Your 'Local' Pro Tour Event Needs You!

With heavy, wet, spring-snow flakes falling outside, we’ll not be having our first day of Primal/First Bank Training Camp today. Instead we’ll be sitting inside on Computrainers wishing it were spring or at least dry and remotely hospitable. The weather forecast calls for 3-7” in the metro area with the heaviest accumulations falling in the foothills: the National Weather Service is actually calling for heavier amounts than the local news, but who really knows. At the bottom of the weather story the comment trolls are feverishly fighting about who loves snow and who doesn’t, who is a real Coloradan and who is not. The weather sure brings out jingoistic sentiment like nothing else.

Well I’ve been here about 10 years, which means I’ve been here longer than many currently residing in Colorado, but I’m not a “Native” and never claimed to be. I’m from Missouri, a good sized state smack dab in the heartland of America. Missouri is book ended on its east and west sides by really large cities (St. Louis and Kansas City) with the rest of the state consisting of largely rural, agricultural or forest land. Like Colorado and many other states, Missouri currently finds itself in a tough financial position; specifically with $500M to trim from its budget. Unfortunately, one of the line items in the cross hairs for trimming happens to be the Tour of Missouri, which gets much of its funding from the State of Missouri Board of Tourism.

Stars and Stripes
Last year my wife and I piled into our Vanagon and puttered our way east from Colorado to Missouri to follow the tour. I’ve seen US ‘professional’ bike races in person (small circuit races or criterium events) but I’ve never followed an actual pro tour stage race. And while Missouri is not the south of France and the Ozarks are not the Alps (or even the Rockies for that matter) the event was awesome to watch and the scenery and geography of rolling hills and small rural towns made for great racing. Many of the small US pro teams (Jelly Belly, Bissell, Team Type 1, Kelly, Colavita) fought hard against the continental teams which made the trip to race in my home state: Cervelo, Liquigas, Quick Step, Saxo Bank and Astana. The big American teams, Garmin and Columbia High Road were also on hand to throw down and they brought big names to help them do it: George Hincapie, Christian Vandevelde, David Zabriskie, Mark Cavendish and others. I saw a handful of Mark Cavendish sprint wins: we saw a Thor sprint win as well which was pretty awesome. We watched break away’s form and get chased down by the pack. We saw riders wear the suffering of incessant climbing on their faces as they incessantly climbed Missouri‘s hills and ‘mountains‘. The race had it all and it was only 800 some odd slow Vanagon miles from our home here in Denver.

Levi Gets in the Zone for His TT Effort in Sedalia
From what I’ve read in the tour’s impact study, the 2009 Tour of Missouri brought in about $38M in tax and sales revenue to Missouri; that sounds like a pretty big chunk of change compared to the state’s $5M investment in the event. The study noted that approximately 500,000 spectators watched the event over the course of the race and potentially hundreds of thousands, if not a million more, watched the coverage on TV or followed the tour online. While critics of the race would suggest this is not a sizeable enough return on investment, and poor, rural, Missouri cities pony up a fair amount of unaccounted for fees to play host to the race, it certainly wouldn‘t seem to me that these critiques justify calling off the event altogether. While far from perfect, I’d argue the event has merit and puts Missouri into the global spotlight in a way that other events could scarcely conceive of doing (there won’t be a Rams Super Bowl appearance anytime in the near future so what else is there that’s comparable?) Additionally, the race did seem to energize some of these local communities who served as key watch points along the route, not to mention the start and finish towns. The impact to these communities, which otherwise would scarcely see outside visitors or tourists, must certainly have been significant even if brief.

Great Night of Camping in St. Johns State Park
For our part, while on the course of our trip we stayed in State Parks or small town camp facilities using the Vanagon as our base of operations. We bought food in local stores, bought wine from local wineries (very tasty I might add), fed my coffee addiction from local coffee shops (no Starbucks in middle America praise the lord!) and tried to walk around these small towns and visit with local shop owners to let them know what brought us to their towns. We talked to about as many local cycling fans (and curious residents) as we talked to racers; and yes you can talk to and meet just about all of the racers…and for the record Jens Voigt is twice as personable and clever in person as he is on TV. And while it was hot and humid at times (so is France) there really were no complaints.

JENS!
The moral of this story is less about how great 2009 was, but more a plea for people to support the effort for 2010. While the rest of the world seems to properly recognize the sport of professional cycling for the quality spectator event that it is, the US is struggling to get there. We’ve got a strong local and national race scene and are gaining in notoriety for the quality of pro level competition at our grand tours: Tour of California, Tour of Missouri and the former Tour of Georgia. But with the Tour of Georgia the funds dried up and so too did the race, the Tour of Missouri could very well be next. If you think there should be a 2010 Tour, as either an in person spectator or general fan of quality pro tour bike racing, then the good people of Missouri need your help. Here’s what you can do:

• Visit the Tour of Missouri website (http://www.tourofmissouri.com/) and just poke around: hits mean interest.
• Sign up for their email list or register as a fan if you feel so inclined.
• Send some emails: emails to your friends telling them about the tour, emails to fellow race fans telling them the tour is in jeopardy and most importantly emails to key folks in Missouri State Government to tell them you want their support for this event. As a starting point, here’s some contact info for Governor Jay Nixon’s office and the Missouri Director of Tourism:
• Governor Jay Nixon: 573-751-3222, http://governor.mo.gov/
• Tourism Director Katie Danner Steele: 573-751-3051, DirectorMoTourism@ded.mo.gov
• You could also email Lt. Governor Kinder, local representatives etc. I actually emailed the Lt. Governor after last year’s tour and got an actual email back from a real human being (not the Lt. Governor, but I’ll take it.) This leads me to believe that there are folks out there in MO-GOV land who really want this event to continue, they just need your voice to help add some momentum to it.
• Continue to support local racing and interest in competitive cycling. More interest will mean more races which will eventually make it harder to say no to events like these in the future.

Garmin in the Break
Here in Colorado the buzz is about whether the Governor and Lance can work out a deal to bring a pro tour race to Colorado in the near future. We had the Coors Classic back in the 80’s but since then haven’t hosted an elite level bike race, while other states have seemingly been working to promote the sport in our absence. Colorado could very well host some of the most challenging riding pro riders could ever expect to encounter: you want to climb high?--then climb Mt. Evans. You want days of endless climbing…how about days of climbing at 6,000+ feet…all day long. Flats…yes we got them too. But one race cannot stand on its own and expect to continue on the support of state and local governments alone, it needs to draw from a growing support for the sport across the country; it needs help from other state Tours to keep the energy and interest growing. Colorado needs the Tour of Missouri just as the Tour of MO needs Colorado (and others) right now. Take a moment and send an email, support your local pro tour event: have a bake sale or something, every little bit helps.

KOM Sprint Starts to Form