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The multiple World Champ many South Africans don't know about, but should
For 25 years, Greg Minnaar was the rider the rest of the field measured itself against. For most of that time, he was quietly convinced he was the one coming up short.
Picture a World Cup practice run somewhere in Europe. Greg Minnaar is standing trackside, studying a section he hasn’t quite worked out yet. A rival comes past at full tilt, and something in his gut drops.
“I used to get quite intimidated,” he says. “I’d be looking at a section, I’d see one of the guys come past and be like, oh, they’re flying.”
This is the most decorated downhill racer the sport has produced talking. He has four world titles spread across 18 years, three World Cup overalls and 23 World Cup wins. And for almost all of it he carried one private belief.
“Through my racing, I never felt that I had the skill of my competitors.”
In What We Know Episode 2, “Community”, Greg leads the Pietermaritzburg segment, paired with Brad Binder as the two greatest Africans to go fast on two wheels. The most revealing thing he brings to it isn’t a split time. It’s that admission, and what happened when he finally sat in a room full of athletes and realised he wasn’t the only one keeping something like it quiet.
Back to zero, every weekend
From the outside, winning looks like it should settle the question. For Greg, it never did.
“If I’d win a race, the following weekend I had no confidence to keep riding this hard,” he says. “It was back to, like, flip, look how quick these guys are.”
More on Greg Minnaar
So he built something to stand on instead. Greg broke every three- or four-minute track into four separate races, so that a mistake in one sector could be cleared from his head before the next. Inside each sector, he choreographed every move.
“I always explain it like a ballerina or a gymnast,” he says. “You’ve got this routine, and you’ve got these things that you have to hit. This is how I process the track. I have to go just slightly left of that root, over this rock, skim close to the tree on the right.”
Red Bull’s Brad Binder and Greg Minnaar film What We Know
© Wayne Reiche / Red Bull Content Pool
He’d plan where to push to 105% and where to hold back at 95%, and where the brakes would stay untouched on race day, even if he’d never managed it in practice.
“I know I can’t do it like they can,” he says, “but in this race I’m not touching my brakes through this section. And then you make it through and you’re like, whoa!” Then comes the reset. “You’ve got to bring yourself back together and go, we’re not quite done yet.”
It’s a telling detail. The full-throttle reputation was real, but it was built on meticulous planning, not natural swagger. “It’s not just full commit,” he says. “It’s processing.”
The stone he wouldn’t turn
Every other rider on the circuit had a sports psychologist. Greg didn’t, until he was 39 and could see the end of his career coming. It wasn’t arrogance that kept him away. It was fear.
“I was always really nervous of going to someone that’s going to interfere with something,” he says. “I don’t really know how I’ve managed to build this up.”
People would tell him how mentally strong he was, and he’d agree and say he’d been working on it. “I had no idea how I built this up,” he admits.
When he finally went, the psychologist mostly confirmed the process he’d pieced together on his own. There were small tweaks, like learning to ask whether a rival was actually faster or just looked faster. What mattered more was that he went at all.
“I just felt like I had to flip over that stone,” he says. “Can you imagine if I’d gone to the sports psychologist and dominated for like three years? That would’ve been sick. It didn’t happen. But I was prepared to see if it would.”
Around the table
Filming for the episode brought Greg to a roundtable with athletes from across a range of disciplines, and a few comedians. He heard stories from sports he’d assumed had proper systems behind them, which turned out not to. He heard Jordy Smith talk about what he’d had to push through. “I had no idea,” Greg says.
What struck him most was how much everyone had been carrying without saying anything.
“Maybe those people that seem like everything’s just a win, win, win all the time,” he says, “is because they’ve never ever spoken about all the hardships.”
He’s describing the room, but he could just as easily be describing himself. His results said win, win, win, and he kept the doubt to himself for the better part of two decades.
“Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone loses at some point,” he says. “Those that dwell on it get stuck with it. But those that are able to push through grow into something a bit greater.”
It’s why the roundtable mattered to him, and why he’d like to see more of them. “I feel like we need to get athletes around each other a bit more,” he says.
For Greg, that’s what community means. Having people cheer you on is one part of it. The more important part is hearing someone you admire say the thing you’ve been too proud or too wary to say yourself. He spent 25 years racing on a hillside believing everyone else was flying. Now that he’s the one younger riders look at, the most useful thing he can hand them might be that confession.
Watch Greg Minnaar in What We Know Episode 2, “Community”.
