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Team Rwanda Heads To African Cycling Championship

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The Team Rwanda cycling team. (Courtesy of Team Rwanda/Facebook)
The Team Rwanda cycling team. (Courtesy of Team Rwanda)

The 7th annual African Cycling Championship kicks off Tuesday in Eritrea. Riders will come from across the continent, including South Africa, Algeria, Morocco, Egypt. Participants will also come from Rwanda, a country where cycling has become more than just an athletic pursuit.

Seventeen years after the genocide there, the sport has become popular among many young Rwandan men trying to forget painful memories of the past.

In a recent edition of the New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch profiled the young cyclists of Rwanda. They were young kids during the genocide, and Gourevitch says they don't ride to forget the past, they ride to push those horrible memories back.

Guest:

  • Philip Gourevitch, writer for the New Yorker

This segment aired on November 8, 2011.

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