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Inside Cycling with John Wilcockson: Along the Niger River
Bamako, Mali — The Niger, the biggest river in West Africa, is more than 4000km long.For a third of its length the Niger cuts a giant swathe through the nationof Mali. On Tuesday, the kilometer-wide waterway served as the backdropto a very unusual bike race at the bustling river port of Mopti. Most ofthe starters would be from Mali, a country that is so impoverished thatits 11 million population includes only 60 or so cyclists with the meansto compete at a national level.Two dozen of them will be taking on seven Saunier Duval-Prodir teamprofessionals in a road race to launch the UCI ProTour team’s inspirational“100years for a million trees” project. Most of the new trees will be plantedin country regions around Mopti, a city of some 105,000 people.The venturesome pros that agreed to kick off their seasons in this remoteAfrican state are veteran Christophe Rinero of France and Guido Trentinof Italy, along with five Spanish riders in their 20s, Ruben Lobato, CarlosZarate, Alberto Fernandez, Arkaitz Duran and rookie Raúl Alarcón.They had a 5:30 wake-up call at their hotel in the Malian capital of Bamako,before taking a one-hour flight by bush plane to Mopti — where the Malianriders slept overnight after a long bus ride on the bumpy two-lane roadthat links the two cities.Bamako has more than a million citizens, and its noisy, polluted streetsdon’t lend themselves to bike racing. To get a feel for Bamako’s trafficat rush hour on Monday evening, I walked along the long, narrow bridgethat crosses the Niger between the raucous downtown and the city’s southernsuburbs.Most of the commuters were crammed into dilapidated minivans and pickupsthat would be considered un-roadworthy in the developed world. Next inthe pecking order were the mopeds that weaved between the other traffic,their drivers giving futile honks on squeaky horns. Some of the underpoweredtwo-wheelers had father driving, mother behind and little daughter sittingon the luggage rack.The narrow sidewalk was the property of the pedal cyclists — most ofthem on dust-covered single-speeds or clunky, decades-old mountain bikes.Among them was an aging Malian man wearing a traditional, ankle-lengthMoslem robe who had a huge hundredweight sack of rice strapped to his rearrack.He wore crude, open sandals with which he was cranking hard on pedalsthat were reduced to their steel axles. No platforms. He wobbled up thegently sloping bridge at maybe 1 mph. On each half-pedal stroke he momentarilystopped pushing so he could get some extra purchase on his single freewheel.It was painful to watch, and probably even more painful to do. But when,like 90 percent of the Malian population, you earn just $2 a day, the onlyway to get that rice home was to carry it on your back … or your bicycle.Despite their monotonous diet of rice and peanut sauce, rice and chicken,rice and vegetables, rice and meat, and sometimes rice and fish, most Maliansare tall and muscular. You don’t see anyone overweight. And the strengththey develop — like that needed by the gentlemen pedaling his beyond-heavyload across the Niger River — make them potentially powerful bike racers.We’ll see what they are like on Tuesday afternoon in Mopti.
Related stories:Part 1 - Onthe road to Mali
