Excellent read about the Rwandan national cycling team that was established in 2007.
Excerpt:
The race ran between shabby peasant villages, through tea plantations and fields planted with beans, carrots, and corn, past herdsmen with long staffs following cattle, a work gang of convicted génocidaires, roadside barbers, and schoolgirls skipping and singing in pleated smocks. It began to drizzle, and Jock urged the riders on as the pavement grew slick. At one point, a local cargo-bike rider found himself in the midst of the racers, and started cranking to keep up for a hundred feet, straining in his flip-flops, his rear fender laden with three bleating goats. Children on the road shoulders cheered and sprinted alongside till they got winded and fell away laughing. The riders from the northwest were familiar presences, often hailed by name. And yet the distance between the athletes—on their expensive road bikes, with their American coach following, iPhone stopwatch in hand—and the world that they tore through seemed as though it could be measured in centuries.
+ Sources:
• Climbers :: By Philip Gourevitch :: The New Yorker
• Team Rwanda Cycling
