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Jordan Schleck Ssekanwagi was already one of the best cyclists in Uganda while he was just 14 years old, his results were very impressive locally, and he almost got an opportunity to already make a big step forward in his career by going to Europe. It's a Ugandan friend of Jordan who had first talked about him to the Belgium-based "Cannibal team", a very good European youth team (which has U17 and U19 men and women teams), when he had gone to Belgium. Cannibal Team were impressed by Jordan's videos and results so they first sent him some kits and stuff, and then they wanted to take Jordan to Belgium to race with them in 2017. But Jordan never went to Belgium because he wasn't in good term with the Ugandan Cycling Association and they refused to sign the official documents needed to get a visa.
To understand why Jordan could not go to Belgium, we have to explain how the Ugandan Cycling Association works and why they had problems with Jordan. The Ugandan cycling federation (the Ugandan cycling federation is called Ugandan Cycling Association, or UCA, it has a different status but the same role as a federation), as many cycling federations in Africa, is corrupted. "In Africa, federations are like governments, when you have a sitting president of a federation he takes it like his own propriety: he is there to stay" explains someone who knows well East African cycling. Sam Muwonge, the current president of the Ugandan Cycling Association, was re-elected again in February, but these elections where held behind closed doors. "We have had the same leadership for years now, recalls a rider, it’s really hard to change and to understand how do things work. Personally, I always like to just keep quiet because I don't want to fight them since I was a rider and I don't want to have a misunderstanding with them" he adds. The corrupted federation is a big brake on the development of cycling in some countries like Uganda or Kenya. Federations should only care about supporting the riders, but in these countries "they only try to find ways to making political mileage or making money or business out of it." In effect, they don't make an effort to organize more races or to support the young riders, they sometimes try to make the riders pay to get the official documents they need and even sometimes tolerate cheating by race organizers (help with motorcycles or shortcuts) to avoid some riders they don't want to to win. Another very common problem in Uganda is the last-minute cancellation of the national team's races, which are really frustrating for the riders. The most recent case is with the Tour of Lunsar in Sierra Leone where Uganda was supposed to have a men and women team, but the federation failed to release the funding in time for flights. Another example: from 2017 to 2019, the Ugandan cycling federation wanted to send riders to the U23 and U19 Worlds but they finally did not start a single time. An Ugandan explains the problem: "Some people working with the federation don't know what they are doing, sometimes they make an appointment at the embassy too late, sometimes they miss out some documents... But also sometimes I think that they get the money for the trips but they try to make it not work out and they never return the money, they keep it for them." Without independent structures, like Safari Simbaz or Kenyan Riders in Kenya and Masaka Cycling Club or Tropical Heat Cycling Academy in Uganda, the local riders, who usually come from a non-cycling background, would just disappear. So it all ends up with those people doing the donkey work, and the UCA just gets the credit for nothing. Making things change is really difficult, people have tried in a lot of countries where the federation is corrupted, but very few have succeeded. The UCI is aware of the situation, but in most countries the problem is deeper than the cycling federation, it is national politics, so there is nothing that the UCI can do to really solve the issue.
It's in that context that David Matovu, Jordan's dad, when he wasn't racing competitively anymore, started becoming an enemy of the Ugandan Cycling Association. He was strongly opposed to them, making a lot of effort to try to make things change for the best. David Kinjah, who is the most experienced Kenyan cyclist and the director of the Kenyan club Safari Simbaz (where Chris Froome was riding when he was in Kenya), is a very good friend of Jordan's father; he knows well the difficulty to deal with a corrupted federation as the problem is the same in Kenya. "The UCA didn’t want to see him, David Kinjah explains. So David Matovu automatically started to teach his son what was happening: 'I’m fighting for you but these guys are fighting me because they think I’m a threat.' The father was being in trouble and now Jordan, as a young rider who was only 14 years old, started to face all this politics! So I told David Matovu 'you know, the best thing is just to teach the boys to be the best cyclists they can be, there is not much you can do with the federation'." David Kinjah has the same issue in Kenya, he was a critic of the federation for many years but he had to learn how to live with the federation as his enemy and as his neighbour. When Jordan got the opportunity to go to Belgium to join Cannibal Team in 2017, he needed a recommendation letter from the Ugandan Cycling Association to get a visa. But with the conflict the federation had with Jordan's father, they were not very keen to give him this document. "The UCA wasn’t in good term with my dad, Jordan says, they had their political issues, they had a lot of fights, and they included me in their political issues." Jordan was very young and sad to be in such a situation, so he did not act in the best way to convince the UCA to let him get the visa either, as Charles Kagimu recalls: "The issue was with his father, but I think Jordan also said some things which were really bad on some WhatsApp group. I also blamed him because he didn’t have to do that, and then sadly he lost a lot of chances because of that and because of this sad behavior of the Ugandan Cycling Association. I just hope such things never happened again because I think he would have been really fine if such a thing never happened."