Special Issue: The Rwanda World Championships: At Risk with No Plan “B”

When asked recently about any alternative plans for the world cycling championships scheduled to be held in Rwanda this fall, UCI President David Lappartient proclaimed that cycling’s international governing body had no “plan B” to relocate the event. His fully committed stance to the troubled and restive country seemingly aligns with his lofty internationalization goals for competitive cycling, and hints at political calculations around his candidacy for the IOC Presidency to be determined this Thursday. However, plans for the event have generated widespread skepticism and allegations of sportswashing, and there are legitimate questions about the nation’s preparedness to host a major international sporting event. A military and humanitarian crisis largely stoked by the government of Rwanda is unfolding on its border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), barely a hundred miles away from where the racing will take place.

Sport has always been used as a political tool. The Cold War dominated the second half of the 20th century and broadly impacted the Olympic movement. Competition at the Games became a proxy battle between communism and capitalism, culminating in the tit-for-tat boycotts of the Moscow (1980) and Los Angeles (1984) summer games. China’s 2008 Summer Olympics were widely seen as a tool for deflecting its ongoing occupation of Tibet and preceded a ramp-up of Uyghur ethnic displacement and prosecutions. Russia fully embraced the practice beginning in 2014 with the Sochi Winter Games and ending with the 2018 FIFA World Cup, events by which it embellished national pride, generated propaganda, and created an international detente that preceded its invasion of Crimea and instigation of the current Ukraine conflict.

The Russian blueprint has since been adopted by various nations in the Middle East. Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and, most notably, Saudi Arabia rapidly assembled sports marketing strategies to diversify their declining petroleum economies and to distract from their numerous human rights abuses. Qatar hosted the 2022 FIFA World Cup, while Saudi Arabia invested billions of dollars in football clubs and stadium naming rights in Europe, disrupted golf with its LIV initiative, and became one of the leading hosts for combat sports like the UFC. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have also used pro cycling as a sportswashing lever to project soft political power and achieve hard economic aims. The UAE has built and fielded professional cycling’s strongest men’s WorldTour team and secured the services of star rider Tadej Pogačar through 2030. Saudi Arabia sponsors UCI WorldTour teams through its Alula tourism arm and hosts a UCI race. Bahrain also sponsors a UCI WT team.

Not all examples of using sport as a political and nation-building narrative have negative connotations, though. The 1995 Rugby World Cup, held in then-newly integrated South Africa, heralded the arrival of the reformed Apartheid nation on the world stage and proved pivotal in Nelson Mandela’s agenda of reconciliation and growth for the formerly embattled pariah state.

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame may have hoped to surpass South Africa and follow in the footsteps of the Middle Eastern kingdoms when the country was awarded the World Championships award in 2020. And Rwanda did, during the 2010s, boast a rich and developing cycling culture. After Rwanda’s horrific civil war in the early 1990s, the bicycle became a primary form of transportation due to its war-torn infrastructure. Nearby, East Africa gained traction in cycling with the rise of Kenyan native and future multiple grand tour champion Chris Froome. Eritrea and Ethiopia had also adopted cycling as a national sport, influenced by their prior Italian colonial occupation. The seminal competitive cycling documentary Rising from Ashes kickstarted a renaissance in African bike racing, reaching a high point in the mid-2010s when several Rwandan professionals raced at the highest level in Europe and the Tour du Rwanda was an important UCI stage race.

Whereas Middle East nation-state investments in cycling thrive, Rwanda’s has faltered since the championships were awarded. Accusations of corruption, abuse, and dereliction of duty among its national federation leaders persist and there are still serious questions about whether the country will be ready to host the events in Kigali. Independent of political considerations, the country’s recent national championships, which were hoped to herald the upcoming World Championships, suffered various organizational and competitive problems.

An essential backdrop to the 2025 World Cycling Championships is the political and historical significance of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, when Hutu nationalists and extremists infamously murdered over 800,000 Tutsi, Twa, and moderate Hutus in just 100 days. Paul Kagame’s predominantly Tutsi rebel coalition halted the killing spree and ended Rwanda’s civil war. Tens of thousands of the killers or “génocidaires” escaped over the borders into what is now the DRC. That displaced extremist Hutu population represented a genuine threat to Rwanda’s tenuous peace, but this dramatically decreased over time because the cross-border populations have become a mix of displaced Hutu and dozens of other native and refugee ethnic groups. Many of the original génocidaires were killed by combatants in the Second Congo War and subsequent cross-border clashes with the Rwandan army, while most of the rest have simply become too old to be a threat more than 30 years later.

It is almost universally recognized now that Rwanda’s incursions and deliberate destabilization of the DRC’s Kivu regions over the last decade have led to the current conflict. It has accomplished this by arming and training various Tutsi-influenced rebel factions, most notably the notorious M23 group, which recently seized Kivu’s capitals, Goma and Bukavu. Rwanda’s pretext for this military interference previously focused on rooting out Hutu perpetrators of the 1994 genocide, but now it claims that Congolese ethnic Tutsis are being massacred, and Rwanda’s ethnic ties to them therefore demands that they be protected – a circular argument that guarantees conflict escalation because the more Rwanda supports the ethnic Tutsis, the more the Congolese react to them as a threat.

According to various news outlets on both sides of the political spectrum, Rwanda has more than 10,000 of its troops on the ground in the DRC now to support M23, and upwards of a million DRC citizens have already been displaced. As a result, the likelihood of a regional war involving multiple nations is increasing, despite the DRC's recent overtures to the U.S. and other countries for military and diplomatic aid to protect its borders in exchange for mineral rights. The large civilian populations that could eventually be caught in the crossfire bear comparison to the Second Congo War from 1998 to 2003, in which Rwanda was a significant participant – a war colloquially known as the African World War that devastated the DRC and killed approximately six million civilians in the crossfire of displacement, disease, starvation, and violence across the region.

Kagame became President in 2000 and hasn’t relinquished an iota of his power since. He rebuilt Rwanda by proactively addressing the ethnic friction that precipitated the tragedy, leveraged foreign aid and investment to rehabilitate the economy and infrastructure, and professionalized his military. Rwanda’s economy boomed during the first 20 years of Kagame’s reign and sustained economic growth and stability in arguably the globe’s most unstable political region. More recently, that broad-based economic growth has flattened, particularly the IT sector, due to regional and continental competition with Addis Ababa, Cairo, Gaborone, and South African hubs as a preferred locale for African high-tech investment. Most significantly, Rwanda lacks the natural resources of precious metals, industrial minerals, and gems that many of its immediate regional competitors have in abundance. And, more critically, Rwanda’s population growth has outpaced its resources; annexing the Kivu would quadruple its territory and relieve many land-constraint pressures.

Rwanda has one of the continent’s most capable, well-trained, and well-equipped military forces. Through M23 and its allied factions, Rwanda hijacked the DRC’s most valuable Kivu mining fields and de facto became one of the world’s top exporters of rare earth minerals like coltan – despite literally having no reserves within its borders to exploit. The DRC’s attempts to force out the rebel groups, retake the region, and thwart Rwanda’s natural resource piracy has called Kagame’s bluff; threatened with losing a valuable revenue stream to other non-Rwanda aligned rebel groups and the DRC’s security forces, Rwanda’s now direct military actions have escalated the situation.

For all of these reasons, Rwanda's best-laid cycling plans have primarily fallen apart. From a political planning and regime policy perspective, its cycling World Championships aspirations were too far ahead of other variables. Rwanda’s presence in cycling peaked years before it submitted a bid in 2020 for the 2025 edition. Its opportunistic occupation of the Kivu preempted any opportunity to deflect criticism and consequences with a shield of World Championship goodwill. The country may instead be an antagonist in a local guerilla war when the racing begins this September.

A key question is where UCI President David Lappartient actually stands in this morass. He has engineered a meteoric rise through sports politics by creating and exploiting alliances. First, in his successful gambit to lead the EU cycling confederation as France’s national federation leader, and then – by locking out then-UCI President Brian Cookson from the EU voting bloc and securing African and Middle Eastern votes – ascending to his current UCI position today. We believe that Lappartient’s swaggering “no Plan B” statement is 10% theater and 90% political ambition.

By doubling down on Kigali and appearing to show confidence in his Rwandan partners, Lappartient bolsters his standing with certain members in the African voting bloc in this Thursday’s IOC presidential election (it should be noted that many African nations have poor relations with Rwanda). He already has considerable favor from Middle Eastern voters via green-light approvals of racing throughout that region. He might have sensed an opportunity when he awarded Rwanda the championships in 2020 – a four-year runway to help build his IOC candidacy despite Rwanda’s known host-preparedness deficiencies. Although it is unlikely, Lappartient’s combination of non-Western, non-European alliances – particularly Saudi Arabia, which has made no secret of its desire to host a future Olympics – and the IOC’s arcane secretive voting process could potentially combine to lift him into the IOC Presidency.

In this context, the cycling World Championships have become a textbook example of sportswashing: a bold sporting investment to showcase economic opportunities in Rwanda and build national pride, while just 100 miles away, a war primarily sparked by Rwanda could well be ongoing. Kagame's apparent primary political objective is to project his regime’s regional power in the face of his country’s economic limitations and oncoming international sanctions, thus protecting the legitimacy of his Presidency. Meanwhile, at least one of Lappartient’s objectives must be to parlay the alliance into sports politics glory.

However, the history and volatility of the region are well beyond the UCI's ability to mediate or depend on others to control. So far, Rwanda has eluded much attention from the world powers that could intervene or bolster stability. From a cycling event perspective, combatants are engaged in open warfare virtually within reach of the venues, and the race course and its visitors would be viable targets for guerilla or terrorist attacks. As the risk grows and travel advisories are heightened, the need for transparency increases. As we suggested a couple of weeks ago, the risk is significant enough that many countries may elect not to send their full teams or entourages, which will result in an incomplete and asterisked World Championships at best. And with Rwanda cutting diplomatic ties with key cycling powers like Belgium earlier this week, disruption of the event becomes even more likely. We would hope Lappartient goes public with some sort of “Plan B” in the next few weeks, following the conclusion of the IOC election.

Of course, there is also a counter-argument here: an African cycling World Championships with the support of the UCI and the international community will herald the heroic arrival of an emerging African success story into the global sporting spotlight. It could reinvigorate Rwandan cycling programs and the sport across the continent, providing children with new aspirations and highlighting opportunities for investment and development. It represents a boost long overdue for global cycling and changes the composition of athlete and racing development that diversifies the sport, its sponsorship profile, and potentially changes the scope of its fan reach.

There are very few in pro cycling who would bet against Lappartient, and fewer in foreign policy who would bet against Kagame; both men have political acumen and a track record of stacking the decks in their favor. However, it is impossible to ignore the fact that few other world championships in any sport since the 1936 Berlin Olympics have been played out so close to the peril of war – from both a timing and geographical perspective. What could be a brilliant moment in Rwanda’s reinvention from a decade of civil war, genocide, and a further 25 years of regional turmoil has instead become a dangerous proposition for the cyclists and fans who might converge in Kigali. The risk for cycling in six months is real and cannot be ignored by the constituent federations of the UCI. Hopefully, the situation stabilizes, worthy world champions are crowned, and African cycling has its next moment in the sun. But should the worst come to pass, it seems that all parties have something to lose – Rwanda and its neighboring countries, the UCI, David Lappartient, the reputation of cycling, and the sport’s international community of fans.

For further background and context on the Rwandan situation, we invite you to view a selection of documentaries from a variety of news sources. While not broadly covered in U.S. media, timely news segments are available on Al Jazeera and France 24 outlets:

● Rwanda, M23 and the conflict in Congo explained

● War in Congo - Trapped in a spiral of violence

● Colonial roots of the genocide in Rwanda

● Searching for alleged genocide perpetrators in Australia

● Rwanda, chronicle of an announced genocide

● Rwanda Genocide: The Killer is Among Us

● Blood Coltan