MTN-Qhubeka Will Soon Become The First African Team To Start the Tour de France

To say that the Tour De France has been dominated by Europeans is to understate how mono-geographic the race's 102-year history is. Only two non-Europeans have ever won it, depending which record books you read and what Texans you still believe in. Hell, Luxembourg has the fifth most titles. On Saturday, when the Tour De France begins in Utrecht, it will look awfully familiar and predictably pale at the front of the pack. The Dutch will swarm to watch Stage 1, and someone (probably Tony Martin) will don the yellow jersey. But, outside the reach of that bright spotlight, MTN-Qhubeka will make history by becoming the first African team ever to start the Tour.

In the very recent past, and tentatively, the race has started to diversify. Riders from China, Ethiopia, and Costa Rica have all represented their countries for the first time over the past five years. MTN's trailblazing is not without immediate precedent, but no team from the cycling hinterlands has climbed as high or as fast.

Douglas Ryder founded the team in 2007 with the ambitious dream of turning Africa into a cycling hotbed, the way the Horn of Africa is for distance running or Lithuania is for basketball. Ryder captained the South African national team during the 1990's and then immediately tried to build a team. By his logic, elite cyclists and elite runners need roughly the same physical skills, which meant that cycling's lack of East Africans was both a vast inefficiency and an opportunity.

Building a cycling team from scratch is daunting work, especially with the top echelon of the sport contracting. It means having to appease sponsors, wrangle logistics for 40-plus people, and convince races that your unknown team belongs there at all. The degree of difficulty is considerably higher when you also have to strain against the sport's baked-in racist, colonialist attitudes; this is, after all, the sport whose former commissioner called for "the Anglo-Saxon vision to carry the day." But Douglas Ryder is a grinder, which is how he and MTN got this far. He might also be a visionary.

Chris Johnson, who knows Ryder and founded an American team three years ago with similar ambitions, told me Ryder was doing exemplary work and that his racers were fantastically talented. Johnson knows this from experience: his Airgas-Safeway team raced against MTN-Qhubeka at the 2014 Mzansi Tour, where MTN took first, second, third, and fourth place and bagged a pair of stages. There's work still to be done, but it sure seems like Ryder was right about his continent's untapped talent.

Five of MTN-Qhubeka's nine starters at the Tour are African, which adheres to Ryder's loose rule of racing with an African majority. Louis Meintjes is one of the best Under-23 talents in the world. Eritrean Daniel Teklehaimanot won the King of the Mountains jersey at the Criterium Du Dauphine and the Janse Van Rensburg brothers are talented and tactically sound. Ryder has recruited experienced racers like Edvald Boasson Hagen and Tyler Farrar to mentor younger riders and get some wins to keep the team's profile high. At the Tour, they are targeting a jersey—likely King of the Mountains—and a stage win. Ryder has said, repeatedly, that his long-term goal is to help a black African rider win a World Championship and a yellow jersey. That rider might be Teklehaimanot or Merhawi Kudus, another Eritrean who is as gifted as he is inexperienced. That rider might also be as yet unknown, a speedster doing his thing unwatched on local roads whose talent the MTN project might someday allow him to share more widely.

Ryder's ambitions are still grander. Qhubeka is not a second sponsor, but rather a charity that aims to distribute bikes to Southern Africa communities in an effort to close spatial and infrastructural deficits. Despite his team's delicate position, Ryder has given away half of MTN-Qhubeka's title sponsorship for free. The Tour De France is one of the biggest advertising platforms in the world and Ryder is essentially giving Qhubeka millions in exposure. They will have a chance to widen an already successful program, and in turn help spread and popularize the sport in Africa. The mission is not only to elevate African cycling, but to get the whole continent on a bike.

Many well-intentioned and well-credentialed people have failed at this very goal, because the issues at hand aren't the sort that can be solved by white money parachuting in. Making an impact on the sport's biggest stage would send a uniquely forceful message. Ryder says he wants an African rider on the podium in five years. It's a long shot this year, although Louis Meintjes is a decent long shot bet for a top-10 finish in the Tour. But if it's not him or this year, Ryder has proven himself both dedicated to and capable of making it happen. It's a big ask and an odds-against gamble, of course, but MTN-Qhubeka is used to that.