Team Amani’s Tour de France Femmes dream: Overcoming tragedy and needing to raise $1m

On the start line of May’s Classique Morbihan, Haftu Eyerusalem Reda shook with nerves.

Team Amani’s first road race in Europe, at this one-day race in Brittany, France, was a chance to see how she and her teammates compared to some of the world’s best. It was the next step in the dream.

Eyeru, as she is known to everyone, tried again and again to move up from the back of the bunch into the belly of the beast, only to be churned backwards in the washing-machine cycle of moving cyclists.

She kept fighting because how could she and her East African team of riders make it to the Tour de France Femmes in 2028, their collective goal, by staying in the rear part of the peloton?

The 27-year-old knows the meaning of perseverance and has experienced harsher things than a few elbows in the pack. By the end of their European racing block, she was battling with the best.

She is one of three riders in Amani’s 12-strong women’s road team who come from Tigray, a north Ethiopian region on the border with Eritrea. It is a high-altitude hotbed of cycling passion, with its own structure of races and cycling teams.

However, after civil war hit Ethiopia in 2020, it became the focal point of a devastating, violent conflict. Mass rape was used as a weapon. A 2024 New York Times report said 600,000 people were killed in the conflict.

Power, mobile network, internet and electricity were often cut off. For three years, Eyeru raised her child and did not ride her bike.

“There are things that come through cycling,” Kidus Grmay, assistant coach and fellow Tigray native, says. “A dream, hope, everything. And in wartime, I was losing them.

“Not having hope or a dream was so hard. I didn’t know what I’d do the next day. You are not even sure if you’ll be alive tomorrow. It was a tough time, just survival.”

Geopolitically, the region remains unstable. Both Grmay and Eyeru have spent the last several months away from their homes, as they tell The Athletic on a video call from a rented house 1,000 kilometers away in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa.

For many riders, Team Amani is a path out, their painful experiences inconceivable to their rivals. According to the team’s co-founder Mikel Delagrange, there is a Ugandan rider who grew up in an orphanage and Rwandan riders had parents killed in the 1994 genocide.

“This is more than a competition, it’s more than just riding bikes. It’s a chance to dramatically change not only their lives but the lives of everyone around them,” Delagrange says, speaking over a video call from his home in Switzerland.

“It’s not a sad story, it’s a story of overcoming. It’s just there are a sh**load of things we have to overcome that the people we line up against have no idea about.”

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Delagrange is probably as unlikely a cycling team head honcho as you’ll ever meet.

A criminal lawyer by day, he has worked at the International Criminal Court in The Hague and has a Fidel Castro ‘muerte al invasor’ poster on his wall. In his white-rimmed glasses, he bears a resemblance to a younger Robert Downey Jr.

While eloquent and evangelical about the squad, the man from Miami says having a project in Africa was “the last thing” he wanted. He started Team Amani – which means “peace” in Swahili – with Kenyan cyclist Suleiman Kangangi in 2020.

“Sule was a unicorn, in a sense, because not only was he really talented on the bike, but he was able to articulate very clearly the things that were holding him back,” Delagrange says.

“He was able to identify the glass ceiling and why it sat there, and he also had ideas about how to chip away at it.”

The Amani project is about providing access to top-flight racing opportunities for African cyclists, offering a long-term answer to their perennial under-representation in the sport.

Delagrange was the resource marshaller, taking the proverbial passenger seat until Kangangi’s death at a Vermont gravel race in August 2022. He has stepped up after the “big shock” to him and the program.

In recent years, the team’s focus has evolved from gravel races, including events such as Unbound, to pursuing road racing success, with a UCI Continental (third-tier) men’s team also making its debut in 2025. However, it is their women’s squad who have their sights set on road cycling’s biggest race.

When it comes to fighting for opportunities for African cycling, modern cycling fans will likely think back to MTN-Qhubeka.

Against the odds, as a wildcard team, their German rider Gerald Ciolek won the 2013 Milan-Sanremo. Two years later, on the team’s Tour de France debut, Eritrean racer Daniel Teklehaimanot spent four stages in the polka-dot King of the Mountains jersey. He was one of 10 Africans to make their Tour debut on the team.

However, the squad left the sport in 2021, having battled to compete in the WorldTour over its last seasons. During the final year, their roster had just two African riders when there had been 13 three years before that.

African success, let alone representation, is still anomalous. Eritrea’s Biniam Girmay won three stages and the Tour de France green jersey in 2024, but was the only African in this year’s men’s Tour de France.

Similarly, Mauritius’ Kim Le Court-Pienaar has been the continent’s only racer in the women’s race in 2025 and 2026, although long-time women’s racing stalwart and contender Ashleigh Moolman-Pasio is a mentor-ambassador for Team Amani.

Team Amani is seeking to create a meaningful, long-term route to the top of the sport, bigger than one race or season. “For us, the path and the process is of equal, if not greater importance, than the outcome,” Delagrange says. “We’re not going to compromise on this, not for one single athlete. You can put that in print – let me be found to be a hypocrite five years later!”

That also means having deeper roots back in their home countries. Ethiopian Tour de France trailblazer Tsgabu Grmay and brother Kidus have their finger on the pulse in Tigray and Ethiopia, spotting talent. They have operations in Rwanda, too.

American head of performance Owen Searle has helped to build the team’s performance structure across road, gravel and mountain bike racing since joining in early 2023, spending much of that time based out of the team’s house and training facility in Iten, Kenya.

They have an academy helping to teach English there. As well as training, they are trying to grow their own culture of excellence in a town famous as a marathon-running mecca. Their riders regularly cross paths with leading Kenyan athletes pounding the road in their carbon-plated super shoes.

“The talent is there. It needs to be developed and nurtured and given a stage,” Searle says.

That platform is Europe and meant the next rung up the ladder in 2026 was taking on established pro teams in their own backyard. The women’s team embarked on a daunting block of French and Spanish Pro and .1 UCI events, between early May and mid-June.

“Racing in a big peloton for the first time was a big leap,” Searle says.

Most cyclists had rarely competed outside their country and the Tigray riders had not been in a bunch over 20. The Volta a Catalunya pitted them in a peloton over six times the size against leading squads, such as FDJ United-Suez and UAE Team ADQ.

Eyeru was not the only one feeling nerves and doubt. Kidus Grmay had wanted for so long to be part of the speeding peloton with sparkling team cars, a sight he had seen many times on TV. An inevitable question shot through his mind: do I belong here?

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Having tested Amani’s riders, Searle has no doubts that physiologically, they do.

With his belief that a Tour de France Femmes contender can perform at approximately 5.5 watts per kilo for a 20 or 30-minute climb, Amani’s head of performance says the numbers are good enough.

“Our riders are in the mix. The limiting factor is not that, it is everything else that goes into it, whether it’s the nutrition or saving energy, the little bullets you spend when not cornering as well as someone else and you have to sprint or have to chase back on during the descent.”

In June’s Alpes Gresivaudan Classic one-day race, containing over 3,500 meters of elevation, the Amani riders made up places on the long climbs and dropped back when the road tipped down.

Off the bike, there were bureaucratic pitfalls and nasty surprises. Rwandan athletes Xaverine Nirere and Claudette Nyirarukundo had their passports stolen on the way back from the French embassy ahead of the first race — for the visa within, Delagrange believes.

Nyirarukundo missed the entire European block with subsequent visa denials. After receiving a new visa, Nirere was sent back after flying into Italy first on her way to France, with a non-Italian visa. She barely made it to the Classique Morbihan.

They are trying to coordinate a racing calendar while knowing riders can only spend 90 days in Europe, due to visa constraints and Schengen short-stay rules. Then, there are logistical challenges with getting equipment into Kenya through customs.

“These little things that nobody thinks about aren’t explicit barriers, but are small signs that say, ‘We don’t think you should be here’,” Searle says. “It’s not always designed to be easy if you’re an outsider coming in.”

While they have a largely African staff and riders, there are also inevitable linguistic, nutritional and cultural differences when competing in Europe.

In a sport of marginal differences, the hurdles stack up. Team Amani are trying to obtain sporting residency visas and establish a permanent base in the Spanish city of Girona so they can focus on the sufficiently challenging task of training and racing bikes.

For all the setbacks, there were clear signs of improvement. Haftu Eyerusalem finished 20th at the Volta a Catalunya, taking some of their first UCI points. “With every race, I feel more comfortable and happier there,” she says. “We took a lot of experience.”

The modest Ethiopian breaks into a laugh about “pushing in the sprint” with cycling legend Marianne Vos.

Her dream is getting a result in the Tour de France Femmes. “I know the professional riders after the World Championships. After that, I feel I need to be like them,” she says.

“At the beginning, I think you were the most afraid,” Searle adds, turning to her on the video call. “At descending, in the group, in the fight for position.

“By the end, you were in a bunch sprint in Catalonia in the middle, fighting against all the big sprinters,” Searle says.

“And you’re not a sprinter in Europe! Especially for Eyeru, the way she improved over only two months was quite remarkable. The power was there from the beginning, but the way she got confident and moved in the peloton was incredible to see.”

The backroom team is aware that all the potential and willpower in the world is nothing without resources.

Funding is the main challenge, Delagrange says. Leading cycling brands such as Rapha, Factor, SRAM and POC partner with the team, providing equipment and helping them to keep it running, but they have no title sponsor.

To achieve their ambitious goal of getting onto the start line of the 2028 Tour de France Femmes, Amani have to earn their place.

“We need to raise $1 million to be able to have the support structure necessary to be able to compete against these powerhouses,” Delagrange says. “We are completely David and Goliath right now, we’re rocking up in our beautiful little Škodas against big vans filled with staff.”

That money would give the ability to hire soigneurs (team members who typically give riders massages), nutritionists, doctors and coaches. It would also potentially mean UCI minimum wage salaries for their riders, which would be “life-changing.”

Team Amani are set compete in the Tour of Burundi, Africa’s only UCI-ranked women’s stage race, in mid-August before a return to European competition in September. The next leap will be becoming a UCI-registered professional team in 2027 to give more opportunities to race.

Their co-founder feels like they could be at the crux. “Especially at the beginning of this year, I could feel the sands changing underneath our feet,” Delagrange says.

This all feeds into something far bigger than Tigray, Ethiopia, eastern Africa and even the continent as a whole.

“What we’re trying to achieve is the internationalization of this sport. We think it should be open to the whole world,” Delagrange says.