28 February » Events and races »
Amgen Tour of California recap
A former mountain biking star secured his place in road racing history by winning the inaugural Amgen Tour of California Sunday near Los Angeles.
Floyd Landis got his roots on the NORBA dirt circuit and then, after spending some time helping Lance Armstrong win multiple Tours de France on the Discovery Channel Team, he moved to Phonak in 2005 and became the leader of his own team.
This year Floyd is back with the Phonak squad again and, while the Tour is certainly the biggest focus for the whole team, winning the 600-mile Tour of California was still a major goal.
Landis, who lives in Southern California said he was thrilled with the outcome.
“We came here to represent our sponsors, Phonak and iShares, and so the best way to do that is to win the race,” Landis said in the post-race press conference. “I won’t say we came here with any other objective. We have multiple goals throughout the year, such as the Tour de France, but this one came high on the list.”
Landis was the overall winner of the race mainly because of his incredible performance in a Stage 3 time trial in San Jose, where he beat the rest of the field by 26 seconds. That gave Landis a considerable lead in the general classification, so his team was able to ride a defensive race around him for the rest of the event to save the golden jersey.
Behind Landis, fellow Americans Dave Zabriskie and Bobby Julich, both of Team CSC, finished second and third respectively. T-Mobile’s Olaf Pollack took the Clif Bar Sprint Jersey. Levi Leipheimer of Gerolsteiner had enough points following Saturday’s Stage 6 finish in Thousand Oaks to take the California Travel and Tourism Commission King of the Mountain (KOM) Jersey.
And, despite a crash on the first lap in the final stage, Tom Peterson (USA) of Team TIAA-CREF won the Union Bank Best Young Rider Jersey, and Navigators rider Glen Chadwick’s active role in the final stage earned him the Adobe Most Aggressive Rider Jersey.
After eight days of racing, which hit 10 host cities and covered 600 miles from San Francisco down to Redondo Beach, everyone is calling the inaugural Tour of California a huge success. More than 1.3 million spectators took in the eight stages, while a one-hour recap was also shown each night on ESPN 2.
“As far as I can tell everything went perfect,” said Landis. “I don’t know if this race would have been possible a few years ago. Obviously Lance brought a lot of fans to cycling, and hopefully we can keep them here.”
At the post-race press conference, American ProTour stars Leipheimer, George Hincapie, Landis, Zabriskie and Julich sang the praises of the new event. Julich called it the “best race I’ve ever done in the U.S.”, while Leipheimer ranked his day in the golden jersey in his hometown as “one of the most memorable moments of my career.”
If there was one negative from the race it’s that outside the cycling world and the short broadcasts on ESPN2, there was almost no coverage of the event in the mainstream media. With no Lance Armstrong competing to draw in the average reader or viewer, few mainstream media outlets picked up on a race organizers are hoping will one day rival the Tour de France. In Canada, coverage of the race was virtually non-existent, and even in the US the coverage was limited mostly to previews in the newspapers of host cities or short news clips on host-city television channels.
But with that being said, and having watched the prologue stage from the streets of San Francisco myself, it would be hard not to consider the Tour of California a big success. Having some of the world’s best ProTour riders racing a major event (other than the Tour of Georgia) is a huge deal, and everyone around us on the hills leading up to the Prologue finish at Coit Tower last weekend understood that.
Events like this are huge for the sport of cycling – whether it be road or mountain — and it will be important for Tour organizers to attract more media coverage in 2007. With greater public awareness, the Tour of California will continue to grow and organizers may be able to reach their goal of having a race that rivals the popularity of some of the larger stage races in Europe.
Coverage of the Amgen Tour of California
- Amgen Tour of California website. Lots of good ‘official’ information here.
- Tour of California slideshow. Plenty of photos to help you with your road racing fix.
- VeloNews. A good starting point for your cycling news.