“‘‘The 2025 UCI Road World Championships, Kagame’s Machinery of Sportswashing’’

When the world's best cyclists descend on Kigali this week for the UCI Road World Championships, they'll race through streets that tell only half of Rwanda's story. The other half Paul Kagame desperately wants buried underneath the spectacle involves silenced journalists, disappeared opposition figures, and millions of displaced Congolese caught in a conflict Kagame’s regime is fueling while refusing to acknowledge its role.

As a Rwandan journalist who has witnessed firsthand how dissent is crushed in Rwanda and witnessed the systematic dismantling of independent media. I cannot watch in silence as Kagame's regime transforms the September 21-28 championships into an elaborate exercise in image laundering. This isn't just about sport. This is about how authoritarian regimes use global stages to whitewash their crimes and how international sporting bodies become complicit through willful blindness.

The moral UCI quagmire

The Rwanda that international visitors see is incomplete. What they don't see is a country that Freedom House rates as "Not Free," scoring just 21 out of 100 points in its 2025 assessment. They don't see a media landscape so restrictive that Reporters Without Borders ranks us 146th out of 180 countries for press freedom. They don't hear about the seventeen journalists who have been jailed, disappeared, or killed since Kagame’s regime took power, or about those who self-censor to survive, or about many others who live in exile, like myself.

The Union Cycliste Internationale didn't stumble into this moral quagmire by accident. In 2021, UCI President David Lappartient and his management committee deliberately chose Rwanda to host cycling's premier championship, becoming the first African nation to do so. This decision wasn't made in ignorance, it was made despite massive evidence of Rwanda's authoritarian drift.

Overwhelming evidence

By 2021, the evidence was overwhelming and impossible to ignore. Freedom House had downgraded Rwanda's religious freedom score from 3 to 2 in 2019 due to government control over religious institutions, and would further downgrade it from 2 to 1 in 2020 because of the government's persecution of perceived opponents. Reporters Without Borders consistently ranked Rwanda poorly for press freedom, placing it 156th out of 180 countries in 2021, though this represented a pattern of restriction dating back years. The UN Group of Experts had been documenting Rwanda's military support for armed groups in eastern Congo since at least 2012.

‘Lappartient and the UCI managment committee are not passive observers in this sportswashing exercise, they are its enablers.’

Since 2021, the situation has dramatically worsened. Freedom House downgraded Rwanda's overall freedom score by two points in 2025, citing Kagame's systematic disqualification of opposition candidates to secure his fourth term with a North Korea-style 99.2 percent of the vote and also documented how Kagame’s regime weaponizes identification documents to prevent perceived critics from traveling.

Meanwhile, Rwanda's proxy war in DR Congo has escalated catastrophically. UN experts reported in 2024 that 3,000 to 4,000 Rwandan troops are fighting alongside M23 rebels in Congolese territory - potentially outnumbering the rebel group itself. The human cost is staggering with over 7 million people displaced across the DRC and nearly 780,000 more forced to flee between November 2024 and January 2025. As recently as January 2025, Rwandan forces and M23 rebels captured Goma, the region's largest city, after months of indiscriminate shelling of displacement camps, filled with desperate civilians.

No minor inconsistencies

Yet Lappartient and the UCI management committee ignored them all, seduced by Kagame's cycling investments and Rwanda's carefully curated image. They are not passive observers in this sportswashing exercise, they are its enablers.

When confronted with criticism, the UCI inevitably retreats behind claims of "political neutrality." This convenient fiction allows them to host championships in authoritarian states while maintaining moral distance from the consequences. But political neutrality, as applied by the UCI, is actually political cecity - a willful blindness that leads to political partisanship for dictatorship, the exact opposite of its intended effect.

True neutrality would mean applying consistent ethical standards regardless of a regime's propaganda machine. Instead, UCI's version of neutrality favors authoritarian hosts who can guarantee "security" and "efficiency" over democratic societies that might allow inconvenient protests or critical media coverage. This isn't neutrality, it's a structural bias toward authoritarianism veiled as administrative pragmatism.

The contradictions between UCI's stated values and their practical effects are glaring. The organization champions "diversity and inclusion" while hosting championships in a country that has systematically eliminated political diversity. They promote "integrity and transparency" while partnering with a regime that operates in the shadows, silencing journalists and disappearing critics.

They celebrate "respect and fair play" while legitimizing a regime implicated in war crimes just across its border. These aren't minor inconsistencies, they represent a fundamental betrayal of the sport's professed values.

Nothing new under the sports sun

Sportswashing has a long, ugly history. Adolf Hitler polished Nazi Germany's image through the 1936 Berlin Olympics while orchestrating the Holocaust. Argentina's military junta Jorge Rafael Videla used the 1978 World Cup to distract from the disappearance of 30,000 people during the Dirty War. More recently, Qatar spent billions on the 2022 FIFA World Cup despite international outrage over migrant worker deaths, while Saudi Arabia has poured money into Formula One and English football even as it dismembers journalists and jails women's rights activists.

Kagame has studied this playbook carefully. Since 2009, he has transformed cycling from a niche sport into his regime primary soft power weapon, elevating the Tour du Rwanda into Africa's premier cycling event. Now, with the UCI Road World Championships coming to Africa for the first time, he's betting that the world will be too dazzled by the spectacle to notice what's happening beyond the camera's reach.

‘I struggle to understand how the international cycling community can celebrate in Kigali while ignoring the screams from across the border.’

The international community praises Kagame as an African success story, while opposition leaders such as Victoire Ingabire languish in prison and Diane Rwigara, although she was acquitted of charges of inciting rebellion and forgery in 2018 after a year in prison, was barred from standing in the 2024 presidential election. She still faces harassment and intimidation for daring to challenge Kagame's rule. Even exile offers no safety, the regime's tentacles reach from South Africa to Belgium, hunting down dissidents who thought distance might protect them and many get assassinated abroad.

Perhaps most damning is what's happening just across Rwanda's border. While Kagame prepares to welcome the world's cyclists, his forces continue supporting the M23 rebellion in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The United Nations Group of Experts has documented this support repeatedly. The evidence includes weapons, ammunition, and direct military assistance in a zone under UN weapons embargo, renewed by UN Security Council Resolution 2667 (2022), to a group implicated in mass killings, sexual violence, and the systematic looting of Congo's mineral wealth.

I struggle to understand how the international cycling community can celebrate in Kigali while ignoring the screams from across the border. The distance between the championship route and the displacement camps in North Kivu is less than 200 kilometers. The moral distance appears infinite.

Whose priorities?

The financial commitment to this cycling championship is particularly galling when you consider Rwanda's actual needs. Nearly half of Rwandans, 47 percent, live below the poverty line. One in three children under five suffers from malnutrition. Public hospitals lack basic equipment, rural schools operate without adequate resources.

Yet millions flow into international image campaigns. Some €28 million annually for "Visit Rwanda" sponsorship on the shirts of Arsenal, Paris Saint-Germain and Bayern Munich, substantial contracts with PR firms in London and Washington, and now the massive investment in cycling infrastructure and promotional campaigns for these championships. This isn't development, its vanity spending designed to buy international legitimacy while our people struggle with basic needs.

What makes Kagame's regime sportswashing particularly effective is the international community's complicity. The same European leaders who rightly criticize Saudi Arabia and Qatar somehow find endless excuses for Kagame. Aid continues to flow, counterterrorism partnerships deepen, and migration deals get signed, all while fundamental freedoms disappear making the double standard not just hypocritical, it's complicit.