HERE'S THE THING about the Wooden Bike Classic, in Rwanda: It's not really a bike race. Well, there are bikes. Sorta. They're more like prehistoric scooters, carved from eucalyptus trees, with wobbly wooden wheels, wooden handlebars, a wooden platform for your feet, and a splintery wooden seat that's best avoided if you want to have children someday. They look like they were stolen from Fred Flintstone's garage, and though they've been pushed around Rwanda for as long as anyone can remember—hauling bananas, tea, coffee, beans, mangoes, plantains, oranges, chickens, goats, pigs, and whatever else can be lashed aboard—no one ever thought of racing them until Tom Ritchey rode into town.

Ritchey, 51, a lanky, handlebar-mustached Northern California bike builder, first traveled to Rwanda in 2005 to have, as he likes to say, "a great midlife crisis." An ex-racer who crafted some of mountain biking's earliest lightweight frames in the eighties, Ritchey was enthralled by Rwanda's wooden bikes, which are found all over its mountainous, landlocked countryside. No two are built exactly the same, and Ritchey was staggered by the innovations he saw: hand brakes that use rubber strips from worn-out tires, metal bearings taken off old cars, aluminum cans repurposed as reflectors. These were magnificent machines. Then, being an American, he thought, Hey, let's race 'em.

So now I'm here on a humid September morning in the dusty college town of Butare, at the start line of the Wooden Bike Classic 2007, along with a hundred or so Rwandans, many of them barefoot teenage boys, and about a dozen American lunatics, including Ritchey, who's conducting a prerace inspection. The Rwandans don't know Ritchey by name, but they figure the White Dude in the Navy Shorts is in charge somehow, and they clear a path as he runs a hand across their rickety handlebars and wheels. Ritchey halts when he comes to a skinny young man holding a broken wooden frame in his right hand and a busted set of wheels in his left.

"No, no, noooo, man," Ritchey says in his mellow-yellow California accent. "You can't just run it. You've gotta ride it."

The kid has no idea what he's saying, but someone else explains to him, in Kinyarwanda, the regional language, "The bike cannot be carried, dude. It must be ridden." The dejected racer walks away.

Ritchey, who's now at the start line, is waving his arms maniacally as he instructs a Rwandan man about the proper way to start a bike race. "You gotta do it this way!" he says. "You gotta say, Ready! Set! Go!" Ritchey pumps a fist three times. "Ready...Set...Go!"

All around me, the Rwandan racers are getting impatient. They start clapping in unison, like high school football players on the sidelines in some cheesy movie. Ritchey hustles to the back and grabs a tall wooden bike. The Rwandan starter jumps out and flails his arms, just like Ritchey told him to do.

The race is a mile long, most of it on this dirt road. I feel a twinge of nervousness as I place my left foot on my wooden bike and dig my right foot into the red African earth.

"Are you readeeeeee?!" the starter asks.

"Get...

"Set... "