The man doing circuits around the Kinshasa national stadium makes Carlos Sastre look like a foodie three weeks into a duck fat binge. He is so thin that his skin-tight gear flaps in the humid breeze. I suppose this is what outsiders assume most Africans look like—skeletal wraiths—but for the most part, central Africans are big people. This cyclist must be the slightest man in the region.
“Will you look at that,” I say to Kevin.
“Look at what?”
“The cyclist. Look at that guy!”
The stadium consists of a vast circle of rotting concrete ribs, and I find a patch of shade and watch the cyclist pedal by. He rides a yellow Trek, the bike that the company released to celebrate Armstrong’s 2001 victory. Kevin rolls his eyes. He doesn’t share the passion, although we watched the bulk of the 2011 Tour on assignment in Zambia, and he was screaming at the hotel television—“Climb, you skinny fucks. Climb!”
The next time the Congolese Sastre loops around, I wave him over. He looks annoyed at the interruption, but rattles toward me nonetheless.
“Bonjour,” I say.
“Oui?” says the man, whose name turns out to be Wally.
“Je suis un cyclist,” I say, pointing at my chest.
“Mm-hmm.”
In broken English and destroyed French, he informs me that he spends at least three hours doing loops here every day. He must wind his way out from the unpaved tracks of the outskirts, then along the new asphalt road that follows the Congo River as it heads toward the centre of this city of seventeen million. When he hits the broad busy boulevards built by the Chinese in one of the infrastructure-for-commodities deals that have come to define New Africa, he starts winding it up. Then he arrives here, in this perfectly paved kermesse, dust blown and garbage strewn but smooth as newly waxed legs.
“Does the national team race here?” I ask.
“Meh. Rarement, mais c’est possible.”
The Kinshasa Criterium—what a concept. Every year, the NGO Transparency International releases its Corruption Perceptions Index, which scores countries “on how corrupt their public sectors are seen to be.” The Democratic Republic of the Congo scores a dazzling 21 out of a possible 100, and ranks 160th in the world. That said, the Kinshasa Criterium, should it ever become a fixture on the global racing circuit, would have much to learn about filth from the series of criterium races that take place after the Tour de France—two kilometre or so circuits that whip through towns and villages across France and Belgium. In these contests, the custom is to secretly decide on a winner before the race starts. The point of the autumn criterium circuit, which does nothing to enhance a cyclist’s points ranking or to secure a position with a team, is to provide a spectacle, a sixty-kilometre-an-hour circus, and to pad the cyclist’s pocket with euros. The speed and the effort aren’t simulated. But the contest is. This is cycling’s version of professional wrestling.
It’s not uncommon for cyclists to wheel and deal on the bike during a race—money is promised, and results assured.v I’ve always found this part of the sport rather charming. If this is cheating—and of course it is—it’s the best kind of cheating I know. I wonder, however, where and how we draw the line on cheating we consider “uncharming.” More importantly, when and how does cheating become systemic—not just part of an institutional system but the driving force of that system?
“The Latin word corruptus,” a man named Kerry McNamara, in Windhoek, Namibia, had intoned in early 2011, as Kevin and I sat in his sunlight-dappled office. “From the root ruptus, rupture, break down, rot. Corruptus, promoting the conditions for the rotting of.”
Like a schoolmaster out of Dickens, McNamara, an architect trying to clean up the local construction sector, was instructing us in the etymology of Namibia’s most fashionable noun. McNamara was in a fury about how the Namibian government was undermining the labour unions that were once so instrumental in freeing the country from South Africa’s fetters. By allowing Chinese state-run companies to underpay local workers, McNamara insisted, the government was betraying the very people who had helped bring it to power in the first place.
“They tell me, ‘You’re not in the twenty-first century, Mr. McNamara. We are eating now. It is our chance to feed, your chance to feed! Eat, sir. Eat!’ And we shall eat until there is nothing left,” he spat.
Although I saw McNamara’s point, corruption is not an actual term of art, but rather a catch-all that describes a group of behaviours, often illegal (accepting of unlawful gratuities; wire fraud) and just as often not (being filthy rich; behaving like a prick). In The Pursuit of Absolute Integrity, a study of the battle against corruption in New York City during the twentieth century, authors Frank Anechiarico and James B. Jacobs, quoting the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, note that bribery is the “quintessential form of corruption.” That may be so, but the cover-up—the extended lie that aims to conceal the corrupt act—cannot be decoupled from the act itself, and in fact entrenches a corrupt system (by buying off officials, intimidating journalists and so on). Applied to sports in the modern era, and specifically to cycling, doping is the quintessentially corrupt act, and the doping cover-up becomes the extended lie that entrenches corruption.
Anechiarico and Jacobs term corruption crusaders “moral entrepreneurs”—they believe that when governments and large institutions try to eliminate corruption they do not become more streamlined and transparent, but less so. In other words, with all the appropriate checks and balances and bureaucracies in place, corruption-free institutions function much like corrupt institutions, and expend just as many resources in the process.
So, we arrive at the question that plagues cycling, other sports and other institutions: why bother cleaning up? As far as I’m concerned, the answer is easy—what Anechiarico and Jacobs’s outlook fails to take into consideration is the psychological havoc that corruption wreaks. It breaks minds, it tears through societies. No one wants to be subject to institutions too overburdened and creaky to properly govern. But human beings are congenitally unable to live in their own slime. We can’t do it over the long term; it kills us every time. Kerry McNamara was a case in point—the man was unravelling, foaming at the mouth.
I thought back to this while I watched Wally the cyclist in the DRC, who rode round a stadium—the same stadium in which Mobutu Sese Seko once had eight opponents executed in front of a subdued crowd. I watched him do one loop, then another, then a third and turn off into the traffic on the Chinese road and disappear.