Above picture: Last group training ride before the big event.  Mouse-Free Marion Cycling Team members John Cooper, Erica Leppan, Katta Ludynia and Jeremy George on the descent from Chapman’s Peak into Hout Bay along the Cape Town Cycle Tour route

On Sunday 9 March 2025, 31 members of the Mouse-Free Marion Cycling Team will set off in their Mouse-Free Marion (MFM) Project cycling jerseys to ride 109 km around the iconic Cape Peninsula.  This will be the 47th year of the annual Cape Town Cycle Tour, the world’s largest timed cycling event.  Three members of the MFM Project Team, John Cooper, Beate Hölscher and Sue Tonin, will be cycling with the others on Sunday, with no less than 36 previous Cape Town Cycle Tours completed between them.  The team plans to separate at the start into ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ groups to ensure everyone can expect an enjoyable ride within their capabilities.  A few ‘racing snake’ members of the team with higher seedings will, however, be leaving earlier than the main group and ‘going for time’.

Members of the team come roughly equally from the South African Provinces of Gauteng and the Western Cape and have been training for the event with social rides and races over the past several months. Not all have yet met each other, so the ride will also be a social event with a planned gathering afterwards.

Six members of the Mouse-Free Marion Cycling Team on a social ride around Langebaan Lagoon in November 2024

Wearing the MFM Project ‘colours’, the team’s aim will be to raise awareness for the project along the always well-spectated route, with occasional stops at scenic points for group photographs.  Equally important, the team members will attempt to raise a total of R109 000 (R10 000 for every kilometre cycled), equivalent to sponsoring 109 hectares, in support of the project.  To this end team members are approaching their friends, colleagues and relatives to sponsor them an amount for each kilometre they ride.  And this is where you can help.  Please consider sponsoring the whole team with any multiple of R109 you wish to via the team’s GivenGain appeal.  The MFM Project will thank you!

Gauteng members, John Kinghorn Snr, Simon de Wet and John Kinghorn Jnr before the start of the 98-km Virgin Active Ride Joburg event on 17 November 2024; photograph by John Kinghorn Snr

The MFM Project team members and supporters are an athletic bunch.  Previously, separate online appeals have raised funds through, road cycling, trail running and walking events.  What shall be the next sport?

John Cooper, News Correspondent, Mouse-Free Marion Project, 03 March 2025

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A Grey-headed Albatross chick on Marion Island by Flávia F. Barreto of Artists & Biologists Unite for Nature (ABUN) for the Mouse-Free Marion Project, gouache; after a photograph by Kim Stevens

The Mouse-Free Marion Project is a registered non-profit company (No. 2020/922433/08) in South Africa, established to eradicate the invasive albatross-killing mice on Marion Island in the Southern Ocean.  The project was initiated by BirdLife South Africa and the South African Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment.  Upon successful completion, the project will restore the critical breeding habitat of over two million seabirds, many globally threatened, and improve the island’s resilience to a warming climate.  For more information or to support the project please visit mousefreemarion.org