Tour De Californie

Were it not for the fact that we’ve been hanging out this week with our cycling friends Barbara and Susan, I might not have heard of the Tour of California, which would have been a sad thing. This is the inaugural edition of an eight-day cycling stage race throughout California, that started off in San Francisco last Sunday, and winds up in Redondo Beach this upcoming Sunday. This event has attracted the best field of cyclists ever to race in this country, with many familiar names to us from following the Tour de France. What is incredibly neat is seeing this field race over roads I’ve ridden on.

Today’s event was a race from San Luis Obispo to Santa Barbara, climbing over the 2184-foot elevation San Marcos Pass, a couple of miles from where we used to live. This was the biggest climb of the whole tour, though not a Category 1 climb by Tour de France standards. (Had they taken a left at the top of the pass and continued up Camino Cielo to 3900’ La Cumbre Peak, it would have been. But the race organizers thought that would have been too risky a route had it been raining.) The climb wasn’t enough to break apart the peloton, and George Hincapie won the stage in a sprint along the Santa Barbara waterfront, with thousands of spectators watching.

The history of stage racing in this country has been a spotty one, with events being held for a couple of successive years before failing to attract continued sponsorship and thus folding. I hope this race becomes the one to break this pattern, so we can see top-caliber stage racing in our backyard for years to come.