Racing for the Hell of It (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine July 2002

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Racing for the Hell of It (Cont.)


	Rasta Rouleur: Jérémie Ouedraogo at his home in Ouagadougou's Tampui quarter, with Burkinabé

IT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO BE THIS WAY. Not this year, with the new bikes and the training in France and half the European sports press descending upon tiny Burkina Faso—a desperately poor former French colony wedged between Mali, Niger, Ghana, and Ivory Coast—to cover the Tour du Faso, the only professional, internationally sanctioned bike race held in the vast continental swath between the Sahara and South Africa.

After eight days, the host country still had nothing to brag about. Its dozen riders hadn't managed to win a single stage. The highest-placed Burkinabé, 34-year-old Saïdou Rouamba, was lolling in 15th place, more than 15 minutes back, hopelessly out of contention. Jérémie Ouedraogo was in 18th, another three minutes behind. Most of the top places were held by European riders. There was a Moroccan in third, and another in sixth, but nobody from West Africa was anywhere near the front.

Foreigners have always done well in the Tour du Faso, which is held over 12 days every November. The first race was won in 1987 by a Russian, and though African teams have triumphed 9 of 14 times, Europeans have dominated in recent years, as the race has grown increasingly popular with over-the-hill pros and adventurous amateurs who make the difficult trip for various reasons. Some like the exotic locale, some come to rack up easy international racing points, and some show up out of altruism—bringing hard-to-get bike parts for local riders, or supplies for the threadbare hospitals. All are inspired by the opportunity to pursue a purer form of a sport that in Europe has been wracked by drug scandals and excessive commercialization.

The result has been a higher level of racing but a tougher time for the West African riders, who face tremendous training and equipment obstacles in a region that has spent decades on the economic ropes. Like its neighbors in the Sahel region, Burkina Faso has little industry or natural wealth. It has few minerals, not much water, and nothing to draw tourists. The HIV infection rate is horrendous, and illiteracy is the norm. The average per-capita income is $230, barely enough to buy cycling shoes. There's no filthy-rich oligarchy, as seen in Congo or Nigeria, but that's only because there's nothing much to plunder. ("Here, the poverty is equally distributed," one European development worker told me.) Presiding over it all is Burkina Faso's president, Captain Blaise Campaoré, 51, a military strongman who's no stranger to corruption, having allowed his country to be used as a conduit for diamond and arms smugglers, and a safe haven for "every pariah in the world," as an American diplomat once put it to The Washington Post.

The last homegrown rider to win the Tour du Faso was Ernest Zongo, in 1997, a year when only a weak Belgian team showed up. A Frenchman won in 1998, an Egyptian in 1999, and in 2000 a squad of Italian professionals swept five of the top six places. The 2001 event was shaping up the same way—a Holland-based international team had grabbed the lead on the first day and hadn't let go. Local newspapers like L'Observateur were turning Burkina Faso's poor showing into a national crisis, accusing the home team of "always playing second roles."

To make matters worse, this humiliation was being broadcast far and wide. The Tour du Faso 2001 was organized, for the first time, by the Société du Tour de France, the Paris-based body that puts on cycling's biggest event every July and that stepped in to save the Burkina Faso race when it seemed on the verge of financial collapse. With a budget approaching half a million dollars, the strapped Tour du Faso took on relatively fancy trappings. There were nightly television feeds to Europe, better prize money for teams (about $30,000 in all), beautiful podium girls to kiss the stage winners, and five-time Tour de France winner Bernard Hinault on hand to present the maillot jaune—yellow jersey—to the overall leader. It looked and felt like a miniature Tour de France, only hotter, thanks to Burkina Faso's blast-furnace climate.

The French had invited six European amateur squads—four French, one Belgian, and a group of riders from the multinational Marco Polo Cycling Team—to compete against ten African and Middle Eastern teams, including two six-man groups from Burkina Faso as well as squads from Niger, Mali, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Morocco, Togo, Egypt, and Syria. To prepare for the race, a select group of Burkina Faso riders (including Jérémie) flew to France in September 2001 for six weeks of training in Brittany and Normandy, courtesy of the Société. Some even got new bikes—well, slightly used bikes, but still better than the patched-together wrecks they'd been riding.

But now they were racing like amateurs. No, worse: The amateurs were killing them. The Burkina Faso team leader—Hamado Pafadnam, a tall, barrel-chested 28-year-old—was having a tough time. The Tour du Faso was supposed to be his showcase, but he'd been plagued by flat tires and crashes, the result, he was sure, of black magic aimed at him by an unknown enemy. A few riders had shown flashes—Jérémie finished just behind the lead group in the first stage—but the rest seemed discombobulated. The head of Burkina Faso's national cycling federation, an imperious man named Adama Diallo, had personally chewed the riders out, saying they were performing like cowards, always following the Europeans, scared to make a move.

Diallo knew little about racing—he'd played soccer as a youth, and volunteered to run the country's cycling federation—but Jérémie had to agree. Sitting in the shade of an acacia tree, a few hours after the eighth-stage finish in the market town of Fada N'Gourma, he said of his teammates: "They are not in form. They are afraid to attack. When I went today, I called my teammates to join me, but none of them would." Jérémie was disgusted but philosophical. There were three more stages, which meant three chances to win. His teammates were whispering about bad spells and conspiracies—but Jérémie was calm, always calm. Only one thing was certain. Tomorrow he would attack again. It was all he could do.

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