I’ve moved on from my Ugandan cycling journey to Kigali, Rwanda, for the last few days of the 2025 UCI Road World Championships. Please watch PEZ for my final Ugandan post, about our delivery of bicycles to a clinic in remote rural Uganda. And…please excuse the photo quality — I’m not a photojournalist, and I just have an iPhone 14!
With Uganda as my only real African reference point, with its suffocating blue-gray smog, disintegrating roads, and utter lack of civil services — including garbage removal and traffic law enforcement — I’ll admit to doubts that its southerly neighbor Rwanda was up to the task of hosting the 2025 UCI World Championships.
After five waking hours on the ground, though, I’m confident that this country indeed meets all of a hosts’s criteria — and more.
Most streets here in Kigali, the capital and host city, are velvety and maintained — except when they’re not supposed to be: Cobbled stretches marble the city, and while they may not be Paris-Roubaix pavé quality, they jostled my shuttle to the media accreditation center uncomfortably.
Those streets and roads ribbon across hills in every direction. Rwanda is the “Land of a Thousand Hills,” and I can already attest that many of the 1,000 are very steep: My calves were barking as I walked a hairpinned street from my Airbnb to the start/finish. (Of course, we’ve heard criticism that the road race profiles are too hilly, warding off MVDP, Wout, Mads, and other puncheurs who might animate over a less climber-friendly parcours.)
Many cycling traditionalists fretted about African heat, but today it’s about 80 degrees with cooling cloud cover and a bit of a breeze. I felt a bit of sweat as I walked that steep hill, but I’ve felt much worse humidity in the U.S. and Europe.
If the prevailing atmosphere in Uganda is freneticism, here it’s order. I wrote earlier about the price and opportunity of benign authoritarianism; here I can see that this dictator-led country is set up well to host a bike race. Security guards stand on every corner; if I turn 360 degrees anywhere near the course I can spy a dozen volunteers. I watched 200 similarly clad students walk towards the start/finish; I asked a volunteer who they were, and he told me they are “organized fans.”
But amid all that order, there’s a buzz here; Kigali is clearly thrilled to be hosting this event. At Tugende, a cycling-themed hostel, restaurant, and repair shop, I drank a latte while watching this morning’s Juniors race. Later, rushing from the media center back to the finish line, I met two volunteers following the race on their phone; they let me watch over their shoulders as we walked.
One thing Kigali, Rwanda seems to have in common with Kampala, Uganda: friendliness. My family and I have been warmly welcomed here, by everyone from UCI officials to the caretaker at our Airbnb. Hopefully, any cycling fans who doubted that an African country could host the World Championships are seeing not just not just nearly-ideal infrastructure and order, but the kind of warmth that makes for not just a smoothly-run race, but an experience that makes us all want to return.
• Keep it dialed to PEZ for more roadside action from Rwanda.
The post Roadside Rwanda: Kigali Welcomes the World & PEZ appeared first on PezCycling News.
