November 18, 2012 (Rwanda) – This report was filed prior to Sunday’s 3.5km Prologue and the latest news is that Garneau-Quebecor’s Rémi Pelletier-Roy won and teammate Bruno Langlois came second… more on this great start for Canada shortly.

The roadsides of Rwanda are an uninterrupted stream of cheers, hollers and applause as we pedal past hundreds of crowds this morning. And this is just on our training ride.

If that’s any indication of the enthusiasm the country has for cyclists then it’s no exaggeration that the Tour of Rwanda, which starts this Sunday with a 3.5km Prologue, in the country’s capital of over one million, will have Tour de France-like crowds.

The five of us from Garneau-Québecor are invited to join the country’s national team, Team Rwanda, on their morning training ride the day before the prologue. We leave our shared hotel in Kigali under the escort of two motos, a photographer, a French TV5 camera crew and a humid and sunny forecast.

Our double paceline never goes more than 50 metres without returning waves to roadside fans: farmers tilling fields, crews shovelling ditches, kids gathering wood, women with towers of produce on their heads. All of them cheer, run, jest and reach for high fives as our spectacle of spandex passes them at 40k an hour.

It looks like Team Rwanda—or pretty much anyone in tight shorts on a bike with more than one gear—are kind of a big deal here. Maybe It’s because most Rwandans can’t exactly stop supporting their families and pick up a road bike, even if they could afford one. Or find one: there’s no road bikes in the country, for starters. No one imports anything close to a race bike or parts. Even if you have a credit card and an internet connection you’d be hard-pressed to order a roll of bar tape: shipping to this landlocked country, in the middle of Africa, is either non-existent or over-the-top expensive.

When a Team Rwanda rider wears out a chain, or crashes a jersey, he waits until a volunteer or friend from America or Europe brings a replacement in her luggage next time through.

As we discuss the 200 branded water bottles we brought just for our own team, Kimberly Coates, the American cyclist who came to Rwanda three years ago and now handles logistics and marketing for the team, exclaims “Don’t chuck them!”

“Water bottles are like gold here,” she says, and they’ll take any we don’t need.

Dave McIntosh, a cyclist and coach from Colorado Springs, came to Rwanda two months ago to volunteer after seeing a screening of Rising From Ashes the documentary about Team Rwanda. He shows us the team bikes, which are themselves evidence of this material liability. They’re all pro peloton hand-me-downs, a mélange of Canyons, Looks and Merckxs with their original rider’s name on the top tube: Dries Devenyns, Nicolas Maes, Van Goolen, Adam Hansen, Jérôme Pineau.

The situation sounds similar amongst many of the other African teams at the race this year. Sizing up each squad in our hotel courtyard on the eve of the prologue we see an assortment of mismatched jerseys, wheels and frames. Our team’s definition of looking ‘pro’ isn’t exactly a priority here. The opportunity, however, to transform determination and vision into momentum is, and they’ll use what they can to compete against the well-supported teams from Europe, America and us, from Canada.

Jeff Werner races with Garneau-Québecor and is a designer and writer based in Vancouver.