The bicycle is used as the primary means of transport

Imagine if cycling was once more viewed as a sport of champions, not cheats, enjoyed a drug-free image, was principally about competing and not money and cyclists became role models for individuals, and even countries…?

Idealistic? Perhaps, but not impossible – despite the damage wrought to the sport by the regular doping antics of the Tour de France. For today, the brightest ray of light among these dark clouds may be in Africa, a continent seldom associated with cycling or good news.

Team Rwanda’s six young cyclists could help alter this image. The men, until the team was formed last year, had never been in an aircraft, never left Rwanda, never slept under bed sheets or stayed in a hotel, never seen the ocean and never even enjoyed a hot shower. Today, team member Nyandwi Uwase (26), who trains three to four hours a day, returns to a house where he stays with his mother and grandmother, brothers and sisters, and where there is no running water or electricity. His $100 monthly team stipend has to keep alive an extended family of 10.

Nyandwi Uwase and Jock Boyer. Photo by Mike Spicer

Rwanda is a nation of cyclists. The bicycle is used as the primary means of transporting people and goods across the small, mountainous Central African nation.
Speckled across Rwanda’s breathtaking scenery in the ‘land of a thousand hills’, is the constant presence of long lines of cycles laden with yellow plastic water jugs. Many will be heaving with loads of potatoes, bananas or crates of beer. Wooden bikes are still used to push extra-heavy loads, from pockets of cement to steel pipes and roof sheeting.

Until the formation of Team Rwanda, the country, emerging from the shadow of 1994 genocide, had never formed a cycling team. At the time there were only around 60 serious competitors in the country. None had been trained properly, most had ancient equipment, many were without shoes.

Visit any Rwandan cycling event and the whole history of the sport is on view. Competitors arrive on everything from pullbrake, balloon-tyred, Chinese two-wheeled transporters to single-gear velodrome cycles. Grossly ill-suited to Rwanda’s famously hilly terrain, nearly all bear clear evidence of numerous repairs and welds. They serve as poignant emblems of Rwandans’ commitment and passion for the sport.

According to Team Rwanda’s manager and coach Jock Boyer, “The future of new cycling talent is likely to come from Africa, which has until now been relatively unexploited.” Boyer, the first American to ride the Tour de France with a best place of 12th in 1983 from his five attempts, says “Rwanda has given me a different perspective on life and its challenges. The way the Rwandans deal with seemingly insurmountable difficulties every day just to live, let alone compete as cyclists, is humbling. It is simply the most important and rewarding thing I have ever done.”

The first official team race was the ultra-tough Cape Mountain-Bike Epic in South Africa in 2007 where the two Rwandan teams placed 23rd and 42nd out of a field of 524, an unprecedented result for novices. Thereafter, the team spent eight weeks racing international events in the US, the African Games in Algeria, the World Championships, and the Continental Championships on both mountain and road bikes.

The embryonic team finished fourth in the 2007 African Continental Championships in Cameroon, ahead of many nations with decade long cycling federations and international experience. Missing a 2008 Olympic slot by just one place and one minute, Rwanda’s achievement was astonishing nonetheless.

One might catch sight of an extraordinary looking coffee bike, initiated in association with the team to carry coffee beans, but has nothing to do with competition or sport. Designed by mountain-bike icon Tom Ritchey, these long wheelbase ‘Project Rwanda’ cargo-bikes have lopped as much as two transport hours off each day for rural coffee producers.

Like many Rwandans, Team Rwanda members lost family in the genocide, an event that still defines the country in the eyes of the rest of the world. No achievement of theirs could be greater than to help change that perception.

As team member Rafiki Uwimana (24) puts it in halting English, “Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine becoming an ambassador for my country, and all through cycling.” Rafiki, who is the first of his peers to obtain his driver’s licence, cycles at least once a week for four hours westwards from Rwanda’s capital Kigali towards the Congo.

The journey spans over two gruelling mountain passes, dodging trucks and potholes to the team’s base in the volcanic region around Ruhengeri, where he tunes his bike and grabs a hot shower.

Abraham Ruhumuriza, the oldest team member at 29, and recently widowed, is putting down a deposit on a house through his income from riding, which is likely changing the future prospects for his three children and the generations to follow.

Putting their Olympic disappointment behind them, the team has set immediate, intermediate and long-term goals. By the end of this year, they will establish a hightech facility in a modest house at Ruhengeri. The aim, from August, is to test at least 10 new potential recruits a month and to retest all six current squad members monthly to assess their improvements.

The goal, by the end of the year, is to have a squad of no less than 30 riders who are tested and retested, thereby increasing competition for places and improving performance among the six-strong team.

Alfonse Museruka (29), known to all as “Rambo”, is one such possible contender. A gangly giant of a man, this former soldier has been in and out of part-time employment as a security guard since he was demobilised at the end of Rwanda’s wars with Congo in 2001. Having been a soldier since he was 16 (and been wounded fighting genocidaires in the Congo), he knew no other trade until Boyer saw his talent. “With better training and nutrition to build strength, he has the size to become a perfect time trialist”, observes Boyer. Rambo now has a job as the team’s security guard.

Not only does he have regular income, but he is closer to the action to learn more about bicycles and racing. Such skills are necessary to realise the team’s plans to open a series of cycle shops countrywide, both extending the sport and ensuring income for the team.

The intermediate racing goal is to secure team participation in the 2012 London Olympics, likely in the mountain-biking discipline. At the same time, the team hopes to establish a world-class Olympic training centre in Rwanda, employing the country’s attributes of altitude, hospitality and hilly terrain and expanding mountain-bike tourism, again as a funding stream for the team.

The longer term goal (2015) is to place at least two riders in professional teams participating in the Tour de France. That would be something to celebrate. A team of black African cyclists in a sport dominated by Americans and Europeans, bedecked in a splash of lambent yellow, green and blue and taking on the world’s best up the Alpe d’Huez or along the Col d’Aspin. That could transform the face of the peloton in the same way that Kenyans have changed middle distance running.

Team Rwanda’s future is by no means certain. It was never going to be easy to get a cycle team up and running in a country where the per capita annual income is only $250, and two-thirds of the government budget depends on foreign aid inflows. Until now, the team has had to survive off irregular personal donations and equipment handouts. Yet, Team Rwanda is a powerful demonstration of how international aid can be spent effectively. Its inspiring beginnings illustrate how foreigners can give without reinforcing an aid dependency mindset. Its success has nothing to do with international consultants, aid compacts or donor conferences, but it’s about good people putting their talents to practical effect. It’s fundamentally about Rwandans seeking to change the world around them for the better, not vice versa.

Team Rwanda is a good-news story that Africans and others could do well by. And if its remarkable story can’t inspire the Tour de France to clean up its act, nothing will. ▲