Team Amani to launch men's Continental road team in 2025
East African initiative has focused on gravel up to now, but will race the Tour du Rwanda in February and hopes to bring about more UCI road racing in Africa
The Kenyan-based Amani Project are to create a new men’s UCI Continental road team for 2025, alongside further plans to invest in women’s road cycling in Africa.
Launched in 2019, Amani’s mission is to create racing opportunities for riders from East Africa and enhance the inclusivity of the sport more widely. Up to now, the main focus has been on the gravel, due to the ease of accessibility compared to the road.
“Gravel is still our primary focus,” Amani Director Mikel Delagrange tells Global Peloton. “It's still the only discipline in cycling where we can line up against the best in the world and nobody stops us.”
The Amani Project aims to develop competitive cycling in East Africa, providing access to racing, a quality coaching environment and top-level equipment, while aiming to grow the racing calendar across the continent. Amani also has a development structure and a high performance centre in Iten, Kenya.
The plan is for Amani to be able to race across the disciplines. Whether it be a race on gravel, mountain bike or road, Amani will provide the opportunity for their team to compete.
“If someone's organising a bike race and it happens to be on gravel then we've got a team to field. If there's a road race we've got a team to field. If there's a mountain bike race we've got a team to field. Every rider will be expected to have at least two disciplines under their belt,” Delagrange says.
“We’re trying to kind of create a pipeline of Pidcocks and Van der Poels, from the development level all the way up. And as a team basically be a one stop shop for any serious cyclist on the continent. If you're interested in riding bikes then you have a place here.”
The big challenge for African-based Continental teams over the years has been the lack of racing accessible to them on the continent. Just as they have done with gravel racing in East Africa, Amani will aim to catalyse a new raft of races for their team, and others, to be able to compete in.
“As long as the racing remains on Europe exclusively, everybody from outside of Europe will naturally have a disadvantage,” Delagrange says.
“One of the things we want to do in our new strategy is really to start platforming African cycling. And give it the attention that we think it deserves.”
The men’s road team will race an exclusively African programme in its first season, including Africa’s biggest race, the Tour du Rwanda in February.
The focus will be on developing riders from East Africa, and Amani already has a number of talented road racers on their books. Rwandans Eric Muhoza and Samuel Niyonkuru look set to be part of the road team. Muhoza spent the 2023 season in Europe with the German Bike Aid team.
Also joining the team are three highly-rated Ugandans. Two-time African Continental time-trial champion Charles Kagimu is set to join the team after a season in which he raced both the Olympic Games and World Championships.
Kagimu is joined by two young compatriots Lawrence Lorot and Paul Lomuria. All three had previously been part of the INEOS Eliud Kipchoge Cycling Academy, supported by INEOS Grenadiers, and had raced in Europe last season in the Netherlands with the Ride United Foundation. The Kipchoge Academy have decided to put their focus now on younger riders, particularly working with schools in Kenya. This meant that they would no longer support Kagimu, Lorot and Lomuria. Amani have taken on riders and coaching staff from the academy.
The team have also brought on board Ethiopian Tsgabu Grmay as a coach for the road team. After spending nine years in the WorldTour, Grmay retired at the beginning of 2024 and joined Amani as a gravel racer. He will continue to race gravel alongside coaching riders on the team and has also stepped away from his role with the UCI World Cycling Centre.
Plans are also afoot for an investment in women’s road cycling on the continent. Racing opportunities are sparse for African women, so it wasn’t viable to create a UCI team for 2025, but Amani plan to do so in the future as the racing calendar on the continent grows.
“So the plan this year is...We have our women who will be targeting gravel races at the highest levels across the planet. And then we have a domestic road scene that we're going to be pursuing, to just basically get the team to sort of gel together as a unit,” Delagrange says.
“We've got a whole lot of new women coming in. Like maybe 200% of what we had before, and now five different countries. So all of the region is represented. And then we've got a couple of races that we're targeting as early indicators of how we're going.”
Amani will fully announce their road plans early in the new year.
Happy Friday everyone.
It’s been a busy week on Global Peloton. Next week, following this exclusive piece of news, there will be a more in-depth article on Amani’s plans - for paid subscribers only.
Have a great weekend,
Dan
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