I spoke to Adrien for hours about the genocide, but, except for his description of the Interahamwe who came with the gasoline, he related his ordeal without any visual detail. “He didn’t see much,” his mother told me. Then she said, “He saw some things. He was very young and I tried not to let him see all the dead.” But how could he not have? He told me that if he goes three days without riding his bicycle the memories come on so strong that he has disabling headaches.

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Adrien trained hard enough in the months after the Wooden Bike Classic to put the Americans out of his mind. Then, in February of 2007, he got a call that Jock was back in Rwanda, and was recruiting a team. (This time, when Tom Ritchey and Dan Cooper had asked Jock to go to Rwanda, they didn’t have to ask twice. But just for three months, Jock said, on a trial basis.) In the course of a week, Jock tested some twenty cyclists on his CompuTrainer—a device that connects a stationary bike to a laptop to measure a rider’s power and speed—and selected the top ten for intensive training. He put them up at a local church hostel, fed them heartily, gave them a little pocket money, and worked them out so fiercely that when Adrien looked back on his past five years of riding he said, “Until now, I was just joking.” At the end of the month, Jock thanked half the riders and sent them home. He told the rest that they were now Team Rwanda. Adrien made the cut, and the next month Jock picked him and one other teammate to fly to South Africa to compete in the Cape Epic, the biggest professional mountain-bike race in the world.

Adrien had never seen a great modern city before Cape Town; he had never seen the ocean; and he had never imagined a competition like the Epic, an eight-stage race across the rugged, shifting terrain of the Western Cape, in which more than a thousand bikers, riding in teams of two, covered as many as eighty off-road miles a day. There were sand traps, stream crossings, and long stretches where you had to carry your bike over boulder fields. The logistics of the operation were on a military scale. At the finish line each day, the riders were met by twelve hundred individual tents, tractor trailers with hot showers, a field mess, and brigades of support staff: mechanics, masseurs, doctors, and television crews. Adrien didn’t speak English, just some schoolboy French, which allowed him to communicate with Jock. Beyond that, he could only stare.

He and Jock rode as a team, and when they finished the first stage in twenty-fourth place he heard someone ask about him, “Where’s this guy from?” Their Team Rwanda jerseys tended to attract curiosity. Wasn’t Rwanda just a killing field? Adrien didn’t mind; it felt good to respond by riding his bike. But his body had never felt so destroyed. Just to climb the steps to the shower trailer was a torment. “Eesh,” Adrien said. “It’s no place for me.” He was sure he was finished. “I told Jock, ‘Please, coach, this is not my race. Why did you take me to this race, coach?’ ‘Nah,’ he told me. ‘Don’t worry, it’s a nice race.’ ”

Adrien liked Jock’s toughness. “He knows the suffering part of cycling better than us,” he told me. “You know, some people in my country don’t have anybody to push them. Like when I was in school, nobody was asking me anything. If you have somebody push you, you have to see, to use your mind. If I get strong, I help myself. I don’t help him.” Each day of the Epic, he rode with greater confidence. On the sixth day, he finished thirteenth, and at the end of the race he and Jock took thirty-third place over all in a field of six hundred and seven teams. (The other Rwandan rider, Rafiki Jean de Dieu Uwimana, and his teammate, another American, finished sixty-third.) Jock was astonished, but if Adrien was he didn’t show it. When he returned to Rwanda, he went straight back into training. “After that,” he said, “we were going to America.”

“The Americans—they were born before us,” Rafiki told me, when I asked him about the two months that Team Rwanda spent travelling around the American West, in the summer of 2007. Many of the riders hadn’t seen Kigali before they joined the team, but over the years they have got used to travelling. Jock has sent them to South Africa for intensive training at a camp run by the U.C.I. (Union Cycliste Internationale), the world bicycling federation, and flown them to U.C.I. races all over the continent. After competitions in West Africa and North Africa, the team is always full of stories of organizational chaos and corruption (fistfights with bike thieves, missed meals because caterers absconded with their fees, poorly marked routes with signs that sent half the riders off course). Rwanda, by contrast, is known for its strict social order, and the riders take pride in that. But in America, Rafiki said, “it’s another world—there’s no resemblance to things here.” Five Rwandan riders flew into San Francisco, loaded into Jock’s motor home, and rolled through Las Vegas, and on to Utah for a week of training, then down to New Mexico, to ride in the Tour of the Gila, and back to California for more races on the way to Hood River, Oregon, where they entered the Mt. Hood Cycling Classic.

Americans who encountered the team were impressed by the riders’ easy familiarity, but the Rwandans were constantly struck by the strangeness of American ways. “When we left California for New Mexico, there were places where you find someone living in the middle of nowhere,” Rafiki said. “He has a house, a car, a motorbike, electricity, water—everything you need—but the guy lives all alone in the middle of a forest. You ask yourself why.” Rafiki had taken to counting the miles between homes: twenty, fifty, more. “In Rwanda, everyone lives clustered together to get along,” he said. “If someone can’t start a fire, he can ask for a match next door. If he doesn’t have a mortar for grinding, he can go borrow his neighbor’s mortar. But here’s this guy, living in the bush alone.”

Rafiki said that he had never known real cold until his first night in an air-conditioned hotel in California. All the riders complained that they were freezing, but when Jock went to their rooms in the morning he found the beds untouched. “They said they had never had sheets, so they slept on top of the covers,” he told me. Jock suggested that they take hot showers, and after that, he said, “the whole rooms would be like steam rooms. They’d go to sleep in the shower.” When the Rwandans saw horses, they had to ask what they were. Jock arranged for them to go riding. At Whole Foods, they took trophy photographs of one another in the aisles. Wherever they went, Americans invited them into their homes, and the Rwandans couldn’t stop laughing when they found their hosts living with animals: dogs, parrots, hamsters, fish.

Jock had brought them to America, in part, because a racer learns by racing against superior athletes. He wanted them to know what their sport could be, what they were up against. He believed that there might be a future Olympian among them, but he knew that was impossible unless they believed it, too. He asked them to ask a lot of themselves. And he brought them to America, too, because he wanted to show them off.

Tom Ritchey and Dan Cooper had hired Jock with the idea that Team Rwanda would help to promote Project Rwanda’s coffee-bike program and, more broadly, to boost Rwanda itself, as a country with a future and not just a past. But, while Project Rwanda was a not-for-profit, it was not a charity. “It’s not aid,” Jock insisted. Ritchey’s coffee-bikes were to be sold at cost, generally on credit against the income they would generate. And the team’s coach and athletes were recruited as professionals; although there was no prospect of turning a profit, the hope from the start was to attract corporate sponsorship. In the meantime, the budget—a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year—was made up, more or less hand to mouth, from donations.

Cooper told me that when he was soliciting funds for Team Rwanda a prospective donor said, “That’s a lot of money for such a small number of people.” Cooper disagreed. “If you’re going to give,” he said, “you need to give eyeball to eyeball. The further out you get, where you can’t see the eyeballs you’re interacting with, the less impact you have, and the more danger of potentially having a negative effect. To me, Team Rwanda represents that ideology—investing in a few individuals who will hopefully affect many individuals.”

Jock worked the riders hard in America, but their inexperience showed. They dropped out of a stage in their first race, in New Mexico, and in later competitions they straggled at the back of the pack. Adrien and Rafiki felt the failure acutely. The Americans had training, technical expertise, and technique. They knew how to work together and against one another in a race. They understood gear ratios, ergonomics, and aerodynamics, while Jock struggled to impress on the Rwandans the simplest things, like not to stop pedalling when they ate or drank as they rode. In Rwanda, he kept losing riders for weeks at a time to malaria. He fussed over their diets, and pleaded with them to drink purified water, but on any given day, he said, “ninety per cent have intestinal parasites.” That was easy to cure. “One pill, one day, gone,” he said. “Except then you drink bad water again, and they’re back.”

To Jock, “the total frustration of dealing with people who have no habits of strategic thinking” was a great part of the appeal of working with the Rwandan riders, equal only to “the exhilaration of their raw power and ability.” He’d lower a rider’s seat an inch and a half, and explain how this would increase the power of his pedal strokes by five or six per cent, and the next day the seat was back at the old level. Jock saw the problem as rooted in poverty: “You might be dead tomorrow, so why think about it?” On their return from America, the Rwandans felt that they had disappointed him with their constant losses, and assumed that he would leave. But Jock had the opposite reaction. The trip made him understand how important it was for the Rwandans to win. When they got home, he put them on salary—a hundred dollars a month (more than twice the average national income), plus a small bonus each time they came to training camp—and he gave them all new bikes.

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A week before the Tour of Rwanda, last November, the African Continental Championships were held in Kigali. The big event for Team Rwanda was the final road race, because the first two riders to finish would be qualified for the 2012 Olympic Games, in London. Only seven African road racers are allowed to enter the Olympics, and teams had made their way to Kigali from twenty African countries. At the starting line, there was a minute of silence to commemorate a young Rwandan spectator who had been struck and killed, a few days earlier, by the Ivory Coast team car. Then the riders were off. Adrien was Rwanda’s hope, but for the first half of the ninety-mile race Gasore took and held the lead. When at last he tired, and fell back, Adrien made his move to break away on a steep hill. But as he stood up on his pedals his chain snapped. Gasore promptly swapped bikes with Adrien, so that Adrien could keep going, but although he made up much of his lost time, it was not enough to qualify him for the Olympics.

Still, the team had begun to come together. In 2008, Adrien rode again in the Cape Epic, this time with a Rwandan teammate, and they finished twenty-sixth; then he came home and won the Tour of Rwanda; and soon afterward he was signed on to ride for Africa’s top professional bike team, M.T.N. Cycling, in South Africa. Gasore’s stage win in Cameroon had so inspired his teammates that another rider won two later stages of the same tour. The team had grown; now as many as sixteen riders showed up at training camp each week. The money still came mostly from America (Amway and Walmart both contributed), but Rwanda’s Ministry of Youth, Sports, and Culture now paid for some of the foreign travel, and helped to underwrite the Tour of Rwanda.

The Tour had become a big deal. In 2009, the U.C.I. made it an official race on the international circuit, increasing its prize purses and its draw. The Tour that year included teams from twelve countries in Africa and Europe, and Rwandans lined the roads to watch and cheer. At the finish, in Kigali, Adrien came in third, behind a pair of Moroccans. The city was so crowded with spectators that the police presence had to be tripled to secure the cyclists a clear path. In all, Jock said, it was estimated that some three million Rwandans had seen the race. By contrast, Project Rwanda’s coffee-bike project was stalled. Although a Harvard study had found that Tom Ritchey’s bikes hugely increased profits for cargo haulers, the price of getting the bikes to landlocked Rwanda (one of the most expensive destinations on earth to ship a container of freight, perhaps second only to Antarctica) made the bikes unaffordable on the local market. Cycling as a sport had become an end in itself, and the team’s cyclists were becoming famous in Rwanda. Their names were on the radio, and their jerseys were recognized everywhere. “The team is working,” Jock told me. “I’m flabbergasted.”

Rwanda’s high birth rate—five to six children in an average family—combined with a public-health revolution that helps far more of those children survive, has resulted in a population explosion. The government says that there are eleven million Rwandans, an increase of as much as a hundred per cent since the genocide, and more than half of them are under the age of twenty. Against such numbers, the success of a handful of bicyclists may seem paltry. But the team’s riders were aware of their power to inspire. When they went riding at home, young men and boys would try to tag along.

Adrien had effectively adopted a street kid in Rwamagana, a genocide orphan named Godfrey Gahemba. He joined the team at sixteen, and a year later, in 2008, he finished third in the Tour of Rwanda. Adrien loved Godfrey; everybody did. Jock thought there was no limit to where he might go. Not long after that 2008 Tour, Adrien was in South Africa when he got a call that his father was severely ill. By the time he got home, his father was dead. Adrien stuck around for a few weeks to help his mother and to ride with Godfrey. One day, they rode alongside a local race in Rwamagana. They were passing out water bottles when Godfrey’s handlebars locked with another rider’s and he toppled into the road, where he was crushed by a follow car.

“I went to the funeral of this kid and it looked like every person in a hundred miles came, most of them under fifteen,” Jock told me, when we met, in Kigali, in April of last year. “I asked the mayor if he’d ever seen such a crowd. The mayor said, ‘This kid gave hope to so many people.’ ” Jock nodded at a television, which was playing footage of genocide massacre sites and survivor testimonies. “I mean, look what they’re coming out of. Nothing—or worse than nothing.”

April is the anniversary of the genocide, a month of resurgent memories for Rwandans, and of official commemorations. “How can a team emerge out of all that?” Jock said. “How can you change identities?” It was a good question, and for Jock it seemed personal. Tom Ritchey knew Jock’s criminal record when he hired him to coach the Rwandan riders, and, as Dan Cooper said, “The more Team Rwanda gets famous and successful, the more Jock’s scarlet letter ends up shining.” When I met Jock, all he said about the period before he came to Rwanda was “I had a really bad time of my life then, just made some really poor decisions.” The girl was sixteen in 2002, when she told police that Jock had groped her on multiple occasions in a three-year period, beginning when she was twelve. He admitted it at once, and faced the possibility of twenty years in prison. After he pleaded guilty, he was given a one-year sentence, because he was judged to be of no further threat to anyone, including the girl; he served nine months in the Monterey County jail before he was released on probation.

Jock’s girlfriend, Kimberly Coats, who is forty-five, had come to work for Project Rwanda after she lost her home in Las Vegas’s real-estate crash. She knew Jock’s story before she met him. What’s more, she had been a volunteer for fifteen years for an advocacy group for abused and neglected children. She said that when she and Jock became a couple he asked her, “If you know my past, why did you come?” She told him, “You know what I think? I think you were really stupid, you put yourself in a bad situation, and you didn’t think. That’s what it was.” She said, “It’s just so obvious to me that he’s not a predator.”

Jock was less forgiving of himself. Last November, we sat on a veranda at a Kigali hotel as a tremendous storm blew over the city. The sky blackened, wind bent the treetops flat, and for more than an hour rain pummelled down. Spray blew over us, till we were dripping and shivering. Jock showed no desire to move. “I totally love it,” he said. “Every hurricane, I want to be in it.” I asked him how, as a man in his forties, he had gone for a girl thirty years younger, not just once but repeatedly. He said that he knew her family, so they began innocently, and he said, “It was an emotional attachment, you know, best-friend attachment. We did a lot together, just normal stuff.” Was he telling me that he had fallen in love with the child? You don’t go to jail for being best friends. “We were always fully clothed,” he said. Did he consider her a victim? “Of course. Yeah. You have to.” He said, “I totally went out of the realm of what I should have done, and the trust that was put in me.”

He never spoke to the girl again, and has refused to reveal her identity. “When I look back, it’s just so foreign to me,” he said. “It was an anomaly in my whole character. I just can’t relate to any of it.” He still has to register, once a year in California, as a sex offender. In the eyes of the world, he said at one point, “it would have been better if I had killed somebody.” But there was nothing to be done: some wrongs cannot be made right. “I decided that I’m just going to go forward, and the past is marred,” he said. Christianity was his great solace. He was born again in 1980 and baptized as an Adventist twelve years later. “I totally depend on it,” he said. “Just knowing God’s always there.”

The American professional cyclist Scott Nydam told me that when Jock’s name comes up among colleagues it never takes long before his crime is discussed. “No one understands it,” he said. Nydam was raised in the Christian Reformed Church, but he is skeptical of redemption narratives. Last year, while recovering from brain injuries sustained in bike crashes, Nydam volunteered to help coach Team Rwanda for several months, and he told me this story about Jock: “We walk into the office one time, and he’s sobbing. He’s watching a video, with Muhammad Ali talking about ‘I’m so fast, I turn out the light and I’m in bed before it’s dark. I murdered a rock.’ And then there’s this quote about our biggest fear is not that we’re inadequate; it’s that we’re powerful beyond measure. And then there’s an image of the movie with Brad Pitt as a boxer, and he’s getting beaten to shit. And then there’s Muhammad Ali, like, ‘I’m the greatest, I’m the greatest.’ ” Nydam wondered why those flashes of footage brought Jock to tears. “He was a great cyclist,” he said. “And, shit, if you fall from grace, he fucking fell from grace. I mean, how do you reconcile that? I know he was a good cyclist, but I also know he’s on that watch list. How do you deal with that, other than move to Africa?”

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Jock bridles at the notion that he fled to Rwanda to do penance. “I was O.K. with being where I was,” he said. “I had incredible support from family and friends there. I had a business that was going. I raced. I rode. It wasn’t like, you know, I need to do this humanitarian thing now.” He allowed that it was “almost ironic” that Rwanda was where he had anchored. “This is the land of second chances,” he said. “Murderers are walking around here all over the place. The government let them out of their prisons as they admitted to what they did, and a lot of them are building homes for the widows of families that they slaughtered.” Yet he told me that was just a coincidence: “I could never have picked this place. I didn’t even know the history.”

A lot of Rwandans, Hutu and Tutsi, tell you that they wish that they could forget their country’s history—that they could account for their own lives without having to account for the genocide and the civil wars. The urgent question in the aftermath of the genocide was: How can a people divided by such extreme and intimate bloodshed live together again? President Kagame’s R.P.F., which has been the country’s ruling party since 1994, proposed a seemingly simple answer: We are all Rwandans now, first and foremost. This was the founding doctrine of the new Rwandan state, to which all its institutions and practices were to be dedicated. The extermination of close to a million people by their fellow-citizens is bound to define the country’s history for generations to come. The idea, then, was to contain a hideously broken nation in a collective identity. That identity has the advantage of being significantly true—whatever subcategories you may carve them into, all Rwandans share the same nationality and language—and it has the disadvantage of any universalist diktat, that many other truths have to be suppressed, blurred, and ignored in order for it to take hold. The paradox is that in the name of putting the genocide behind them Rwandans have had it held constantly in front of them, as a warning of the perils of divided identity. And for a young generation that is scarred by its historical inheritance, but free of any direct accountability, it is not enough simply to coexist and to bury the memory of the slaughter; there is a need to make the idea of being Rwandan have greater value.

When Adrien went to South Africa to try out for M.T.N. Cycling, he went with Nathan Byukusenge, a Rwandan teammate. Early in 2009, armed thugs broke into the team house near Johannesburg. Adrien hid in his clothes closet while Nathan was beaten, and a Zambian rider was stabbed. When the thieves left, Adrien found Nathan crying, “No, no, I have to go back to my country. This country is very bad. I don’t want to die in this country.” Nathan was also a genocide survivor, and during the attack he felt as if it was 1994 again. Adrien, too, had endured flashbacks as he lay in his closet, but he thought that Nathan was wrong to quit the M.T.N. team. “I told Nathan, Don’t think like this,” he said. “This is the time to focus on training. Don’t think that back there is a nice situation and you can’t die.” After all, not every moment of violence was historically significant: Adrien’s young protégé, Godfrey, had just been killed in an entirely meaningless accident. And yet, when Nathan went home, and Adrien stayed in South Africa, they both explained the decision in terms of being a genocide survivor.

It is far easier for Tutsis, like Adrien and Nathan, to speak openly about their memories than it is for Hutus. After all, surviving genocide is Rwanda’s official story, and a few years ago the government formally began referring to the extermination as “the genocide against the Tutsis.” (The traumas of the civil wars that preceded and followed the genocide are hardly acknowledged in recent official commemorations, and there has been no public accounting for the many casualties of those wars, Hutu and Tutsi.) Meanwhile, the government has promulgated uncommonly broad laws that forbid “divisionist” speech by proscribing any form of expression that a court might interpret as pitting Hutu against Tutsi; and those laws, combined with the unspoken taboo that arises from an external perception of collective Hutu blame and an internal sense of collective shame, have stifled the expression of Hutu historical trauma. The fear is that any equation of Hutu and Tutsi experience amounts to a sort of genocide negation. That concern is real: Hutu Power ideology is far from extinguished in the broad Rwandan polity. But the policies of ethnic neutrality have created a new set of confusions.

In Rwanda, it has always been uncouth to ask who is Hutu and who is Tutsi, but these days it is widely considered taboo, if not downright illegal. Rwandans, of course, know who is who, and, as a Presidential aide told me, “You’d probably have to arrest everyone in the country every night for ethnic divisionism, if you could hear how we talk about each other in our homes.” Even outsiders often don’t need to ask about people’s ethnicity: if you talk to Rwandans who were in the country in 1994 about their family and they don’t tell you that they are genocide survivors, it’s a pretty sure bet that they are Hutus. That was the case for most of the riders on Team Rwanda. In the day-to-day life of the team, ethnic identity seemed irrelevant. But, when it came to reckoning with the inescapable past, the ease with which the Tutsi survivors expressed the obvious connection of their ordeals to the present was in sharp contrast to the reticence of their Hutu teammates.

When I asked Gasore if he remembered the genocide and the wars, which had been entirely absent in his account of his origins, he told me, “No, no—I was too young in that time. I was really young.” But he was the same age as Adrien. After the genocide, much of the Hutu population of the northwest had fled into Congo (then still known as Zaire), and stayed there until the end of 1996, when Kagame sent his Army to drive them home and to hunt down those who resisted. Gasore said that he had no memories of that, either. In the years that followed, remnant forces of the Hutu Power army and genocidal militias returned from Congo to Rwanda to wage a war of terror in the northwest. The Army responded with characteristic fury, and the war raged for nearly two years before the insurgency was effectively suppressed, at terrible cost to the civilians caught in the middle of it, who were accused of collaboration by both sides. Tens of thousands were killed, and hundreds of thousands forced from their homes. Gasore’s village was in the middle of the war zone, and I wondered if his father’s death, in 1997, might have had any connection to the conflict. No, he said: “Tuberculosis—I think.”

Three other riders on the team had grown up as Hutus in the northwest at the same time as Gasore, and they did not hesitate to tell me how their families had suffered. Sibo, his neighbor in Sashwara who had brought him onto the team, recalled being displaced in 1994, and walking to Congo, carrying nothing but a gallon jug of cooking oil. Another rider spent two years with his family in the Mugunga camp, outside Goma, then returned to his village, only to flee again during the second war. He had lost a brother in the wars. The third rider from the northwest said that Hutu insurgents had killed his father in 1997, and his family then found refuge with the government soldiers on the main road. “There were many deaths in this region,” he said. “I know many people who died.”

Only Gasore claimed to have been untouched by history, and yet he was the only one on the team to have lost everything, to have grown up totally unschooled and alone. I was curious to see the home he had made for himself, and one day last November he arranged for his friend and roommate, a high-school boy named Janvier, to show me the place. It was a day when the Tour of Rwanda passed through Sashwara, and by late morning thousands of spectators had massed there along the road’s shoulders. When the first rider appeared, women began ululating, and the crowd let out a roar that grew wilder when he was recognized as Gasore. He had fought his way up a long climb to the front of the pack, and as he blew through the village, where a year and a half earlier he had been hustling taxi-bike fares, he smiled and flashed a victory sign.

I found Janvier as the throng broke up, and he took me to see the house where Sibo was raised by his grandmother, a tidy rectangle of whitewashed brick. Sibo’s grandmother invited us into the parlor and found a few small wooden chairs. As we talked, she said nothing of the genocide, only that in 1994 nearly everyone she knew fled to Congo. Gasore, too, she said. Janvier agreed: they weren’t there together—Janvier had come home quickly, and Gasore only later—but he was sure of it. When they returned, Sibo’s grandmother said, her family was diminished: a son and a daughter and both of her sons-in-law died in Congo. And back in Rwanda they had to run again, when the infiltrators came killing and pillaging. She had taken her family to hide in the forest, but there was shooting from all sides, and government helicopters dropping bombs, so they returned after a few months, and found protection with the government soldiers. “Now it’s very safe, thank God. If it continues like this until my death, I will die happy. Before, you know, we could sit here like this and you’d see everybody knocked down by bullets.”