this: 488 full teams finished the finale, 170 riders finished solo without their partners and 62 teams completely withdrew from the race. That results in 294 riders out of 1440 who did not finish, a 20.4% attrition.

Absa Cape Epic
Many start each Stage of the Absa Cape Epic but not all will make it to the finish line. Photo by Nick Muzik/Cape Epic

What we want to know is if the results from the initial prologue Stage have anything meaningful to say about who might be in the contest for the podium at the end of Stage 8.

Let’s take a look at some of the stats

UCI Women Top 5 Results – Prologue

1st –  Ghost Factory Racing [ 1:14:45 ]
2nd – Cannondale Factory Racing [ + 1:05 ]
3rd – Toyota Specialized Ninety-One [ + 1:11 ]
4th – Efficient Infiniti SCB SRAM [ + 3:10 ]
5th – e-FORT | PrivateClientHoldings [ + 5:19 ]

UCI Men Top 5 Results – Prologue

1st – World Bicycle Relief [ 1:02:38 ]
2nd – Toyota Specialized Ninety-One [ + 0:51 ]
3rd – Buff Megamo [ + 1:32 ]
4th – Imbuko Pro Cycling [ + 1:37 ]
5th – Wilier Vittoria Factory [ + 1:45 ]

UCI Women Top 5 Results – Overall GC

1st –  Ghost Factory Racing [ 30:56:22 ]
2nd – Cannondale Factory Racing [ + 8:36 ]
3rd – Toyota Specialized Ninety-One [ + 35:48
4th – e-FORT | PrivateClientHoldings [ + 1:44:37 ]
5th – Efficient Infiniti SCB SRAM [ + 1:47:21 ]

UCI Men Top 5 Results – Overall GC

1st – Toyota Specialized Ninety-One [ 25:22:17 ]
2nd – World Bicycle Relief [ + 11:07 ]
3rd – Buff Megamo [ + 11:36 ]
4th – Canyon SIDI [ + 17:47 ]
5th – Wilier Vittoria Factory [ + 27:13 ]

The biggest changes to the Top 15 UCI Men’s standings was 3 teams (Imbuko Pro Cycling, Honeycomb Pro Cycling, and ORBEA Leatt Speed Company Racing) dropping out of the race. Other than that, the top 15 remained mostly the same with the bigger position shifts happening lower down the leaderboard. It makes sense that the lower your Prologue result, the higher your potential to improve is (much easier to go from 20th to 13th than 4th to 1st, for example). Nonetheless, it appears at a glance that the Prologue results were a good indicator of who the top teams would be in the overall GC.

On the men’s side it was only Imbuko Pro Cycling who was missing in the final GC Standings. They were replaced by Canyon Sidi.

The Top 5 UCI women’s teams saw no change other than the 4th and 5th places teams swapping places in the standing. Moving down to the rankings, teams from 10th or lower in the Prologue generally moved up in the rankings throughout the week but wouldn’t break into that top 5. 

Cape Epic Prologue Results Predict Final Gc Standings
Ghost Factory Racing were dominant in the UCI Women’s Field, but not by a huge margin. Photo by Max Sullivan/Cape Epic

Going off these observations, it seemed that the UCI Women’s Prologue podium (as with the Men’s category) was a highly accurate indicator of who was going to be on the final GC podium.

Only 3 of the 54 UCI mens teams finished with the same GC result as their Prologue (Buff Megamo in 3rd, Willier Vittoria in 5th, and Insect Science 1 in 18th). Meanwhile 5 of the 19 UCI Women’s teams finished with an identical GC position to their Prologue result, including the top 3 teams in the race. This suggest you’d be better off placing your bets for a women’s team after seeing the Prologue results than what you may be able to tell from the men’s initial standings.

Who moved up and down the most in the GC standings?

UCI Men’s teams that climbed the most positions throughout the week were ACT (49th to 28th), Insect Science 2 (40th to 22nd), and Valley Electrical Titan (28th to 12th). In the UCI Women’s category it was Scott Calabandida | Bulls (10th to 6th), Pirtek (13th to 9th) and Cape Classic 380 (16th to 12th) who gained the most throughout the week, all moving up 4 positions.

Does the racing get closer or not over the 8 days?

To answer this we’ll take a look at the GC time of teams throughout the field as a percentage of the winner’s time and compare them across the Prologue and final results to see if the percentage difference increases (racing becomes less competitive) or decreases (more competitive racing).


After the Prologue, the time of the 10th placed men’s team, compared to the race leader’s time, was 105.056%, indicating that they were 5.05% slower than the leaders. Contrast this with the 10th place time after Stage 7, which was 106.104%, suggesting a slight loosening of competition among the top 10 men as the stages progress.

Absa Cape Epic Race Results
Though the GC times grow larger after each stage, the relative time gaps seen to narrow for the top teams as the race wears on. Photo by Sam Clark/Cape Epic

Right at the sharp end of the men’s race, the gap between the top 2 teams went from 101.357% at Prologue to 100.665% at the end of Stage 7, showing a convergence over the race and the race getting more tightly contested as the stages wore on. This is somewhat to be expected in a strategic head-to-head race where defensive racing tactics (that may reduce potentially larger time gaps) can be effective for overall victory.

The inflection point is at 9th position in the UCI Men’s field, where the relative time gap starts increasing as you go down the standings, suggesting the top 8 teams are a cut above the others and will get closer in performance as the stages go on.

The gap between the top 2 UCI Women’s teams went from 101.45% at Prologue to 100.46% at the end of Stage 7, converging more than the men’s race over the 7 stages in what was a very closely contested battle for the win between the Ghost Factory and Cannondale Factory racing teams.

The inflection point in the women’s field was also from 9th in GC onwards, where the gaps started growing relative to the prologue. 

It seems that the Prologue stage results were a very accurate predictor of the top teams for GC though you couldn’t quite make a call on the precise final positions in the UCI men’s field as there was a fair bit of movement of teams within the top 10. The UCI Women’s prologue results give a better picture of how the race would unfold, especially give the top 3 teams held their exact positions from Prologue to Finale.

Seeing how the racing converges to be closer and closer over the course of the week is exciting and part of what makes mountain biking so good to follow at the moment!

There’s a lot of excitement for the new sani2c Prologue introduced this year and we’ll have to wait until the end of April to find out if the Prologue Predictor rule is upheld or broken in KZN.

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