AFTER THREE MORE DAYS of riding—and one over-the-bars, helmet-cracking crash by yours truly—I was ready for a break. Luckily, it was time for the first big event of the Wooden Bike Classic weekend: an 80-mile road race from Kigali to Butare. I'd just be watching, thank God.

In the start-line crowd at a mini-mall in downtown Kigali, the guys on the national team were easy to find. Not only were they dressed in blingy gold, green, and turquoise Project Rwanda kits; they were the only Rwandans riding bikes that looked like they'd been made after 1964.

There are five riders on the team: Ruhumuriza, Adrien Niyonshuit, Nyandwi Uwase, Nathan Byukusenge, and Rafiki Jean De Dieu Uwimana. Each of them raced bikes locally prior to being recruited by Boyer; several worked as bike messengers. They've become national celebrities. "Everybody know Rafiki now," Rafiki said.

All the team members have devastating stories from the genocide. Soft-spoken Adrien lost six of his brothers. Nathan's father was killed. Though they represent Rwanda's new growth, the past is never far away. "We try to move on," said Abraham. "But we think about it a lot."

I hitched a ride in the Team Rwanda car with Boyer, as well as Ryan Scheer and Andrew Johnston, a pair of twenty-something filmmakers who flew over from Austin, Texas, to make a documentary about the team. They'd been in Rwanda for a couple of months and had the scruffy beards and farmer tans to prove it.

When the ride began, we roared off and chased after the peloton. At a rotary, we were suddenly joined by at least 60 green-helmeted motorcycle-taxi drivers. Our driver wove through the green helmets until he stopped short at a logjam, and—smack!—a moto driver skidded and bonked off the back of our Toyota SUV. Andrew and Ryan laughed uproariously. The rider was OK; he hopped up, inspected his bike, and sped off.

"Go, go, go!" Boyer said to the driver. "What are you waiting for?" Then, to us: "I don't think the driver is used to race driving. Maybe not any driving."

The day's route was perfect for Team Rwanda. They're all lithe climbers—not one of them weighs more than 150 pounds—and the ride out of Kigali was punishingly steep. Within five miles, the lead group had been whittled down to about 20: the full team, along with Ritchey, Marion Clignet, Kevin Cusack, and a couple of Project Rwanda volunteers from the Bay Area. As a stretch of hills approached, the team rode to the front, and the mzungus started dropping away.

Boyer popped out of the sunroof and barked at his riders in French. "Allez, allez, allez! C'est bon! C'est bon!" A truck wheezed by and exhaled a plume of thick smoke. "Those guys are going to be eating a lot of diesel today," he said.

By now Team Rwanda was riding alone; Adrien took the win in a brief team sprint at the finish line. But before we arrived in Butare, Boyer got a phone call from someone who told him that Ritchey had crashed. Not long after the climb out of Kigali, his front tire had flatted on a descent, sending him careering into a ditch. He landed in a grassy patch, narrowly avoiding a stand of trees. After "taking inventory" of his body and realizing there were no broken bones, he brushed himself off, replaced his inner tube, and jumped back into the race. Cusack would later tell me that he watched Ritchey roar past him at 30 miles an hour, drafting behind a truck. Only later did I learn that Ritchey had actually been holding on to the back of the truck.