Tim Lewis's account of the creation of the Rwandan cycling team is far from the usual rags-to-riches tale
When Rwandan Adrien Niyonshuti crossed the line in the men's mountain
bike race at the London Olympics last year, he did so bearing both the
hopes of a nation and the scars – mental and physical – of the 1994
genocide. The fact that he was thankful just to finish – in 39th place –
is just one reason why Tim Lewis's fascinating story of Rwandan cycling isn't a typical rags to riches, triumph against adversity tale. For one thing, as this book repeatedly reminds us, life in Rwanda is rarely that neat.
Lewis, however, does a fine job of unpicking a tangled narrative that
begins with swathes of Niyonshuti's family being hacked to death by
Hutu mobs. As president Paul Kagame strove to rebuild Rwanda, American
mountain bike pioneer Tom Ritchey – in the throes of a full-blown
midlife crisis – was in the right place at the right time. His Project
Rwanda aimed to produce cheap bikes for coffee farmers to transport
their produce and, eventually, hoped to form a national cycling outfit that might suggest a more positive image of the country.
The
coach for this team was Jock Boyer – a Tour de France alumnus but also a
convicted sex offender. Boyer's murky past is just one of the
intriguing moral questions Lewis throws up – he quickly realises that
almost every westerner involved in Team Rwanda has some kind of personal
trauma from which they're seeking redemption. Their efforts to
professionalise the Rwandan cyclists do certainly have the whiff of the
Victorian missionary.
Happily, though, this is also a story about
the potential of African cycling and its undoubted capacity to change
lives. When Niyonshuti finished last year's race, exhausted, he may not
have won. But he'd become an inspiration.
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