Just a few days remain before the start of the Tour Du Rwanda, the African stage race that in 2025 will have a special sporting and competitive profile. The week of racing and the eight stages will also unveil the circuit that will host the Cycling World Championships in September.

Starting from Kigali on Sunday, February 23rd and ending in Kigali on Sunday, March 2nd, the final stage will feature a selective, extremely challenging route that already sees Tadej Pogacar, yesterday's stage winner at the UAE Tour, as the main favorite for a world title repeat. The Tour Du Rwanda will offer a sporting spectacle traditionally awaited by cyclists from across the Continent, with Eritreans entering the honor roll from 2020 onwards thanks to the triumphs of Tesfatsion (two) and Mulubrhan, representatives of a National team that this year also appears to be the most equipped among African teams. Mulubrhan himself, currently with Astana and launched by Bruno Reverberi, is announced as a logical favorite.

Bolstered by the participation of two Professional teams like Israel and Total Energies, the event can count on the presence of top-tier development teams, from UAE Gen Z to Lotto and Picnic Post NL. Breeding grounds for champions, moreover, the outgoing champion is the Englishman Joseph Blackmore (Israel Premier Tech), overall winner in Rwanda in the same year he won the Tour de l'Avenir.

It should be noted that the tension erupted in the Congo region near Lake Kivu has led Soudal Quickstep to withdraw from participation. The race promises to be dense with implications not strictly limited to race results, both for the enthusiasm surrounding the riders' feats in Rwanda and because it involves a Nation that has bet heavily on sports, even aspiring to F1. In the Capital, which is today the most "green" city in Africa, a memorial recalls the immense tragedy of the 1994 genocide that led to the death of 800,000 Tutsi people. Since then, Rwandan society has managed to recover, without consigning such horrors to oblivion.

The experiential narrative emerging from the day-by-day direct experience in contact with the group will offer a glimpse of vitality and passion, alternating with tourist locations of inestimable beauty, potentially on two wheels. Needless to say, this is a territory that has recently made international headlines, given the emergency caused by conflict in the nearby Congo region (3000 deaths recorded in Goma) closer to the Rwandan border. A long-standing tension between states that is not easy to dispel, although the internal situation within the borders governed by Kigali appears to be under control.

 

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The website www.raggidafrica.it, curated by journalist Aldo Peinetti, following the Tour of Rwanda, intends to offer insights, sporting aspects, curiosities, and direct testimony from the protagonists, not without opening a window to the future World Championship. Without prepackaged views, with a great desire to be surprised, let's entrust ourselves to the story of the road.