Riders halted their post-race interviews, and looked back over their shoulders in the media zone. Photographers, who had left their finish line positions, swivelled on their feet, pointing their cameras back towards the Eiffel Tower. Some rose onto their tiptoes to try and see the source of the commotion.
The roar, they quickly discovered, had been for Charles Kagimu. The 25-year-old crossed the line alone in Paris, wearing shorts salty with sweat, and a white Uganda jersey. Of the 90 riders who started the race, Kagimu was the last one home, over four minutes adrift of his nearest competitor, finishing in 77th place.
He lifted his left hand from his bars, and saluted the masses as he rolled across the line. “They gave me a lot of motivation to finish this race,” he said. “It was a really crazy atmosphere.”
The Ugandan had ridden most of the city-centre finishing circuit by himself. With a determination to complete the race, he found himself willed on by the atmosphere in Montmartre, Paris’s dainty tourist district, which had been transformed into a Flemish berg for the day, swollen six fans deep at the roadside.
“I was at the front for almost 190km,” Kagimu said, recalling the hours he had spent in the breakaway. “It was quite nice to get a head start and also to ride a pace that suited us really well. It’s a pity that some of the guys weren’t really pushing on, but you know, that’s how cycling is. In the end, I’m really happy that I managed to finish the race.”
Born in the capital city of Kampala, Kagimu turned to cycling ten years ago as a means to commute to school. “Then I found a few guys who were racing, and I joined them,” he recalled.
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The Ugandan now rides for a non-professional Dutch cycling club, Ride United, and won his first event last year in the African Continental Championships time trial. The Olympics road race, at over 272km long, and with 2,800m elevation, was one of his most difficult to date.
“I think it’s the longest road race I’ve ever done,” he said. “The race was really, really long.”
The afternoon was made tougher still by a bout of illness he had been fighting for the past week. “After the opening ceremony, I was really sick,” Kagimu said. The Ugandan was his country’s flagbearer on the boat across the Seine, an opportunity that had him bursting with pride, but standing in the rain for hours.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
“On Saturday, I literally couldn’t get out of bed. We worked really hard to get around, but after such a sickness really close to the race, for sure I lost a lot,” he said. Pulling out, however, was never an option. “I had to race,” he continued. “There was nothing else to do apart from doing the race, and giving it my all.”
It was that attitude, that doggedness, that the crowds by Trocadéro noticed in Kagimu as he came across the line. It had taken him almost seven hours to finish, but finish he did, the only rider to do so from the early breakaway. “It’s a huge accomplishment,” the Ugandan said. He then posed for a photograph and, riding alongside the tribunes, began his journey back to his hotel.
