An international criminal lawyer, a tragic loss, and the fight to build Africa’s cycling future.
Mikel Delagrange and Rwandan cyclist Xaverine Nirere.
The first thing you need to know about Mikel Delagrange is that he never wanted this job.
The second thing is that he’s maybe the only person in the world with the skillset to do it.
Sitting across from me, virtually, is a man who humbly calls himself the “head cheerleader” of the Amani Project, the groundbreaking initiative currently working to build Africa’s first UCI women’s team with a goal of racing the Tour de France Femmes in 2028, and eventually to field an all-African squad at the men’s Tour de France, too. Those are big goals, but Delagrange’s modest self-description downplays his influence, determination, and the Amani Project’s prospects of actually pulling it off.
Since the tragic death of the project’s founder, Sule Kangangi, in a high-speed crash at a gravel race in Vermont, Delagrange has found himself thrust into the role of guiding what may be African cycling’s most ambitious project to date.
“Right after [Kangangi’s] funeral, we’re all just devastated and looking around the table like, do we continue this or not?” Delagrange recalls. “And then I said, okay, if we’re going to keep doing this, and I was inspired by what they said, which one of you is going to step up? And it doesn’t need to be one, because there are massive shoes to fill, but a number of you need to step up to take over some of these responsibilities.”
He pauses. “And that’s where it went quiet.”
An unlikely path to Kenyan cycling
To understand the man now steering this ship, we need to teleport from Africa to Miami, Florida, where Delagrange grew up in the household of a Cuban mother and trial attorney stepfather who used the family dinner table as a practice jury.
“I just came at some point to admire the logic that went into it, the human approach, trying to be able to convey and get an emotive response from people concerning the plight of another human being,” Delagrange explains.
That dinner table training would prove formative. After a college football injury ended his days as a wide-receiver and quarterback, Delagrange pivoted to the world of cycling. But his professional trajectory remained laser-focused: nine years of education with a specialisation in international law. First in Cambodia, where he met his wife while working on the Khmer Rouge tribunal; then in Nepal, during the early 2000s civil war. Eventually, his wife got a job that brought their family to The Hague, Netherlands, where Delagrange worked at the International Criminal Court. It was through this work, as a human rights lawyer working with victims, that Delagrange began spending significant time in central and east Africa.
There’s a theme that runs through much about Delagrange: the ability to exist between worlds, to see systems from the outside, to understand both the letter and spirit of what needs to change. These aren’t just useful skills for an international lawyer. They’re also pretty handy for someone trying to bring a fresh perspective to African cycling, creating a new ecosystem of opportunity.
The genesis of a movement
Team Amani didn’t emerge from a vacuum. It’s the continuation of a vision that Sule Kangangi had been nurturing for years, rooted in his own journey from riding “Black Mamba” Chinese bikes on the roads of Kenya to becoming a professional cyclist.
“I always remember the day that I saw my first bike race,” Kangangi said in an interview preserved on Ian Boswell’s ‘Breakfast with Boz‘ podcast. “I was fascinated to see how those bikes were going that fast. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to be like one of those racers. From that moment on, I never looked back.”
But Kangangi understood something crucial: his own success, while meaningful, wasn’t enough. “I’ll not always be a professional cyclist,” he acknowledged. “So I have to try and think how I can involve myself in the community. I have ambitions to run a team someday.”
That ambition became Team Amani. With a name that means “peace” in Swahili, the project represents something far more comprehensive than a traditional development team, which typically have a goal of progressing riders beyond where they are rather than reinforcing the environment from which they came. The Team Amani version of this is an ecosystem designed to identify, nurture, and elevate African talent through a high-altitude training center in Kenya, participation in events like the Migration Gravel Race, and a pathway to the sport’s highest levels.
The ‘moonshot,’ as Delagrange describes it? An all-African team at the Tour de France in ten years, and a women’s team at the Tour de France Femmes within three years.
When Kangangi died, the Team Amani vision could have died with him, but now Delagrange has found himself carrying it forward, even as he grappled with profound grief and the magnitude of what it meant to continue.
“I was completely destabilized by the loss of Sule,” he admits.
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