Yesterday, it
was announced that Paramount will produce a feature film about the Rwandan
national cycling team which competed in cycling tournaments all over the world, and in the 2012 London Olympics.

The unlikely
duo of actor Leonardo DiCaprio and director Michael Bay will jointly produce
the film, which will be directed by Orlando von Einsiedel, who directed the Oscar
nominated documentary, "Virunga," which chronicled the attempts by animal rights activists
to save the last remaining mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of the
Congo, and which DiCaprio exec produced.

However, there is a catch, and I’ll bet you can guess what it is…

The catch is
that the Paramount film will focus not on the cyclists themselves, but on the
white guy who formed the team, Jacques "Jock" Boyer, as a form of
redemption, after getting into considerable personal trouble.

The first
American ever to compete in the Tour de France, Boyer had a very successful
career winning some 40 races before he retired at the age of 32. Then he had a reversal
of fortune, suffering financial ruin after some bad business decisions, and
getting thrown in jail after having sex with an underaged girl.

However, Boyer turned around his life after traveling to Rwanda, which was still trying
to recover from its bloody genocide during the 1990’s, and formed a team made
up of young men and orphans who survived the war, and turned them into a championship
team.

Now, granted
one can’t make a film about the team without dealing with Boyer. However, knowing what we have seen in the past
with similar films, no doubt the entire focus of the film will be on
Boyer, making the Rwandans and the county nothing more than interesting background color. I hope I’m wrong, but I’ll bet I’m not.

It’s probably not
going to be as bad as that Disney project in development, “The Princess of North Sudan," that I wrote about a few weeks ago (HERE), but most likely it’s going to be insufferable enough.