01 A postal bicycle, in 1898
The origin is as prosaic as it is precise. The first bicycles reached the territory in 1898 and were used for postal deliveries in Massawa, the Red Sea port. From there they climbed to the plateau. In 1936 the federation was set up and in 1937 the first organised race was run, with clubs beginning to form in Asmara itself.
Those first races were reserved for Italian riders. Eritreans were not admitted to compete until 1939, and as soon as they could, one of them took the win: Ghebremariam Ghebru. It is the kind of fact remembered inside the country far more than outside it.
02 From the local club to the Tour de France
What began on a city circuit has ended on European roads. In 2015 Daniel Teklehaimanot became the first Eritrean to start the Tour de France, and that same year he was the first African rider to wear the race's mountains jersey, having won that classification at the Critérium du Dauphiné.
A capital of a million people, in one of the least visited countries in the world, that has put its riders on the podium of international cycling. The starting point is this sloping street.
Confirmation came later with Biniam Girmay: the first Black African rider on a podium at the road World Championships, in 2021, and winner of the green jersey at the 2024 Tour de France. Eritrea is now considered one of the continent's leading cycling nations, and not by chance or on the strength of one isolated case.
03 What the altitude does
The explanation repeated both inside and outside the country has two legs. The first is altitude: Asmara sits at 2,325 metres and most of the country lies above 1,800. Training every day at that height produces the physiological adaptations that in Europe are chased with three-week mountain camps.
The second is the terrain. The road down from Asmara to Massawa loses more than two thousand metres in a rosary of tight bends, and it has been the natural training ground of several generations of riders: a long sustained climb in one direction, a technical descent in the other. Nothing has to be built, it is already there.
For the visitor there is a practical and unromantic corollary: that same altitude affects you. At 2,325 metres you feel the first day climbing a flight of stairs, and if you plan to hire a bike it is worth spending the first days riding gently. What gives the locals an advantage takes one away from you for a week.
04 How to see it
First: you do not need to hunt for it. If you happen to be there on a race Sunday you will know about it, because the circuit runs through the centre and the crowd lines the pavements of the same avenues you have been walking all week. You watch it free and standing, like a European classic, but without barriers and without tickets.
Second: look on weekdays too. The bicycle here does not live on sport alone. At the scrap market, on deliveries and in daily journeys, the bicycle with a trailer is a working vehicle. That everyday base is what holds up the rest, and it is the part that never makes the sports reports.
And third: use the fact to read the city differently. Asmara is easy to walk because it is flat and compact, but it stands on top of a plateau, and everything around it drops away. That geometry — a flat city on an edge — explains at once its urban form, its climate and why its riders climb so well.
