On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 3/1/2004
Stage race fantasies
It’s almost springtime again, and that means fans of bicycle racing are emerging from months of hibernation, hungry for the first real races of the year. Cyclocross and six-days races are all well and good, and my hat’s off to those who ply these esoteric trades during the dark side of the year. But most of us, right about now, are starved for real road races, featuring our favorite first division teams, replete with all those big names we know and love, from Armstrong and Astarloa to Zabel and Zulle.
Ever since the last leaves fell in Lombardia, and all through the winter, we have been on a slow drip feed of racing rumors and murmurs: riders transfering to new teams; new teams morphing out of old teams; rider and team agendas announced for the coming season...tantalizing tidbits to tide us over. As winter wanes, we begin reading results from far flung races in antipodal places...Australia...Malaysia...Argentina. Finally, like flocks of migratory birds, the harlequin horde of the pro peloton begins to gather again in Europe, and we are able to sink our greedy little tifosi teeth into those first tasty morsels of the coming feast: Ruta del Sol, Tour Méditerranéen, Giro della Liguria...can Paris-Nice and Milano-San Remo be far away?
Racing in Europe: there is no denying that this is the mother lode for cycling. Nothing else even comes close. We in North America might wish it were otherwise, but a little logistical hurdle known as the Atlantic Ocean, plus a century of cultural divergence in sporting interests have made it the way it is. For the foreseeable future, we on this side of the pond are going to be settling for second or third best when it comes to major cycling events.
It is not my intention to denigrate the American racing scene, nor the many excellent riders who toil here. We are fortunate--and grateful--to be able to see many great races, in all parts of the country. In a few cases--the national championships in Philadelphia and the Grand Prix in San Francisco, for two good examples--the crowds rival those of the major races in Europe. But no one is going to try and make a case that races here are on an equal footing with the big, epic races in Europe: the one-day classics and the grand tours. Even the second-tier stage races in Europe--Paris-Nice, Tour de Suisse, Dauphiné Libéré--are more prestigious and more substantial than anything over here.
I’m as excited as anybody that the USPS juggernaut will be participating in the Tour of Georgia this spring. And I’m equally excited about the prospects for the new ten-day United Tour of Texas, slated to begin in 2005, and promising to be the richest race in America. (Never mind that the total prize pool for this richest of all races is equal to what maybe the fourth place finisher might take home in any run-of-the-mill golf tournament.) I hope both events thrive and prosper, and that more and bigger stage races follow in their wake. But still, it’s a far cry from the manic masses on the Alpine cols or the lunatic fringe along the sections of pavé on Paris-Roubaix or thronging some mur in a Belgian forest. Watching the crazy crowds on the Fillmore wall of the SF Grand Prix gives us just a teasing little glimpse of what it might be like to see the real deal here...just a one-day sampler of how cool it could be. Doesn’t it make you want to have more--much more--of the same?
What would it be like to have an authentic, world-class Grand Tour in our backyard? (With all of the best teams and all of their team leaders committed to winning.) I’m sure I’m not the only bike nut who has fantasized about this. Just for the heck of it, while we wait for the really big races to start showing up on OLN in a month or two, let’s play make-believe here: let’s imagine what it would be like to have an annual Grand Tour in California...a fourth marquee stage race on a par with the Giro, Tour, and Vuelta...
On some levels, this is going to take a lot of imagination. But it’s just a fantasy, so we can be as freewheeling with our fancies as we please. Let’s begin by pretending the Atlantic Ocean isn’t there, or at any rate doesn’t impede the free flow of world-class teams and talent--and fans--between our stage race and all those other big events. Next, let’s imagine there is a 13th month in the year, wedged in, say, between July and August. That’s the window we need to give our poor racers time to recover between the Tour and the Vuelta. There is hardly enough time between the grand tours as it is, at least if you listen to the current crop of riders: very few of them do even two of the big stage races anymore, let alone three. So in addition to putting another month of mellow weather into the summer calendar, and a pair of fresh legs on each rider, we also need to give these guys some serious motivation to do our tour. Two things will do that: prestige and money.
If all the rest of this were solid reality and not a daydream, I can assure you the money would be there. Lots of it...enough to tempt any team. Sponsors would be climbing all over each other to pay the bills and bask in the reflected glory of the event. Cities and towns would be vying for the privilege--no, paying for the privilege--of being a ville d’étape...a start or finish line venue for a stage.
But still, in addition to a big pot of gold at the end of our rainbow, we would need the prestige--the international cachet--of being one of the really, really big prizes in all of sports. So let’s imagine that our stage race has been around for most of a hundred years, growing bigger and more important over that span of time.
Let’s imagine that cycling in America never lost the popularity it had in the days of Major Taylor and Bobby Walthour; that it still draws more spectators and generates more passion and publicity than baseball. (Cycling in America did that, you know...back in the early years of the 20th century. Back when the Tour de France was just a twinkle in the eye of Henri Desgranges, bike racing was the biggest sporting draw in this country.) So, for the purposes of this fantasy, we will roll back the clock a hundred years and rewrite history so that bike racing remains the big deal it had been then, and that all the years in between will be filled with the same epic tales and heroic feats that make the grand old races in Europe so mythic.
Are you still with me here? Okay so far? If you’ve bought into my fantasyland premise up to this point, it gets easier from now on. But wait a second, some of you are saying: what was that you said back there about a stage race in...California...? Isn’t this a national grand tour? Welllll...no, it’s not! Remember, this is my fantasy, and I live and ride in California, so this is where I want my stage race to be. Besides, it makes sense this way, to me anyway. The United States is way too big to host a three-week tour that has any hope of making a big loop all the way around the country, as the Italian, French, and Spanish tours do each year. Besides, who would want to see endless stages slogging away across the vast, flat nothingness of the midwest? If you want that, you’ve got RAAM.
In terms of total area, California is slightly smaller than France or Spain, but a good deal bigger than Italy. Add in the occasional foray into the neighboring “countries” of Oregon or Nevada, and it’s right in the same ballpark as the other Grand Tour nations as far as overall size goes. And it certainly matches up well in terms of great scenery, interesting roads, and challenging topography, not to mention having enough population centers to provide for both logistical support and a significant spectator pool. And with all due respect to Georgia and Texas, it beats the pants off either of those states in all these departments.
Just think of the tour stages we could have here! First off, you’ve got climbs and cols in the Sierra to match anything on any of the Euro-tours. Imagine a mountaintop finish at Whitney Portal or Bristlecone....yeeow! Or how about crossing Tioga Pass midway through a stage and finishing up with a field sprints in Yosemite Valley? But why stop there? Ever been up to Hearst Castle? Remember that wonderful, winding road up the mountain to get there? What a great mountaintop finish that would make! And it certainly wouldn’t all be stages for the climbers: after that finish at Hearst Castle, bed the tour caravan down in San Simeon overnight, then do the length of Big Sur as the next stage, finishing up with the 17-mile drive and then a sprint finish along Cannery Row in Monterey. Then send the herd up through the Santa Cruz mountains to San Francisco. Or--on the day before Hearst Castle--have a mildly uphill sprint finish to the Queen of the Missions in Santa Barbara.
Imagine the stages you could run in the mountains of Southern California. You Bay Area folks may not know these roads, but the hardy bikers in San Diego and LA will understand what I’m talking about when I suggest stages visiting places like Palomar, Idyllwild, Oak Glen, Big Bear, and the Angeles Crest. Epic stuff!
And we haven’t even considered the venues north and east of San Francisco. Just in the immediate Bay Area counties, you have enough possibilities to last you through several tours, rarely repeating a thing. Go even further out into the hinterlands, and the supply of cool roads and challenging stages is virtually inexhaustible. Lake Tahoe...Lassen...Mt Shasta...Avenue of the Giants...the Lost Coast...
My fantasy does have one reality-based caveat though: I like to assume that any given stage would satisfy all the logistical considerations inherent in putting on a really big event, and that means enough room and infrastructure to host a significant finish area, and enough nearby accommodations to house and feed all the teams and support personnel...no small undertaking. That leaves some of California’s most remote corners as somewhat problematic, at best, in terms of hosting a stage. But any number of stages on the Euro-tours end in far off, obscure, primitive places--Zoncolan and l’Angliru come to mind--and the organizers manage to get everyone off the mountains and down to hotels and hot food eventually.
It’s doable, for sure. If all the suppositions upon which this tour is based were fact instead of fantasy, it could be and would be one helluva stage race. Unfortunately, the fantasy foundation of our event is a towering, tottering house of cards, and I can’t quite see past the fantasy to whatever it would take to make it real. Perhaps some others with more vision and more resources can make it happen someday. Lord knows, I never thought I would see crowds--and race fields--as deep as we have seen at the San Francisco Grand Prix. It’s still a piddly little event compared to a 20-stage grand tour, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net