Benin is about to make historical past this September as its girls’s nationwide biking crew will turn into the primary African squad to compete in a significant UCI-sanctioned race on U.S. soil, organisers of the Maryland Biking Basic introduced Thursday.
Now in its third version, the Maryland Biking Basic returns on September 6, 2025, as America’s highest-ranked skilled highway race, and one of many final remaining UCI races on U.S. soil. For the primary time, the occasion will embrace an elite girls’s race alongside its established males’s competitors.
Earlier this spring, top-tier groups together with CANYON//SRAM Zondacrypto, EF Training–Oatly, and Crew USA confirmed their participation within the girls’s area. The addition of Benin’s nationwide crew now sends a strong message concerning the world enlargement of girls’s biking.
“The participation of the Benin Girls’s Nationwide Crew holds a whole lot of significance on and off the bike,” mentioned Steve Brunner, the race’s Government Director. “Because the expertise pool continues to develop on the African continent, it’s necessary to offer alternatives in world-class races just like the Maryland Biking Basic. Kimberly (Coats) and her crew have put in a whole lot of nice work with the Benin Biking Federation to develop expertise, particularly figuring out elite-level girls. So, it’s nice to offer a platform for these girls to carry out and be recognised.”
Whereas Eritrea has historically led African highway biking, Benin is hoping to emerge as a rising power. The nation made its debut on the UCI Street World Championships in 2024 with 17-year-old Georgette Vignonfodo, who completed one hundred and tenth within the Junior Girls’s race. That very same week, Exodus Saizonou turned the primary male bike owner from Benin to compete at World Championships, ending sixty fifth within the males’s Junior Particular person Time Trial. And Hermionne Ahouissou, who competed within the elite girls’s class, ending 68th within the Girls Elite Particular person Time Trial however DNF’d within the highway race.
“As president of the Benin Biking Federation, I’m comfortable to just accept this invitation for our girls’s nationwide crew to race The Maryland Biking Basic. This shall be a second of satisfaction for our nation, and glorious preparation forward of the UCI World Championships in Rwanda simply weeks later,” mentioned Romuald Hazoumè, president of the Benin Biking Federation.
The 2025 UCI Street World Championships, going down in Rwanda from September 21–28, would be the first time the occasion is held on African soil.
Past bike racing, Crew Benin’s presence in Baltimore additionally reinforces rising cultural and diplomatic ties. “The State of Maryland and the Metropolis of Baltimore have rising connections to Benin,” mentioned Terry Hasseltine, president of the Sport & Leisure Company of Maryland. “Their involvement within the Maryland Biking Basic is a significant extension of that relationship.”
Benin’s nationwide crew shall be one in all 15 squads competing within the girls’s area, providing American followers their first probability to witness this degree of worldwide girls’s racing because the Amgen Tour of California final ran in 2019.
Each the lads’s and ladies’s races will happen on September 6, following comparable programs that showcase Baltimore’s rolling terrain and culminate in a quick circuit end across the metropolis’s Interior Harbor. The males’s preliminary participation listing was launched final month, headlined by WorldTour squads Lidl–Trek, EF Training–EasyPost, and Crew Jayco–AlUla. Full course particulars and the entire race week schedule shall be introduced quickly.
