karlboss said:
Best thing the Tour of Cali could do is invite South american teams.
Dazed and Confused said:
yep, these things aren't really that hard to figure out.
Since it seems the UCI's edict of making .HC races invite the top 3 ranked teams in the Continental rankings has come to nothing, that's not possible at this time. Utah and Colorado can because they're 2.1-rated, but California as a 2.HC race can only take teams from the top 2 levels, and Continental-ranked teams from the host nation. As a result the only South American team eligible for entry currently has most of its best riders doing the Giro right now. And also, quite a few top South American teams have no UCI status at all, of course.
I think the AToC has been happy in the past with its 16-team limit, of which half are World Tour and you get a decent amount of the national teams in, and also I'm not sure that they'd voluntarily lower the race's official level in order to invite the South Americans, while some races willingly keep their level lower than they could be (Eroica) or have been in the past (Volta) in order to have more freedom of invitations. Being the highest status race in the US counts for something, at .1 it's the same as Utah or Colorado, and while the race is growing I don't see them doing that.
Christian said:
I agree that AToC is overhyped by some people and that there are a probably a lot of things that they could do better regarding the parcours. But on the other hand I think this race has shown a lot of growth since being started in 2006, which is not that long ago. The only race that has grown bigger in less time in the last years would be Strade Bianche IMO, but the two are of course not at all compareable. So I think we should give it some more time and I am sure it will continue to grow and to improve
I think this next couple of years are the make or break times for it. It's grown quickly and carved out its niche; the routes have been improving (returning to the epic fail that is Big Bear last year notwithstanding), I think 2011 with Sierra Road early on was very good as it was steep enough to make differences but not long enough to make them too big to damage racing elsewhere (as opposed to, say, Paris-Nice that year where the long TT meant gaps were too large to be made up on the rest of the course), while the weather intervened and prevented them holding the promising Lake Tahoe stage, which couldn't be helped.
However, it had been propped up a bit in its move to May and golden egg status by the Lance factor, and his crowd, and now those are mostly gone; Lance obviously is now disgraced, guys like Levi don't have a team, Horner's age is catching up and illnesses and injuries are taking longer to get over. The field this year seems weak compared to the last couple of years, however if we get a weaker field of people really gunning for the race over a stronger field of people riding around for form and not taking the race seriously it could still be seen as a positive step. However with the star factor dwindling it's had less opportunity to really drive home that self-serving PR that has always rung false and attracted ridicule from many fans, and I've found the build-up to the race, both on the forum and amongst the fans and sport in general, to be FAR more muted this year than in the last three seasons.
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