Adrien finished fifth the first day of the Tour, and the next day he rose to third place over all. The fourth stage was the long, hard mountain run from Kigali to Gisenyi. In the first hour, a Kenyan rider’s bike broke on a fast descent, launching him over the handlebars to slam into one of the Rwandans, and when they disentangled they found that the Rwandan’s ankle was broken. A little later, Gasore, who’d fallen behind the peloton, crashed on a patch of gravel, and skinned his right forearm and left hand. “When I am at the rear of a race, I always fall,” he said.

I was riding on the back of a motorbike, and I caught up to Adrien just past Ruhengeri, where the heaviest climbing begins. The first time he’d attempted the Tour, seven years earlier, he had felt like dropping out at this point. Now it looked as though he were leading the Tour. Then the hills ahead of us lined up a little differently and I could see three cyclists cresting a rise about a mile ahead. There were no other Rwandan riders in sight, but as I cruised alongside Adrien he slowly started to separate from the peloton. He wasn’t straining; he didn’t even appear to be trying to break away. For miles, he climbed like that, floating alone between the front group and the main pack, until he had enough of a lead on those behind him that it would have been very hard for them to catch him. Then he unleashed his power, and for nearly twenty minutes he climbed alone, at full speed, until he caught the three riders at the front. One of them fell back, and Adrien moved into the lead position.

In the rough little villages along the road, the crowds were thick and loud, and time and again a look of ecstatic astonishment would ignite a face as someone recognized the Rwandan jersey in the lead. The air got colder as we rode past the volcanoes, and the sky got lower and darker. At midday, the light was black, and the ceiling seemed to hover almost within reach. When it began to drizzle, I thought we were passing through a cloud. Then, just as we began the long final descent to Gisenyi, a drop of three thousand feet in elevation over eighteen and a half miles, the rain crashed down.

At thirty miles an hour, the rain stung. At fifty miles an hour, I was sure it was raising welts—and I was wearing long pants and a windbreaker, with a face shield on my helmet. Adrien was as good as naked in his racing togs. He should not have been able to see a thing. The rain filled my shoes, and the drops bounced like tiny Ping-Pong balls on the tarmac; each time the road swung around the next curve, it seemed that all of us—the three riders I was chasing, and my motorbike—would go straight off into the abyss. And Adrien was trying to go faster still.

Having led the two other riders to the gates of Gisenyi, he got left seconds behind at the finish line, but he crossed it with his arms held high, fists pumping. He knew the various riders’ cumulative times for all the stages so far, and thought he’d topped them. The officials had to do the math, so he waded through the downpour to sit beneath an awning. The math took a long time, and the rain would not let up. But, when the P.A. system crackled to life, Adrien was right. He’d won the yellow jersey. He leaped from his seat, straight up, with a radiant smile, and Kimberly whipped out her phone to take a picture. But, in the second that it took her to get it in position, his face collapsed into a mask of absolute loneliness.

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The next day, on the return to Kigali, Adrien held on to the yellow jersey. The fans were beside themselves, and his smile held strong. But he was not happy with his teammates. Two days in a row, he had won for them, and they had not been there to help. And as the Tour progressed they did not rally. Adrien fell to second place, then seventh, then eighth, which is where he finished, five minutes behind the Eritrean champion. Now, with the races over, Adrien had to go home to visit his mother. But she didn’t get to see much of him. From the minute he arrived, there was a swarm of visitors, people he knew and people he didn’t know, smiling and scraping, and insisting on an audience, to explain their troubles and to tell him how he should help. Adrien retreated swiftly to the home he keeps in Kigali, a small place, enclosed by a warren of other houses. He felt much better there. “People don’t know where I go, what I do, or where I live,” he said. “When I stay in my home town, people ask a lot of questions and ask for money. Here I feel safe and there is no trouble.”

“The poor do not like when a poor person gets somewhere,” Jock said. “When riders go to America, go to Cameroon, go to South Africa, and come home, they are bombarded so much by a multitude of people, mostly family members, for money.” The pressure played havoc with the team’s concentration. “My riders are threatened all the time: ‘Just give me money,’ ” Jock said. “When they’re at a race: ‘I need money, you’ve got to give me money.’ It’s a battle for them.”

By local standards, the riders did make a lot of money. To encourage teamwork at races, Jock pooled prizes and shared them among those who took part; between that and their salaries, and sports ministry bonuses for representing Rwanda in international races, he said, solid team members make at least six thousand dollars a year—more than ten times what they earned before joining the team. By custom, a Rwandan who prospers, however modestly, is obliged to look after his needier relatives, and the self-definition of family can become absurdly extended. Get ahead in Rwanda, and suddenly everyone is calling you brother, or uncle, or cousin, or, to really make the point, muzungu.

Between paying for school fees, food, clothing, and shelter, and dealing with the perpetual health crises and deaths in their family orbits, the riders operated like the heads of small private foundations. To protect their capital, they invested in small businesses—taxi-bikes or motorbikes to lease, or farmland for others to work—and, at the same time, they started building new homes, where they could have families of their own. Four of the five original team members have new houses, and even so, Jock said, a rider had recently told him, “No matter how much we earn, no matter how much you give us, we will always be in the same position.” Jock often said of his cyclists, “Rwandans are great climbers.” But poverty’s downward drag could make the climb out of it feel Sisyphean.

One afternoon, in Kigali, I went to see Rafiki, who had built himself a house at the edge of town. In the early years of Team Rwanda, Rafiki had been a star: articulate, funny, full of confidence. But then he had a girlfriend, and then the girlfriend had a baby, and then the girlfriend took off. Rafiki showed me the baby, Jonathan, named for Jock. He was sitting on the dirt floor of Rafiki’s outdoor kitchen, and he looked worryingly small for his age. Rafiki was proud of his house, which had electricity, and was near the road. But it was only two spare concrete rooms, and it sat right over a malarial wetland. I had the impression that this might be as good as it was going to get for Rafiki. Already, life was tugging him away from the bike, while younger riders like Adrien and Gasore, who had a monomania and a drive that he could no longer muster, outstripped him.