It was all summed up in the excited, booming Dutch voice of Intermarché-Wanty teammate Mike Teunissen as he grasped stage 3 winner Biniam Girmay by the shoulders: “You make history! You make fucking history! You know—it’s for Africa, for Intermarché. We’re so proud of you!” Yes, Girmay had just become the first Black African, indeed the first Black man from any continent, and also the first Intermarché rider, to win a stage of the Tour de France. And he did it with the utmost skill and speed, first losing the wheels of his lead-out train around the last two turns and then, doing what his boyhood hero Mark Cavendish does so well, freelanced his way along the leeside of the other sprinters before making a late, full-speed sprint to win by a clean bike length.
It was the victory of a true pro, a win that would make any seasoned European sprinter proud, let alone a rider from Eritrea, one of the world’s least developed countries, where the average per capita income is less than $1,000 a year. Indeed, his has been a long, quite remarkable, against-all-odds story.
Girmay grew up in Asmara, a city of 1 million people, with four brothers and a sister. “We lived in a small but nice house,” he told me last year. “The best part [was] that we can play in the streets in Asmara, there are not that many cars. After school we could play football for hours.” Because of the empty streets and the temperate climate (Asmara sits at 2,325 meters,7,628 feet, above sea level), the city has been called a cyclist’s paradise. Also, during 50 years of colonial rule, Italians made cycling a popular sport. Today, Eritrea has 1,000 licensed bike racers and about 100 races a year.
