Efforts are underway to make cycling the second sport of Sierra Leone. Here’s how it’s going.
Longtime supporters of Escape Collective will already be familiar with the Tour de Lunsar, West Africa’s noisiest bike race. Words and photography from the riotous, joyful Sierra Leonean event have featured here in previous years, and on CyclingTips before that.
As far as Sierra Leone cycling goes, the Tour (for us, “the Tour” will always connote Lunsar, not France) has become a bit of a juggernaut. It has a supportive headline sponsor in the form of UK investment management company, Fundsmith. It runs over three days with prize parity for men and women. It has seen international riders take part, and, in 2025, it had its first mountain-top finish.
So far, so self-congratulatory. But one thing we noticed as the nation’s marquee event grew in prominence and began to attract riders from beyond Sierra Leone’s pleasingly round borders (it is the world’s most circular country) was that a skill gap was beginning to appear. Sierra Leonean riders found it difficult to keep up with those visiting athletes from other West African nations.
The situation is not unlike that of Tour du Rwanda, which has seen fewer and fewer home riders on the podium as it has grown in international status. No Rwandan has won the race since it became a UCI 2.1 event in 2019. In 2026, the best-placed home rider came 16th.
In Sierra Leone’s case, some but not all of this disparity might be put down to equipment and economic circumstance. Riders from the Pitstop Lagos team based out of Nigeria won the Tour de Lunsar in 2023 and 2024. The former was a particularly stark year, with the best-placed home rider, Tenesie Dixon, coming fifth, more than 20 minutes down on the overall winner, Preye John Dede.
Lagos and Lunsar are worlds apart. Lagos is often cited as the continent’s most populous city with upper estimates of 25 million citizens. Lunsar is a mining town of about 40,000. Only eight million people live in the whole of Sierra Leone. Nigeria is a rising economic force on the global stage, breaking into the top 50 of the world’s largest economies according to the IMF in 2026. Sierra Leone ranks 152nd. Most tellingly of all, the Pitstop riders arrived with top-spec carbon fibre bikes and Di2. Many Sierra Leoneans on the start line were rolling on nine-speed.
But, as a pugnacious little Texan who has since faded into obscurity once said, ‘it’s not about the bike’.
Control what you can
After the 2023 Tour in April, we decided to make a change. Ambitious though we might be as bicycle race organisers, supercharging the Sierra Leonean economy seemed like a stretch. But what if we could gradually shift the sporting culture, to push cycling into the centre of the conversation? We would never knock football off the top spot in terms of national interest, but what if we could make cycling the second sport of Sierra Leone?
We knew that to take on the world, we needed athletes in better physical condition. Riders racing for months and building up to the Tour, not just training in the six weeks prior. In short, we needed a season.
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