Oregon Cycling Magazine

by Mark Lansing

On February 18, 2008, the Powers That Be joined forces to send me to the Bay Area to cover the Tour of California.

In an eight-day stage race that has rapidly risen to become the top field annually (and perhaps ever) in the United States, top national and international stars were listed to start, and when I checked into my motel room that evening, defending world time trial champion Fabian Cancellara had come away with the prologue win on a two-mile course through Stanford University. The first distance stage would be run the next day from the Bay north to Santa Rosa.

I was really looking forward to it. The Euro-studs on pre-race rosters included Tom Boonen, Jens Voigt, Robbie McEwen, Paolo Bettini, and Oscar Friere. From retirement, organizers had also convinced Mario Cipollini to appear. On the American side were George Hincapie, Christian Vandevelde, Bobbie Julich, David Zabriskie, Tyler Hamilton, Chris Horner and defending champion Levi Leipheimer. During Lance Armstrong’s seven-year reign at the Tour de France, Hamilton arguably put in the best performance by an American there, breaking his collarbone early in the 2003 race, riding through the pain for almost three full weeks, and ending up in the top four. But Hamilton has lately been living under the cloud of doping allegations and indeed, just prior to the start of the Tour of California, they disqualified him for that reason.
On the morning of February 19th, I headed toward Santa Rosa to do some in-person spectating. If all had gone well, these are the things I would have seen over the following week:

Stage One—Argentina’s J. J. Haedo got the win after a beautiful ride up the coastline.

Stage Two—Boonen launched to victory and Cipollini took third after a vigorous sprint into Sacramento. Tyler Farrar, who some of you may recognize as a former Junior National Champion from Wenatchee, Washington, assumed the overall lead.

Stage Three—Astana teammates Leipheimer and Horner combined forces with Zabriskie and Robert Gesink of the Netherlands to decimate the field on the hilliest day of the race. Gesink got the stage win but Leipheimer grabbed second and assumed the overall race lead.

Stage Four—A crappy, rainy day. I would have stayed in bed and not seen anything.

Stage Five—A fifteen-mile individual time trial through Solvang saw Leipheimer increase his overall lead by taking the stage win. Americans Vandevelde (third), Zabriskie (sixth) and Horner (seventh) also solidified their positions on the leader board with solid time trials.

Stages Six and Seven—These were the best two races of the week, with lots of tactics on display over the closing miles into Pasadena. Multiple cat-and-mouse breakaway games supplied the drama. Englishman Mark Cavendish was the Stage Six winner after crashing two miles from the finish (how he made it back to the group remains a mystery). In Stage Seven the field was never quite able to catch a breakaway group that kept attacking each other and looked close to getting swallowed on several occasions. Hincapie outdueled four other riders at the finish.

Sadly, however, I was not able to see any of this stuff first hand. Before the field arrived in Occidental, California, miles from the finish of Stage One, I parked my car and went on a short ride to kill some time. If you ever get a chance to do a bicycle tour there, it comes highly recommended—I had been through the area before and it is just beautiful, especially Coleman Valley Road, which climbs the coastal foothills from Highway 1 to the top of a 900-foot summit. Taking off on that ride is more or less the last thing I remember; I woke the following day in a hospital, having suffered a concussion, five broken ribs, a broken clavicle and a broken pelvis. Thus, what follows are the lessons I learned on my recent trip to the Tour of California:

1. Personal safety and welfare is more important than any bicycle race. If there is anything you can do to make your riding less hazardous—short of quitting the sport entirely—make sure you do it.

2. If you are going to crash, try to do it in front of witnesses or with some other means of understanding what happened. I have been in many bicycle wrecks before, and they were never any fun, but I always felt like I learned something out of the transactions, i.e. where all of these dangers come from, what can be done to avoid them, and so on. There is nothing more frustrating than ending up badly hurt and having no idea what happened. In my case, my bicycle was completely undamaged, and according to emergency personnel I was still clipped into my pedals and my chain was still on the chain rings when they found me. This might tend to indicate that no motor vehicle was involved; on the other hand, the wreck happened at an intersection where two other bicyclists have lost battles with cars and been taken to the hospital by helicopter since the beginning of the year. This seems awfully coincidental, if in fact I simply crashed on my own.

To be blunt, even after the physical injuries heal (assuming they do) I’ll be needing a major courage injection to get back on that bicycle again. Not all lessons are enlightening.

YHIHF may be emailed at lansingatlaw@rvi.net.

Possibly Related

• May 2008: Clown around at Cirque du Cycling
• November 2007: What shall we do now?
• September 2008: Clipped in Washington County
• September 2006: Dave Campbell interviews George Hincapie
• June 2008: Getting our share