Yes, thisÌýÌýcosts $3,000. But here's why: each one isÌýhandmade out of black walnut and the nose of eachÌýboardÌýis covered in hammered brass made byÌýcraftsmen inÌýKumasi,ÌýGhana.

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Para-Athlete Emmanuel YeboahÌýis originally from Koforidua, Ghana. Born with just one leg, Emmanuel was seen as disabled and cursed. But this man overcomes challenges and is determined to change the perception of disability in Ghana. His trek is aimed to raise money to build schools in Ghana for disabled children, and you can find out more about Emmanuel and filmmakers Fancy Content .

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Dan Austin

Age: 36

Organization:


The original idea was straightforward enough. While planning a bike ride through the Cambodian countryside in 2006, Austin, an author and documentary filmmaker, and his brother, Jared, a pedia­trician, decided they wanted to donate their bikes to a local orphanage. Then they found out the orphanage housed 88 kids. “It was like this lightning bolt,” says Austin. In just five days, the brothers, with the help of Web-savvy friend Nick Arauz, founded a nonprofit, launched a Web site, and linked it up to PayPal. “Being able to accept donations online easily and securely was a tremendous help,” says Austin. Each bike costs $88, and by the time they got to Cambodia, they had all the money they needed to buy bikes for every orphan. “When you buy a bike, we give your picture to the child,” says Austin, “and then we take a picture of the child with the bike holding your picture and give it back to you.” It’s a winning strategy: Over the past three years, 88bikes has given away several hundred bikes to children in Uganda and Peru and has projects under way in India, Nepal, Vietnam, and Ghana. One of the main keys to 88bikes’ success is understanding the limitations of social media. “We’ve got a blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter page—all that stuff,” says Austin. “But you’ve still got to take time to chat with people and forge one-to-one connections.”

Tim DeChristopher

Tim DeChristopher

Age: 28

Organization:


DeChristopher is facing two federal felonies, ten years in prison, and $750,000 in fines. Last December, he bid on, and won, close to $1.8 million worth of oil-and-gas rights near Utah’s Arches National Park. The crime: He couldn’t pay. He’d bid in protest of any drilling. “We didn’t get the Civil Rights Act because the last bigot in Mississippi stopped being racist,” says DeChristopher, an economics student at the University of Utah and climate-change activist. “It was because people stood up and were willing to go to jail.” In February, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar shelved about 80 percent of the land parcels DeChristopher bid on, and DeChristopher has since founded the nonprofit Peaceful Uprising to promote nonviolent protest. In the coming months, he and pro bono lawyer Pat Shea, the BLM director under President Clinton, will make the precedent-setting argument that DeChristopher’s action was designed to slow climate change and therefore falls under the lesser-of-two-evils defense. If DeChristopher wins, climate-change protestors have a legal shield. Despite the gravity of his situation, DeChristopher recommends acting for climate change in any way possible. “It’s terrifying,” he says, “but sometimes you jump off the cliff, then build your wings.”

Reza Baluchi

Age: 36


Organization:


Baluchi’s advice for those looking for a way to help? Get moving. “When you run, you have a lot of time for thinking. Think of what you can do to make the world a better place. For me, if I help people, it makes me happy.” Baluchi’s stats prove it:

43: Number of days it took the former pro cyclist and peripatetic Iranian-American this summer to run across the United States—3,300 miles from L.A. to New York, more than 76 miles per day—raising money for UNICEF.

14: Number of New Balance shoes he wore out during his cross-country run.

15,000: Number of calories he burned per day.

38: His resting heart rate.

11,720: Number of miles he ran around the perimeter of the U.S. in 2007, raising money for a Denver children’s hospital.

49,000: Miles clocked on a goodwill bike ride through 55 countries that ended at New York’s Ground Zero in 2003.

85,000: Miles he plans to cover, on foot and in a specialized paddleboat, on his five-year, human-powered journey to all the world’s countries. Along the way he hopes to become an ambassador for peace—meeting with world leaders, helping schools and local organizations, and inspiring others.

Brad Ludden

Brad Ludden

Age: 28

Organization:


While Ludden may be photographed with his shirt off more than Matthew McCon­aughey—Ludden was on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø‘s cover in 2000, and a few years later Cosmo named him Bachelor of the Year—he’s not just a pretty torso. The pro kayaker’s idea: Build a cancer patient’s confidence by teaching him or her to kayak. After his aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer, Ludden founded First Descents in 2000 to provide what doctors call the other half of recovery—the emotional cure—to young cancer patients. Ludden has now taken 600 of them, ages 18 to 39, down rivers. “A week on the water reminds them that they’re not fragile,” he says. Past participants tell him that kayaking restored their courage, allowing them to bridge the gap between treatment and daily life. Though he’s still kayaking intense water—Ludden recently filmed the documentary The River Ward in Madagascar—he’s changing focus. “More and more, I find fulfillment in teaching people,” he says. So what’d he do with the $10,000 Cosmo gave him for the bachelor title? Promptly donated it to First Descents. “Share your passion with somebody in need,” he says. “It’ll make both your lives better.”

Geoff Tabin

Age: 53

Organization:


Tabin’s life was transformed when he saw a team of Dutch physicians in Nepal cut into a local blind woman’s eye. “At that time in Nepal, it was accepted that their eyes turned white from cataracts and then they waited to die,” says Tabin, who was there to climb Mount Everest. “Seeing this woman restored to sight was incredible.” In 1995, Tabin, along with Nepalese doctor Sanduk Ruit, started the Himalayan Cataract Project (HCP) in Kathmandu. In addition to facilitating the mass production of inexpensive lenses used in cataract surgery—the same procedure that costs thousands in the U.S. can be done by HCP for $20 in Nepal—Tabin and Ruit have trained more than 100 local surgeons. Now, after 15 years and hundreds of thousands of eye surgeries, Tabin is looking to bring the same high-quality, low-cost treatments to sub-Saharan Africa. His goal: to eliminate preventable blindness, a condition that afflicts some 45 million people worldwide. “I still receive great satisfaction from standing on top of a mountain, but it’s pretty minimal compared with watching a patient regain their sight,” he says. “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do.”

Eric Greitens

Eric Greitens

Age: 35
Organization:
Greitens’s résumé is hard to believe. Twelve-time marathoner with a 2:58 best. Champion boxer. Aspiring mountaineer. Rhodes scholar. Oxford graduate. Author and photographer (his humanitarian work in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Gaza, among other places, was published as a book of essays and photographs). College professor. Navy SEAL. Four tours (in Iraq, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, and Africa). A Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. A White House Fellows program. But the reason we chose him out of more than 600 nominees as Reader of the Year? His work since his tours. After a suicide truck bomb hit his platoon in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2007, Greitens visited his wounded teammates and other marines in military hospitals. They all said that when they recovered, they wanted to continue to serve, in uniform or out. The St. Louis based Greitens then partnered with a few veteran friends and used his own combat pay to start The Mission Continues, an organization that trains wounded vets for leadership roles in their communities. He’s since put 31 vets through the program. Greitens, an ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø reader for years, still finds time for six workouts a week, and he’s writing a book about service. “I think people end up benefiting from serving as much as those they aim to serve,” he says. Here’s more, in his own words.

One of the most influential people in my life was my first boxing coach, Earl Blair. He taught me that every single person is capable of tremendous courage if they’re given the right circumstances, the right training, and the right encouragement. When you challenge someone, you let them know you believe in them.

In SEAL training, I learned it’s actually easier to be a leader. When you’re leading a team, your thoughts are always on them. No matter how much I was hurting, no matter how tortured I had been, there was someone hurting worse than me. You don’t have time for your own self-pity.

I take time every single morning to exercise. It’s really important for me to get my head and spirit right before I start the day’s work. I work very long hours, but when I go home, I’m home. When I’m on the mountain, I’m on the mountain. I do not constantly BlackBerry.

My two favorite marathons were the New Jersey Marathon, where I broke three hours, and the Shamrock Marathon, which we ran in Fallujah, Iraq. It was the first marathon where they start the race with a briefing about what to do in the event of incoming artillery fire.

I want every single wounded or disabled vet to be welcomed home and seen as an asset. This year, we want to have 100 wounded or disabled vets as Mission Continues fellows. At some point, if we’re tremendously successful, the organization will grow larger than me.

Clare Lockhart

Clare Lockhart

Age: 36
Organization:
Lockhart’s inspiration came in 2002, when the guns had fallen silent–briefly—around Kabul and she was standing amid the rubble. “There was no guidebook on how to rebuild a country,” says Lockhart, who was part of a team setting up the new Afghanistan government. So the New York-based London native wrote one. First she co-founded the nonprofit Institute for State Effectiveness, in 2005; three years later, she published Fixing Failed States, which outlines how citizens from war-torn countries can organize their societies, economics, and politics. “I wanted to enable the people to empower themselves,” she says. By the time she was 30, Lockhart had visited as many countries, earned a history degree from Oxford and a master’s from Harvard’s Kennedy School, and practiced law in London. Now she’s provided more than $800 million in grants to 23,000 villages in Afghanistan through her National Solidarity Program, and she spent the better half of the past three years traveling on foot, horse, jeep, or helicopter to many provinces in Afghan­i­stan. “The people are rebuilding schools, medical clinics, and government facilities in their vision of the country,” she says. Lockhart emphasizes that you don’t have to work abroad to create positive change. “Volunteer locally,” she says. “The closeness of that interaction makes the feedback immediate.”

Ben Horton

Ben Horton

Age: 26

Organization:


Horton is many things: adventurer, photographer, activist. Just don’t call him a photojournalist. “Photojournalism is about presenting a story straight, without personal input,” he says. “For me, I want to influence the story. I want to create change.” To that end, Horton has traveled to the world’s wildest and most endangered landscapes—including the Arctic in spring 2008 as part of Will Steger’s Global Warming 101 expedition—to document those environments with his camera. He then publishes and exhibits the images to persuade the public, politicians, and big-time philanthropists like Richard Branson to protect them. “If you present scientific data to a group of people, not many are going to get it,” he says. “But if you put a picture of a landscape in front of them, all of a sudden they have a personal experience with it, and they’ll become inspired to save it.” Says Horton: “Everybody has their own medium, whether it’s writing, music, computers, or artwork. Use it to create change.”

David Rastovich

Age: 29

Organization:


You wouldn’t peg Rastovich to star in a thriller. The man’s a freesurfer, which means he gets paid to surf exotic waves for promotional films. Not exactly a high-stress gig. And yet there he is at the climactic moment of the year’s most talked-about documentary, The Cove, paddling out to cause a ruckus in a sea of dolphin blood. In the scene, Rastovich leads a crew of five wetsuit-clad activists—including movie stars Isabel Lucas and Hayden Panettiere—into a clandestine Japanese dolphin slaughter, disrupting the killing with a board circle. “The fishermen flashed the propeller at us and hit the girls in the legs with the boat hook,” says Rastovich, who was born in New Zealand and lives in Australia (and now has arrest warrants out for him in Japan). “Rasta” became interested in marine conservation after giving up contest surfing at age 20. Four years later, he started the nonprofit Surfers for Cetaceans to mobilize an athletic community not exactly known for monkeywrenching. Two days after the group formed, Rastovich was surfing at a local break when a shark bore down on him and a dolphin nosedived in, butting the shark away. “That was all the confirmation I needed that I was on the right path,” he says. Next up? Kayaking down the Australian coast, from Byron Bay to Sydney, alongside the humpback whale migration. The goal: Pressure the Australian government to enforce whale-sanctuary laws in the Antarctic waters where Japanese whalers hunt. “The government made a promise to help out and hasn’t delivered,” says Rastovich. “We’re going to make them honor their word.”

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THE ANTARCTICA
On this 19-day February whirlwind tour of the Falkland Islands, the South Orkneys, the South Shetlands, Elephant Island, and South Georgia Island, you’ll be hanging with the most impressive roster of guides we’ve seen yet. Reinhold Messner, Conrad Anker, and Caroline Alexander, author of The Endurance, will be present, as will a half-dozen top-tier geologists, biologists, historians, and a photographer, all specialists in Antarctica. Oh, and the wandering albatross, king penguins, hundreds of pelagic birds, sea lions, and icebergs will be there, too. Outfitter: Wilderness Travel, 800-368-2794,

GHANA
On March 29, 2006, the west coast of Africa is the place to be to witness the total solar eclipse, an eerie, extraordinary event. On this trip, you’ll visit numerous tribal villages in southeastern Ghana, walk a scary suspended rope bridge in Kakum National Park, and, on day eight, watch the total-eclipse show from a high plateau. NASA astronomer Laurance Doyle will be on hand to answer your science questions; anything else, you can discuss with the elders from nearby Abutia Teti village. Outfitter: Tusker Trail, 800-231-1919,

NUNAVUT/NORTHWEST TERRITORIES
It’s hard to get more remote than this: The Kuujjua River traverses the high Arctic plain on Victoria Island, a landmass with only two villages. Over 16 days in July, you’ll canoe approximately 150 miles of Class II–III whitewater, among caribou, white wolves, musk ox, and not a soul but your expedition mates. Outfitter: Equinox Wilderness Expeditions, 604-222-1219,

ALASKA
Your new luxury tented base camp for spying grizzlies at the foot of Mount Iliamna overlooks sweet, juicy berry bushes where the big beasts love to feast. Between hiking, mountain-biking, rafting, and kayaking forays on the Kenai Peninsula, recuperate in a lounge chair and watch one of the greatest shows on earth. Outfitter: Outer Edge Expeditions, 800-322-5235,

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AS WE RIDE UP TO THE FISH FARM, a mob of women crushes against the tall metal gates. They have walked here through suffocating heat and humidity, from mud huts dotting the Western Sahara veldt, carrying tin basins on their heads. Packed together, they are desperate, determined, on the verge of breaking down the fence. Workers inside are wielding sticks to keep them from clambering over the top.

The Hard Way: A 75-Dollar Bicycle Revolutionizes

Brad Schroeder, my unflappable guide, squeezes his yellow bicycle straight into the fray. I follow on his heels. The gates crack open just long enough for us to slip through to the compound beyond, the surge of humanity attempting to follow us inside.


A tall man in sunglasses, his shaven head glistening with sweat, greets us. “What’s going on?” yells Schroeder as they smoothly execute the Ghanaian handshake: white-man clasp, brother clasp, white man, brother, mutual snap of the fingers.


“Giving away free fish,” replies Mark Amechi, smiling broadly.


Amechi, 33, is the Nigerian-German owner and operator of Tropo Farms, a fish company he founded here, near the banks of the Volta River, in the West African nation of Ghana. He has a master’s degree in aquaculture and raises tilapia, a one-pound white-flesh fish he sells to the markets down south in the Atlantic-coast city of Accra, Ghana’s capital of two million. Just this morning, Amechi traveled to the nearby village of Asutsuare to announce that he would be handing out 3,000 pounds of undersize stock. That’s roughly seven pounds of perfectly good fish per person, worth about $2.50—more than a day’s wage for a rural Ghanaian. By the time Amechi got back to the farm, word had spread and a throng of villagers had arrived to claim their share.


“Might as well help out the local families,” explains Amechi. “The fish would rot otherwise.” He invites us into his un-air-conditioned office and proffers a bottle of ice water and some oranges. Schroeder and I have just cycled 65 brain-baking miles north from Accra, across rolling farmland, and we’re dripping profusely in the equatorial heat.


Schroeder, a 27-year-old from Charlotte, North Carolina, is the Ghana program officer for the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization based in New York whose mission is “to promote environmentally sustainable and equitable transportation worldwide.” His current goal is to make bicycling in Ghana more economically feasible and reliable by importing well-built bikes designed for the rugged conditions in Africa. Until now, Ghana’s bike market has consisted primarily of new and used single-speed city bikes from Europe and shoddily built imitation mountain bikes from Asia—which sell for between $40 and $100.


In 2002, Paul Steely White, ITDP’s Africa regional director, spearheaded a plan to create an affordable bicycle that would combine the dependability of European bikes with the versatility of mountain bikes. Then he teamed up with Waterloo, Wisconsin-based bike giant Trek to create just such a product. “The challenge,” Trek president John Burke told me, “was to build a durable, high-quality bike that was actually affordable for Africans.”


Manufactured for Trek in China, the so-called California Bike—named, according to White, to give bicycling a successful, upscale image—is a banana-yellow, six-speed hybrid mountain bike with a chrome-moly frame and fenders, sturdy rear rack, and puncture-resistant tires. To date, ITDP has imported 600 of the bikes to Ghana and sold them to local companies and dealers at cost.


Schroeder is irreverent, inexhaustible, realistic yet irrepressibly optimistic—the kind of guy who solves problems with an élan born of directness. He works like a dog, drinks like a fish, and pops beer caps off with his teeth. He and I had spent the last three days wheeling through the thickly polluted, impossibly congested, blaring, sweltering, treacherous streets of Accra.


Today’s ride is our first into the bush—it’s Schroeder’s mission to deliver the California Bikes we are riding to a village to the north and to check in on Amechi’s recent acquisition of 26 bikes for his employees. The bikes cost $75 each; Amechi picked up 30 percent, and the workers will pay off the rest of their purchase through deductions from their paychecks over the next seven months.


“So how’re the bikes working out?” Schroeder asks Amechi, speaking clearly even with an entire orange in his mouth.


“Brilliantly,” Amechi says. “Already they’ve become something of a status symbol. The men are quite proud of them. Some of my guys were walking five to ten miles to work, so I’ve seen a significant decrease in tardiness. They have so much more freedom now. A few even ride home for lunch. There’s a newfound self-esteem.” Glancing out the door to the front gate beyond, he pauses. “Would you excuse me for a moment?”


Amechi springs to his feet, races into another room, then flies past us and out the door, shoving shells into a shotgun as he runs. The villagers have burst through the gates and are rushing helter-skelter toward the ponds to get their fish. It’s bedlam. Amechi raises the shotgun and fires into the air. They freeze. He fires again, and then, shotgun in hand, charges the mob, bellowing at the top of his lungs. The crowd spins about en masse, hightailing it back out through the twisted gates, where Amechi will have them wait to be let in, ten at a time.


I’m stunned, but Schroeder merely shakes his head: “Giving anything away for free never works.”

THERE ARE TWO Africas: the bush—ancient, agrarian, slow to change—and the city—vibrant, dissonant, evolving by the minute. This dichotomy is especially vivid in Ghana, an English-speaking country of 20 million, roughly the size of Oregon, on the Gulf of Guinea. Nicknamed the Gold Coast in the 17th century for its lucrative precious-metal trade, Ghana was the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence, in 1957. Today, it’s a relatively stable democracy with one of the most prosperous agricultural economies in West Africa.


In Ghana, as in the rest of the continent, life in the bush often revolves around basic human needs: food, water, shelter. Services remain so spread out and transportation options so few, villagers often walk enormous distances every day—to their fields, to the well, to market, to school, to medical clinics. Unimaginable hours of productivity and education are lost for lack of efficient transport, let alone the suffering endured because of too-distant health care. In rural Africa, less than 1 percent of the population owns a car. A staggering 70 percent of freight, from bricks to buckets of water, is still transported on the heads of women.


The problem is just the opposite in the city. Africa’s inexorable rural-to-urban migration—at 4.9 percent, its annual urban growth rate is the highest in the world—has turned metropolitan centers into sprawling toxic messes. Too many cars, too many taxis, too many tro-tros, or private minivans. Traffic accidents occur with alarming frequency, and deaths per vehicle are 50 times those in the U.S. In the major urban areas of West Africa, 75 percent of commuters live within six miles of work; in Accra, however, 35 percent take a taxi or tro-tro, at a cost of about $1 round-trip—this despite the fact that incomes can be as little as $3 a day. The result is a country—and continent—in desperate need of alternative transportation.


Enter ITDP and Brad Schroeder. A rock climber, Appalachian Trail through-hiker, and competitive water-skier with a B.S. in environmental science, Schroeder joined the Peace Corps in 2000. He was stationed in Volivo, a village in southern Ghana with no electricity and no running water. Over the course of two years, he learned to speak Dangbe (one of Ghana’s 75 tribal dialects), drilled five potable-water boreholes, built a canoe that sank in the Volta, came down with malaria, and developed a taste for akpeteshi, palm-wine moonshine.


At the end of his hitch, the sounds, smells, and tastes of Africa had so permeated Schroeder that he decided to stay in Ghana, took a job in Accra with ITDP, and began work on the California Bike program.


“The bikes aren’t free—that would only put the local bike dealers out of business,” Schroeder tells me over lunch at a restaurant the next day, back in the welter of Accra. He explains that he’s organizing Ghanaian bike dealers into a co-op that will have the financial resources to buy and sell California Bikes on its own: “So many well-meaning NGO projects have devastated local business and replaced it with a welfare economy. That’s unsustainable. Besides, it robs people of their pride.” He fires down his de rigueur double shot of gin, stands up, and swings his leg over his bicycle. “C’mon,” he says. “You can see how it’s working.” And back into the fray we fly.


Our first stop is Latex Foam, an Accra mattress factory that employs 300 workers and has just purchased California Bikes for 20 of its top employees. As we arrive, the workers are wheeling around, getting acquainted with their new rigs.


“They are too good to be true,” says Eric Nayanyi, 35, the union chairman at the factory. “The workers with the California Bikes will no longer be stuck in traffic, missing wages.”


Down the road, a powdered-milk company called Promasidor is awaiting delivery of 60 California Bikes. Managing director Dirk Laeremans tells us, “The price of gasoline doubled recently. These bicycles will save our employees considerable commuter money. My guess is that, in five to ten years, many, many people will be bicycling here.”


Last on our agenda is Accra’s city hall: We have an audience with Mayor Solomon Darko.


“Bicycles are an obvious transportation solution,” says Darko, speaking from behind foot-high stacks of paper on his desk. “They’re inexpensive, often faster than a car in the city, cost the government nothing, and are pollution-free.” Darko is a city planner by profession, educated in the Netherlands and Great Britain. He and the Accra city government, in consultation with ITDP, are developing a master plan to build a system of bike lanes throughout the capital. “People will bicycle if they feel safe,” he adds. “Why not? It’s a healthy, beautiful thing. We already have excellent examples of this in our country. Have you been to Tamale, in the north?”


“We’re flying up there tomorrow,” Schroeder says.


The mayor listens carefully as Schroeder outlines our itinerary: first, a tour of the progressive, bike-friendly city of Tamale, followed by a three-day, 235-mile test ride of the California Bike through rural Ghana’s roughest terrain. We’ll pedal from Tamale to Yendi, Bimbila, and Salaga, then back up to Tamale, where we’ll drop off our bikes at a dealer—the first in the area to join the ITDP program. When Schroeder finishes, Darko looks at us gravely and says: “That is no small thing.”

ON THE HOUR-AND-A-HALF flight to Tamale the next day, Schroeder and I are joined by Ben Gherardi, 26, a six-foot-four jock from Fort Collins, Colorado, who works for Right to Play, a Toronto, Canada-based NGO that promotes health through sports. Brad and Ben are boon companions, having done everything there is to do within a 300-mile radius of Accra: rock climbing in the Volta region, kitesurfing off Cape Coast, road trips to Togo and the Ivory Coast. We assemble our bikes at the airport, then ride the 12 miles into town.


Tamale, a thriving northern commercial hub of about 150,000 surrounded by savanna, is indeed a bicycling wonder. In the early 1990s, the World Bank funded the construction of 15-foot-wide paved bicycle paths that parallel the main streets on both sides, as well as low concrete barriers that separate motor vehicles from bicyclists and pedestrians. A decade later, more than 15 percent of trips in Tamale are made by bicycle.


We spend all day cruising around town, marveling at the efficiency and pleasantness of it all. Not surprisingly, there are people on bikes everywhere: men in billowing blue caftans, schoolgirls in brown-and-orange uniforms, farmers with hoes tied to the top tube, village women with towering loads of firewood roped to the rear rack.


The next day, we ride to Yendi, bouncing along a rutted mud track through hand-tilled yam and cassava plots. Over the course of 65 miles, only two groaning trucks and an occasional courageous car pass us, but cyclists are numerous—all types of people wheeling from one village to the next on typical Ghanaian bikes: heavy, slow, jury-rigged contraptions.


An hour into our second day, the rough road takes its toll on us: Schroeder’s seatpost, raised high to accommodate his lanky legs, buckles under the pressure. His only options are to sit on the rear rack, as if he were on a recumbent, or to pedal standing up. So he reclines on his panniers, singing a riff from Easy Rider and spinning like a circus bear.


“Sure you can ride like that?” I ask.


“No sweat,” Schroeder replies, although he’s drenched and straining. “It’s just a minor design flaw. We’re still tweaking the bike to find the right balance of strength and weight.”


By the time we straggle into Bimbila, Schroeder has ridden 20 miles on a bumpy dirt track without a saddle, not complaining once. We go straight to the village blacksmith, a stick-thin, barefoot man sitting cross-legged amid a pile of scrap metal. He studies the problem, then goes to work with his tongs, tiny forge, and anvil (a chunk of railroad track). Using a one-inch-diameter piece of solid rebar he’s found at his feet, in less than ten minutes he manages to cut, fashion, and fit it inside the hollow seatpost. The homemade heavy-metal splint works perfectly.


Schroeder beams. “God, you gotta love Africa!” he says. “Improvisation is what it’s all about.”

THAT AFTERNOON we pedal around Bimbila, a dusty place with a roadside bike shop on nearly every corner, looking for lunch. Eventually, we’re directed to a clapboard hut on the edge of town where a pair of women in bright turbans stir two large cauldrons with paddles. Inside one is fufu, yams pounded and then heated to a rubbery, mashed-potato consistency; in the other is a gruesome fish-head gruel. We pull up a couple of benches and are served.


Fufu turns out to be one of Schroeder’s favorite dishes; he wolfs his plate down heartily, as does Gherardi. I’m three-quarters through my slimy, foul-tasting chowder when I feel something curious in my mouth and spit it out: a fat, white, wriggling maggot.


“Say, Brad, mind having a look at this?” I ask, figuring he’ll just tell me to munch it down.


Brad and Ben peer into my bowl, and blanch.


“Well,” Schroeder says in a tight voice, “I’m finished. How ’bout you guys?”


We saddle up and ride on. And on. It’s another 45 miles of burning, leg-leadening, sweat-sucking dirt to Salaga. In villages along the way, our yellow bikes attract considerable attention from passing cyclists. To Schroeder’s delight, several young men ask where they can buy one. At a bridge 13 miles outside of town, I don my headlamp and we carry on through dusk.


When we finally reach Salaga—a thriving slave-transfer station in the 19th century, but now an isolated village—the only rooms available are concrete cells with cold water and buckets for bathing. In these dismal surroundings, Gherardi becomes violently sick. By morning, he’s so weak and pallid that we put him on the bus back to Tamale. He will eventually wind up in the Accra hospital with something nasty but unidentifiable.


SCHROEDER AND I manage to pedal the last 75 miles of packed red dirt back to Tamale. To avoid drinking the dubious village water, which might expose us to guinea worm, we pour hot Fanta and Coke into our water bottles. Every seven or eight miles, we fall off our bikes and crawl beneath the shade of a baobab tree to hide from the heat.


Each time, while I try to decide if I’m suffering from heatstroke, Schroeder invariably falls asleep and then wakes up 20 minutes later, cheerfully crying, “Doesn’t get more African than this!” and hops back on his bike.


As we roll into Tamale, Schroeder tells me his dream for the bike program: “Make myself and ITDP obsolete. In our place, independent California Bike corporations in Kenya, Senegal, and South Africa owned and operated by Africans with the money and muscle to lobby their own governments and influence policy.”


Africa is a peculiarly obdurate part of the world, a continent where idealism can be worn down by brutal circumstance. But dreams are the wheels of hope, and I sense that Schroeder will stick his out until at least part of it comes true.


And that would be no small thing.

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HE IS ALONE, but he is not alone. There are the schoolchildren by the road, waving shyly as he passes, and the idle men resting in the sparse shade. There’s a yellow Mavic-sponsored motorbike trailing him, with extra wheels in case of a flat, and a small convoy of official cars, creeping along at the pace he sets. Behind them, somewhere, is the peloton. A police motorbike draws even and a chalkboard is waved in his face: 40 seconds. He boosts the pressure on the pedals, turning perfect, powerful circles, extending his lead.

Give me your flat-tired, your worn out, your sweltering Europeans: Inside a Tour Du Faso transport wehicle, ferrying riders over a stretch of impassable road.

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

The other racers can see him, of course. The road is as flat and straight as a stretched-out snake, and the lead he’s fighting to keep is less than a kilometer. When Jérémie Ouedraogo (pronounced “wed-DROW-go”) took off from the pack, sprinting into the clear, a few riders tried to chase him, but not for long. Perhaps they thought it was too early for a breakaway to succeed, or perhaps they saw the color of his skin and didn’t like his chances. But he went out anyway, and now he’s pushing a strong, steady cadence across the savanna, his wheels turning like the ²õ¾±±ô³¾²¹²Ô»åé, the turning wind, which transports magicians and spirits across great distances, but not bike riders. He crosses a white line on the pavement: 25 kilometers to go.

He is a °ù´Ç³Ü±ô±ð³Ü°ù—²¹ workhorse. When others are content to stay in the pack, sheltered from the wind, Jérémie attacks, he makes things happen. Today there’s a chance he could make it to the stage finish ahead of les blancs—the Dutch, Belgians, and French—but it’s a slim one. It’s the eighth stage of the 11-stage race, everyone is tired, and he’s too far down in the standings to threaten anyone’s overall lead, so maybe they’ll let him go.

Or maybe not. The peloton is waking; the riders smell the finish. The wind is waking, too, pushing at his face, and because he is riding alone, he is doomed. The chalkboard again: 30 seconds. His legs feel heavy. Then 22, 15, 5. They swallow him.

An hour later, Jérémie watches French race officials give the stage winner’s jersey—the first awarded to a West African this year—to N’gatta Coulaibaly, 33, an Ivory Coast rider he has beaten many times in the past. Coulaibaly is so exhausted he can barely stand, his gold shorts stained dark from urine. His tears of joy mix with sweat as he does a barefoot dance, to the delight of a mostly African crowd that numbers in the hundreds.

Jérémie, a 27-year-old native of Burkina Faso, waits patiently to receive the red “combativity” jersey, given to each day’s most aggressive rider—his reward for those long kilometers alone. He puts it on quickly, kisses the podium girls, and smiles for the cameras. But it’s a loser’s prize, and he knows it.

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.

AFRICAN CYCLING IS A LITTLE like Australian ice hockey. Few people know it exists, and nobody expects very much from it. But just as the Brits brought cricket to India and the Caribbean, so the French introduced cyclisme to their African colonies. Liberation was just over the horizon when, in 1959, the French staged an exhibition race in Ouagadougou, the dusty, sweltering capital of a colony that was then called Upper Volta.

That race, a short criterium (multilap event) featuring top European riders, went down in cycling history, but only because of its aftermath. The second-place finisher—the great Italian Fausto Coppi, a two-time Tour de France champion and the dominant rider of his era—went on a hunting safari after the race and fell ill. His doctors back home thought he had contracted influenza, but it was really malaria, and it proved fatal. Coppi died in January 1960, just 40 years old.

The seed of cycling had been planted, and the Ouagadougou race became an annual event that eventually grew into the Tour du Faso, under the stewardship of the late Thomas Sankara, a charismatic military officer who seized power in “La Revolution” of 1983. Sankara instituted a wave of reforms, and renamed the new country Burkina Faso (a phrase meaning “Land of the Incorruptible” in the two major native languages, Moré and Dioula). In 1987, he started the Tour du Faso, inviting a Soviet junior team to compete. Soon afterward, he was ousted, executed, and dumped in a pauper’s grave by his longtime friend and fellow revolutionary, Blaise Campaoré.

As of last August, it looked like the Tour du Faso might also come to grief. Burkina Faso’s national cycling federation had run out of money. There were no funds to sponsor races, to buy new bikes, or even to stage a national championship. But in late summer, the French—motivated largely by lingering affection for the event—came to the rescue.

“I wanted to be involved in that African race, because I’d seen it and I knew how amazing and human it was,” says Jean-Marie Leblanc, 58, the director general of the Tour de France and a guest of honor at the 2000 Tour du Faso. But the fuzzy feelings were severely challenged when Société staffers went to Ouagadougou in August and found that their money had mysteriously evaporated. This, with the Tour scheduled to start in just two months.

At least the course was set. Burkina Faso has only a few paved highways, all radiating from the capital like spokes. By necessity, a 1,302-kilometer stage event has to use most of the nation’s rather bumpy pavement, so the tour traditionally starts in Banfora, a small market town in the southwest, near the Ivory Coast border, and makes its way toward Ouagadougou, smack in the center of the Colorado-size country. From there it traces a series of out-and-back journeys, traveling deep into the bush one day, returning the next.

A few weeks and a few hundred grand of the Société’s funds later, all the other logistical problems were solved. The teams had been invited, the international press had been alerted, and a French-owned catering company had been hired to serve meals, complete with tiny wedges of Camembert. The Tour du Faso was ready to roll.

Or so it seemed. A few days before the scheduled October 31 start, the whole thing almost fell apart again. An Air Afrique strike stranded half the riders in various airports around Europe and North Africa. As participants straggled in, bleary-eyed and jetlagged, the Syrians and the Egyptians wound up canceling, as did the Togolese.

And then there was the problem with the cars, which the Burkina Faso Ministry of Sports and Youth was supposed to provide. Actually, the cars were fine—a fleet of gleaming-white Renault taxis that were to serve as team vehicles, plus another squadron of minivans from National Car Rental. Two days before the start, race officials ordered the cars and the chauffeurs to assemble at the Stadium of August Fourth, a state-built concrete monstrosity on the outskirts of town. There, in its moldy bowels, the French were informed by representatives of the Ministry of Sports and Youth that the price for the vehicles was going to be substantially higher than previously agreed. Or else there would be no Tour du Faso.

It was not a happy meeting. In the end, the Société ponied up, the Tour went on as planned, and the French shrugged their shoulders and muttered, “C’est l’Afrique.”

THE DIMENSIONS OF THE TOUR DU FASO mismatch become clear on the morning of the first stage, when the riders gather in the main square of Banfora. Amid a grove of tall trees, the teams unload their vans, eat lunch, and assemble their bikes: shiny, new aluminum and carbon-fiber machines for the Europeans, with brand names like Look and Colnago; ancient Peugeots for most of the Africans, with torn saddles, old-style toe clips, and electrician’s tape wound around the handlebars. Their helmets are battered, their shoes ratty.

The biggest crowd gathers by the Burkina Faso team vans, where Jérémie is preparing for the race in his usual manner, which consists of standing around in a green-and-white track suit with a Walkman glued to his head, listening to reggae star Lucky Dube. He is tall and handsome, with high cheekbones and lively eyes that project a quiet authority. While Pafadnam is the official team leader, Jérémie is the one his teammates look to in the races, the one they’ll fetch cold beer for afterward.

His bike leans against a tree, an orange-and-black Eddy Merckx that’s only a couple of years out of date. It’s not actually his bike; it belongs to the national cycling federation, which got it from the bike company owned by Merckx—the legendary Belgian who won five Tours de France in the sixties and seventies—when the team traveled to Europe.

Jérémie hates it. For one thing, it’s too large; for another, it’s aluminum, stiff and dead-feeling. He’d much rather be riding his own bike, even though it’s heavy and old. The bike’s orange steel frame is more supple than aluminum, and more important, it’s his; after thousands of kilometers of training, his body has adapted to its dimensions. His nickname, “Rasta,” is lettered on the front fork. But he has no choice. The French gave him this bike, and how would it look if he were to refuse? He ditches the Walkman, stuffs a banana into his jersey pocket, and rolls to the line.

The race starts off fast, and the selection is merciless. On the very first climb, one of the riders from Niger is dropped. Hunched over the bars, his mouth halfway between a grimace and a gasp, he struggles to catch up, but can’t. The announcement goes out over Radio Tour: “Rider number 26 has been distanced by the peloton.” Within 20 minutes, four of his five teammates have also peeled off the back of the pack.

The Africans are not the only ones suffering. For some reason the stage started at 2 p.m., the absolute hottest part of the day, when shops close and nothing and nobody moves. The temperature has crested at 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and after a half-hour of racing, the red-faced Frenchmen at the back of the pack are waving their empty water bottles desperately.

Up front, the leaders put the hammer down, and the race explodes into a half-dozen small groups. Jérémie manages to join the lead breakaway but is dropped a few kilometers from the finish in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second-largest city. He winds up tenth, about two minutes down—by far the best of his teammates, and the best West African.

Riders are still coming across the line 30 minutes later, long after Hinault has pulled the yellow jersey over the shoulders of the winner, a tall, dark-haired, 27-year-old Dutchman named Joost Legtenberg. The stragglers are mostly African, their mouths gaping, some wobbling on their bikes, utterly devastated. Two European riders come into view, with an African just behind. Seeing the finish line ahead, the African sprints furiously to beat them, and the crowd—lifeless a moment ago—goes wild.

WHEN JÉRÉMIE OUDRAOGO WAS SIX OR SEVEN—his exact birthdate is unrecorded—his father, Sibri, took him into the bush, a day’s walk from their farm. Stand up straight, Sibri told him, like a man. Then he took a long knife and made three quick horizontal cuts on Jérémie’s right temple, just behind the eye. He repeated the cuts on the left side. Jérémie winced, but held back his tears. The scars that eventually formed would forever identify him as a Mossi, a member of the largest and most powerful tribe in Burkina Faso.

The Mossi had fended off Muslim raiders in the 16th century, slave traders in the 18th, and missionaries and colonists in the 19th before Ouagadougou finally fell to the French in 1901. The colonizers imposed brutally high taxes that pushed many Mossi to sell their livestock and go to work on French-owned coffee and cocoa plantations in Ivory Coast. Jérémie’s forebears were among the few who somehow clung to their land, tending their little plots of millet, sorghum, and peanuts, suffering the vicissitudes of rainfall and drought.

At home, one of Jérémie’s duties was to fetch water for the family, which was already quite large: He is the second oldest of nine brothers and sisters by his father’s first wife. (Now close to 60, Sibri has sired some 20 children with four wives, and shows no sign of letting up.) In the rainy season, April to June, this meant a quick trip to a well in a nearby field, not far from the family’s cluster of mud-and-thatch huts, one hut for each wife.

Every year the rainy season ended and the well dried up. Then Jérémie had to get water from the other well, five kilometers away through the bush. In the morning he would take a green plastic container, tie it to an old blue Peugeot one-speed that was the family’s only transport, and ride dirt paths to the well. The bike was too big for a seven-year-old, so he would stand on the left pedal and stick his right leg through the frame to reach the other pedal, holding the handlebars with his skinny arms.

It was years later on the same bike, a vélo ordinaire with a single speed and dubious brakes, that Jérémie entered his first race, in the nearby town of Boussé. He was 18, tall and strong by then, and he went along with a bunch of friends, turning his handlebars upside down so his rattletrap steed would look more like a racing machine. There were 40 riders there, on all kinds of bikes, and after riding around and around in a cloud of dust, he came in fourth. He won 300 francs—about 50 cents—the easiest money he’d ever made.

From then on Jérémie competed whenever he could, at the dusty races in small towns all over Burkina Faso. Most were multilap events through town streets, usually unpaved. Jérémie was a smart racer, and he clawed his way through the local scene. “He is très intelligent,” says Victor Duchene, a wizened 69-year-old Belgian who volunteers as the Burkina Faso team trainer. “And he is malin“—clever, and a little ruthless.

In 1996, barely 21, Jérémie was selected at the last minute to ride the Tour du Faso with the national “C” team. A German won that year, but Jérémie placed 16th—not bad. Two years later, facing a tough international field, he finished third overall, astonishing everyone but himself. On the final day, the Frenchman who won looked at Jérémie’s bike in disbelief: It was a rusty old Peugeot, with ancient shifters and a gummy chain, the front fork painted Rasta red, green, and yellow.

His stunning performance earned Jérémie a spot on a club team that also provided him with his beloved Rasta bike. As one of the top five or six riders in the country, out of some 350 licensed racers, he commanded a stipend totaling $55 a month—enough to live on.

He began training full-time, often in the company of Hamado Pafadnam, who was his teammate and best friend. A poor boy from the northern town of Kaya, Pafadnam was big and gentle and had a killer sprint. Jérémie was wiry and resilient, but Paf was the closer, the one who could win races. The two became inseparable, training every day on the road northwest of Ouagadougou. In local and national races they made a powerful combination. “When we rode together,” Jérémie remembers, “nobody could beat us.”

But Jérémie wanted more; he has always dreamed of bigger things. Every July, he spends his days in a firemen’s bar in central Ouagadougou, glued to the live TV coverage of the Tour de France. Sitting there in the dark, nursing a Sprite or a Castel beer, he’ll watch the flickering images on the ancient set, which is enclosed in a metal cage to prevent theft. It’s a 10-kilometer ride from his home on the outskirts of Ouagadougou, in the Tampui quarter, but the bar gets good reception. Over the years he has watched Indurain, and Ullrich, and Armstrong—all the greats. But no black African has ever made the starting line.

Maybe Pafadnam will be the first. He’s going to ride for a semi-pro team in Spain for the 2002 season—the first Burkinabé racer to go to Europe. Jérémie is a little envious of his friend, but he wishes him the best. So he’ll sit back and see how Paf fares abroad. And maybe his chance will come someday, too. But time is running out. He is 27 already. He has to make a move soon. When the Tour de France stage finishes, Jérémie pulls worn bills from his pocket, pays, and rides home to his wife, Kadi, their infant son, Evarice, and their two-room cinder-block house on a cratered, nameless street in Tampui. There’s a curtain for a door, a piece of corrugated metal for a roof, and inside—against one wall—a long, low table laden with trophies.

EACH DAY OF THE RACE dawns cool and pleasant, the amber light slanting across the flat grasslands and the scattered baobab trees, their roots as massive as the buttresses of a French cathedral. But it’s all a deception. By 11 the heat is oppressive and queasy-making, which is why most stages start at 7 a.m. The air is filled with dust from the Sahara, blown down by a seasonal wind called the harmattan, the bane of the riders’ existence.

By the third stage, from Boromo to Koudougou, quite a few riders are looking ill. So are the French TV people, the commissaire from the International Cycling Union, and the guys from Mavic, the wheel manufacturer. Watching a hapless Belgian drop back from the pack for a midrace Imodium—his shorts stained a repulsive color—Hinault rolls down the window of his Mercedes limousine and cackles, “Il fait la chiasse!” He has the shits!

If la chiasse doesn’t let up, a racer’s next stop is most likely the car balai, or “broom wagon,” an ancient beige school bus that rumbles along after the very last rider, like an overfed lion stalking the weakest member of the herd. Nine riders bailed during the third stage, out of 76 starters. The fourth and longest stage, a 173.5-kilometer run from Ouagadougou north to Ouahigouya, close to the Sahara, promises to be a banner day for the wagon.

The riders leave on time, but around the car balai there is little sense of urgency. In fact, it is out of gas. As an underling scurries off to find some, the car’s chief takes the opportunity to lecture me gently on America’s various sins. “You give us your wheat, your milk, your soy oil,” he says, referring to the U.S. foreign aid that Burkina Faso relies on heavily, “but you don’t know how to be loved.”

His full name is Nocke Blaise Antoine Mamadou Bassole, comprising his Mossi, Christian, Muslim, and family names, but he goes by Blaise. A tall, dignified man in his sixties, clad in a light-gray polyester African suit, with a salt-and-pepper beard to match, he spends most of the year as a state railway inspector. As the commissaire of the car balai, he commands a staff of four, a driver and three helpers.

Bassole’s underling returns. Gas has been found, but now the car balai refuses to start. Soon we are all pushing the old bus, joined by commuters who have been press-ganged into service. The driver jams it into gear, but it dies. He opens the hood and fiddles with something, and the engine growls to life. We climb aboard and rumble into morning traffic, bound for Ouahigouya.

We quickly leave the city behind, trading swarms of buzzing mopeds for a dry, flat landscape reminiscent of west Texas. The road is rough and newly graveled, and before long we come upon rider number 22, Harouna Amadou of Niger, 26, pedaling along at a slow and stately pace. He shows no sign of stopping—in fact, he has outlasted his own bike, which gave out during the third stage. The Mavic guys loaned him a yellow Cannondale, and so we fall in behind him, maintaining a respectful gap.

Soon we find our first customer: Lionel Vedrine, a 29-year-old from central France. He’s had bad luck from the start, when he flatted about eight kilometers into the first stage. He rode the whole way alone, exhausting himself, and when the pace picked up today he couldn’t match it. “You have pain in your whole body, you are thinking of your sweetheart, and it is over in your head,” he says, collapsing into the seat beside me. “Shit.”

We pick up another tired Frenchie, then a burly Moroccan who has snapped his seatpost, and isn’t happy about it. Finally, Amadou pulls off to the side of the road and dismounts. But instead of climbing aboard the bus, he squats behind a bush—la chiasse. He remounts and continues, unhurried as ever.

We pick up two more of Vedrine’s teammates, but Amadou still does not stop. Discontent rises in the bus. He is moving at only about 20 kilometers per hour—at this rate, it will take him all day to finish. The European riders want Bassole and his crew to make him quit, but Bassole will have none of it. Whether Amadou gives up or slogs on, it’s his decision to make. One of the younger French riders waves a cold Coke out the window. “Come on in!” the kid yells, waggling the bottle in his face. “Stop now!”

“Pourquoi?” asks Amadou. Why?

“We have these expensive bikes,” Vedrine whispers, “but they don’t quit.”

We pull ahead and park in a small town, in the faint shade of a tree. Semicold Cokes appear, along with a pile of sinewy grilled chicken and a bunch of bananas. A small boy comes up to the window holding a metal can, looking at us with pleading, gooey eyes. “Vote Blaise Campaoré,” his filthy T-shirt urges, “for the blossoming of youth.”

Ten minutes later Amadou rolls past, and we toss our chicken bones out the window and rumble off after him. Before long he pulls over to the side of the road and stops. His bike is hoisted to the roof with the others, and he takes a seat toward the front of the bus. He isn’t even sweating. “Malade,” he says, indicating his stomach. He takes a banana from his jersey pocket and eats it, staring wordlessly through the windshield.

OUAHIGOUYA. YAKO. KAYA. Ziniaré. Fada N’Gourma. The caravan rolls across the countryside, one stage blending into the next. In the small towns and tiny farming villages, children are let out of school and flock to the roadside to wave as the race goes by. They wave at the publicity trucks; they wave at the cops on the motorbikes; they wave at the multihued swarm of racers. They wave at the winners, and at the very last riders, the ones struggling just to keep going. “Bon courage!” they shout.

Everyone agrees that the race is better organized than ever; there is good food every night, and the stages leave on time. But the stage finishes are remarkably unfestive—sullen, in fact. Almost nobody claps. “There is something missing,” a Burkina Faso TV journalist tells me one night over beers. “Everything in Africa is like a party. But here, there is no fête Africaine.” One of the Belgians, who has raced the Tour du Faso for the past five years, agrees. “It has lost its African soul,” he mourns.

The reason is simple: The stage winner is almost always European. The Moroccans have a rider in third place overall, but they can’t seem to move him up. So the yellow jersey stays on Joost Legtenberg’s shoulders, even through the inevitable bout of la chiasse. As for the West Africans, they dropped out of contention for good with the grueling fourth stage, during which Jérémie lost a full 18 minutes after getting stuck behind a crash caused by a rider from Cameroon.

One night in Ouagadougou, after stage six, Jérémie goes to see Victor Duchene. Charged with tending to the riders’ physical needs, like food, fluids, medicine, and massage, the trainer is often closer to the riders than the team director. Victor worked with many of the greats, including Eddy Merckx and Greg LeMond; he spends a few weeks a year working with the Burkina Faso team, preparing them for the Tour.

Jérémie is discouraged. He is crying. He’d hoped for a top five finish this year, enough to get him noticed in Europe. But he’s so far behind, it’s hopeless. And his teammates still lack unity; each one seems to be riding for himself. He tells Victor he has decided to quit.

Victor has seen this before. “They are ³¦´Ç³¾±è±ô±ð³æé,” he says later. They see the Europeans’ shiny bikes, their expensive sunglasses, their new helmets, and they become demoralized. Their legs feel heavy. They hesitate to attack, and instead only follow.

Look at me, Jérémie, he says. I am white, you are black. But you are just as strong as me. Stronger. You mustn’t be afraid, and you mustn’t quit. Victor knows that Jérémie is a good rider, a tough all-arounder. He is less strong than Pafadnam, but he has the smarts to make up for it, and he wants to win.

The next day there is a meeting, and it is announced that Jérémie has become the leader of the Burkina Faso team, replacing Pafadnam, his closest friend. Now there are tears, there’s shouting. But the logic is unassailable. “He showed in the Tour du Faso that he is the best rider in Burkina Faso,” Victor says later. And Pafadnam? Perhaps in his mind, he is already in Spain.

HE DREAMS OF ESCAPE, of long breakaways in the sun. On the morning of the ninth stage he takes off dangerously early, just three kilometers into the 126.5-kilometer dogleg from Fada N’Gourma to the town of Tenkodogo, joining a breakaway of five other riders: his teammates Lucien Zongo and Mahamadi Sawadogo; Martinien Tega of Cameroon; Sylvain Després and Arnaud Vettier of France. They are four Africans and two low-placed Frenchmen, so nobody pays them much mind as they build their lead, rotating smoothly to share the work. The gap grows to two minutes, then three, and then, after 40 or 50 kilometers, it starts to come down, dropping to two minutes and change.

At Koupéla, where the course turns south, their capture seems imminent. Jérémie urges his teammates to ride à bloc, all out, and they renew their effort. They are in a crosswind now, so they spread out across the road in a wind-cheating echelon. The gap begins to grow again.

Still working seamlessly together, they pass a large lake without noticing the crocodile basking on the muddy shore. Jérémie drops back to get water from his team car and stays at the rear of the breakaway, resting. His teammates Zongo and Sawadogo keep the pace fast while waiting for his sign.

He feels good, in part because he decided to ride his old bike again, but for other reasons as well. In earlier stages he felt weak at crucial moments, and he wondered—like Pafadnam—if someone hadn’t put black magic on him, known in Burkina Faso as “the Wak.”

Bike racers are superstitious in every culture, but especially in Africa, where magic is accepted as part of everyday life. If something bad happens, or even something good, a Burkinabé suspects the Wak is involved. Who would have done such a thing to Jérémie?

“Someone who does not want us to win,” he said gravely, implying that it might even be a teammate.

With five kilometers to go, he attacks, shooting up the right side of the road, almost in the gravel, and into the clear. His companions, momentarily stunned, are slow to react. But on the yellow Mavic motorbike, which has trailed the breakaway since the start, the driver groans. “He truly sucks,” he says to his passenger. “Why is he attacking now?”

Sure enough, he’s caught; his attack succeeded only in shedding his teammate, Zongo. With the gauntlet thrown, all cooperation ceases. After nearly three hours of working together, the riders have suddenly become bitter enemies: the three Burkinabé versus the three others. The six racers slow down, passing a dirty Shell sign, and Zongo claws his way back.

Jérémie sits nonchalantly at the back, watching the hostilities. With two to go, his teammate Zongo blasts clear down the left. The road slopes slightly downhill, so he gets a good gap. The Camerounais tries to chase Zongo down, but he can’t, leaving it to Després, the Frenchman. They are going quite fast now, over 55 kilometers per hour, and for a moment it looks like Zongo will make it all the way to the finish-line banner, rapidly approaching.

The road is like a funnel, sucking them toward the line. Després catches Zongo and keeps going for the finish, burying his head between his handlebars, with Jérémie on his wheel. But it’s too soon. He runs out of gas, and it takes almost no effort for Jérémie to swing right and float ahead, as though an invisible hand has given him a gentle push. His hands shoot up into the air as his bike swerves crazily across the finishing area, buffeted by waves of emotion from the crowd. He hears a woman scream with joy; his body tingles as he flies down the hill and into town.

JéRéMIE COMES TO REST in the shade of a small bar, several hundred yards past the finish line. There is a stampede, a sea of people surging toward him, small excited children and lumbering TV journalists, clearing a path with their heavy cameras. Everyone piles into the small outdoor bar, pressing him farther into the darkness, where he is wedged between a foosball table and a TV camera. A cold Fanta is placed in his hands; microphones are pushed in his face. “C’est une grande victoire pour notre pays,” he begins.

He is a champion, a hero. In his distinctive French, he thanks his teammates and describes how he was inspired by the crowds lining the final kilometers. A local journalist collars him, and he switches to his native Mossi tongue, the words tumbling out freely. Victor finds him, and they embrace. “Are you content?” Jérémie asks. Yes, Victor is content.

Soon, a representative from the Ministry of Sports and Youth drags Jérémie toward the podium, where he receives his white stage-winner’s jersey and his winner’s kisses. And the race officials breathe a collective sigh of relief. It would have been a terrible thing if the host country didn’t even win a stage.

Later, the Dutch will talk about what an easy day it was—almost like a rest day. And others will whisper: Was it fixed to let them save face? Last year, Jérémie’s friend Mahamadi Sawadogo won the same stage—but only, the cynics say, because the Italian team let him. Perhaps this was the same. At any rate, the following day, stage ten, is very fast—suddenly lots of people are going for it. “Every African guy’s got it in his head that he can win now,” complains a Dutch rider.

MAYBE JéRéMIE HEARS THE TALK, maybe not. Certainly he knows the truth: To win a single stage, in a race that barely matters in Europe, is not enough. And so Jérémie decides to go for it again on the 11th and final stage, the most prestigious of the race, a 156.5-kilometer run from P(tm), near the Ghanaian border, north to Ouagadougou. The stage will end in front of the Moro-Naba palace, home of the Mossi king, who will be on hand to watch.

The stage starts off slow and festive, but the riders—the 48 survivors of the race, that is, out of 77 starters—smell one last chance at glory. Twenty kilometers outside Ouagadougou, Jérémie finds himself in a breakaway again. In the ragged outer slums, the crowds lining the roadside are four and five deep. He can hear snatches of conversation. More than one person shouts, “Pafadnam! Pafadnam!” But Paf is not in the break. It is Jérémie, Sawadogo, a Moroccan, and a Camerounais—no Europeans this time. At one point they are ahead by more than a minute, but as they approach the city center they have barely 35 seconds, a sliver of a margin.

They enter the city from the east, dangling in front of the peloton, dodging potholes. At the United Nations circle they’re ahead by eight seconds. As they take a hard left at the Banque Centrale d’Afrique de L’Ouest, with one kilometer to go, Jérémie can hear the pack closing in from behind.

Sawadogo takes off solo, going for the win. Jérémie gives one last push for the line, but his legs will not turn. They have no power—he wonders, is it the Wak?

The chasers swarm past, catching Sawadogo too, and a big, muscular Frenchman wins the stage.

Later, Adama Diallo—the head of Burkina Faso’s cycling federation—comes up to Jérémie, removes his cigarette holder from his mouth, and gives him a questioning shrug, as if to say, “What’s the matter with you?”

Jérémie endures it, somehow. He respects Diallo, but Diallo has never raced a bike, so he has no idea how hard it is: the suffering, the loneliness, the mental torture. Jérémie merely shrugs back and mumbles a polite explanation. He watches the Mossi king, his king, give a splendid white robe to the overall winner, Joost Legtenberg, who looks—there is no other word—goofy in it. Then he goes to look for Pafadnam, but he is gone.

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