Reijnen reigns triumphant in return to racing

KIGALI, Nov 20 - Team Type 1 - SANOFI rider Kiel Reijnen came back to professional cycling on Sunday after a season-long illness took him off his bike in the spring and promptly put himself in gear, winning the prologue stage at the Tour of Rwanda.

Reijnen, who lives in Colorado, won the 4km prologue in 4:22, eight seconds ahead of Joey Rosskopf and 10 seconds in front of Ty Magner, both from Team Type 1 - SANOFI.

"To win today was important for me, to show my thanks to Team Type 1 - SANOFI for standing by when I couldn´t even ride my bike for an hour," Reijnen said.

Reijnen first fell ill in February, but was incorrectly diagnosed with celiac disease until March, when a proper diagnosis of pneumonia of the muscles grounded him from racing until the disease could be treated.

Team Type 1 - SANOFI is at the week-long Tour of Rwanda to compete for the second year, and has brought a strong squad to the season-end stage race. Reijnen, Magner and Rosskopf join Alex Bowden and Alexey Shmidt for the 9-stage race.

"This course is hard and hilly every day, and the teams here are motivated to do well. We´ll have our hands full defending against the South African and Ethiopian squads, and the local Rwanda team has some really strong guys with an entire country pulling for them," Reijnen said.

Team Type 1, as part of its diabetes outreach program, came to Rwanda with more than just bike racing on its agenda. The Atlanta-based organization also packed more than 100,000 donated diabetes test strips, 200 blood glucose meters and 10,000 lancing devices for more than 650 children with diabetes in the African country.

Team Type 1 - SANOFI CEO Phil Southerland said victory on Sunday was sweet.

"We´ve come back to try and win the race, but our bigger goal is to train health care workers on diabetes awareness and to put the right supplies into the right hands to give these kids a chance. Most type 1 diabetic kids in Rwanda suffer from horrible complications in their teens and twenties, because the kind of medical self-care and supply availability we take for granted in the United States simply isn´t possible here. There´s no reason a 5-year old girl here has to go blind or have organ failure or have a foot amputated in her later life if she has access to diabetes supplies now," Southerland said.

Team Type 1 - SANOFI rider Alex Bowden, a professional athlete with type 1 diabetes, said he started the prologue with a blood glucose around 150.

"About 30 minutes before the start it shot up to above 300, just out of nowhere, so I took a bolus of insulin and it came back down to normal again, around 160, by the end of the race. It must have been something I ate in the warm up," Bowden said.

Southerland said the long week of racing ahead of the team will be hard, but defending the leader´s jersey "will be worth the suffering."

"All of Rwanda, and pretty soon all of Africa will see us out there, and the attention we can in turn focus on diabetes education and management is a tremendous step forward for Team Type 1 - SANOFI and for our partnerships here. It´s something we´re tremendously proud of, and to have Kiel wear this jersey is special for us," Southerland said.

Based in Atlanta, Team Type 1 - SANOFI is the men´s professional squad of Team Type 1, an organization of more than 140 athletes affected by type 1 diabetes. 

This month the Team Type 1 running squad completed an 18-day, 10-man all-T1D relay from California to New York on foot, running non-stop across the country to finish on World Diabetes Day in Manhattan and draw attention to diabetes awareness.

Follow the squad at the Tour of Rwanda on Facebook and our website www.teamtype1.org

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