Calm and Collected:“I don’t see any Basques here.” Photo: Alsport International
The USA Pro Cycling Challenge—a grueling seven-day road-bike stage race in August that criss-crosses Colorado—took the state by storm last year. And with a penultimate finish atop Boulder’s Flagstaff Mountain this summer, the race promises to draw even more revelers cheering the dudes in tight pants as they whip by at crazy speeds. But did the fans overdo it last year? Joe Lindsey certainly thought so, but Rob Coppolillo thinks he’s nuts. So we let the two duke it out in these pages and left it up to you to decide how you will spectate come August.
Chill Out
The scene on Swan Mountain near Breckenridge in the 2011 USA Pro Cycling Challenge was pretty memorable. There was music, there were costumes, and there were several beers that unconscionably ended up on our windshield rather than inside some fan.
It was an excellent party, but when Ben Jacques-Mayne came by, someone got a little too close in their excitement and knocked him off his bike. He was not at the front of the race in some crucial move like Guiseppe Guerini was on Alpe d’Huez when some asshat tangled his flag in Guerini’s drivetrain and dragged him to a halt. (Guerini still won the stage.)
But Jacques-Mayne was still in the race and the cardinal rule of race-watching is Don’t Interfere With The Race.
Honestly, fan craziness was not much of a concern the first few days of the 2011 USA Pro Cycling Challenge.
But the race really came to life on Independence Pass. George Hincapie scouted the climb the week before the race and recalled thinking, “This is in the middle of nowhere; there won’t be any people here.” Try 20,000. It got bigger after that.
Every racer or director I talked to compared it to the Tour de France, and my own experience told me they weren’t just blowing sunshine. Colorado showed up huge.
But I also want us to show up smart. And I have a theory where we go wrong: like all social commentators, I blame TV.
U.S. fans seem to model themselves on what they see from the Tour de France or, rather, the craziest parts of the Tour. The fans who get the most TV time in the Tour are typically the Basques, identified by the orange flags with white and green stripes. They are the soccer hooligans of bike racing, people. Taking cues from them is like modeling alcohol consumption on spring break at South Padre Island.
The solution is simple: have fun, be crazy. But be responsible; don’t get in the racers’ way. Levi Leipheimer, winner of the inaugural Challenge, has a good rule of thumb for fans running near the racers. Run alongside, never in front. How close can you run? “Far enough that if you reach out your arm you can’t touch us.”
Be loud; get crazy; have fun. By all means, throw as much beer as you want on my rental car; I got the insurance waiver. But when the riders come, don’t be too close.
Joe Lindsey covers pro cycling for Bicycling magazine.
Turn it Up
Behave? Is that what I’m hearing? I’m all for getting the riders to the finish in one piece, but as for toning it down and behaving like model citizens, I must utter a polite, hell no. I say take the Basques as a baseline… and then have a bump, down some Red Bull, and ratchet your game up three notches further.
The riders should be unmolested in their heroics, but they should also be left thinking, What is wrong with these people?!
We may not have the cycling tradition in this country of the Dutch, French or Italians, but then we’ve got the world’s biggest rollercoasters, the Bill of Rights and we’re 2-0 in world wars. We’ve got a standard to uphold here, people.
I say tattoo your face, paint your body cerulean blue, dig up your costumes, call your buds, ditch work, taunt your boss, mail-order a vuvuzela (or three), renew that psychotropic drug prescription, dust off the long-since-retired mania for sports, and head to your favorite stage finish. And make a scene. A loud, jubilant, original, memorable, what’s-France-got-on-us gong show of roadside bipolarism gone horribly awry, and let it all hang out.
The Flagstaff stage is the most easily accessible spot for this year’s event, so I’ll plan on seeing you there. (Further, I recall a meeting with city planners, more than a decade ago, in which they said, rather too emphatically, there will never be another bike race on the hallowed hill above Boulder.) Let’s turn that frickin’ pile of rock into a 1,500-foot tower of Burning Man meets Mad Max, with a few manorexic Lycra warriors thrown in just to give us a reason to
do it.
Obey the few rules that matter—no flamethrowers, no knocking the boys off their bikes, no picking wildflowers—but beyond that, enjoy the hell out of yourself. And let’s make sure the riders go to bed that night thinking, What is wrong with these people?
The answer? Nothing. Nothing at all.
Rob Coppolillo blogs at ElevationOutdoors.com. He used to race bikes, in front of vast crowds numbering in the tens of people.
