Stage 5: Breckenridge - Pikes Peak, 178km
GPM:
Hoosier Pass (cat.2) 10,0km @ 4,5%
Wilkerson Pass (cat.3) 1,8km @ 5,5%
Crystal Creek Reservoir (cat.2) 9,3km @ 6,5%
Pikes Peak (HC) 17,0km @ 8,1%
OK, time for an absolute peak performance, as we start challenging the UCI’s acceptability limits, with a monster mountain stage that despite being more or less Unipuerto is one of the most brutal stages ever seen at this level, thanks to the combination of extreme altitude and just the sheer monster difficulty of the mountaintop finish.
We start at over 3000m of altitude already, in the ski town of Breckenridge. This town was settled by prospectors and named after one of their party back in 1859, and has a permanent population of around 5.000, although the town absolutely swells to many times this size every winter with the colossal population influx of tourists to the local ski resorts. It was founded to serve miners and speculators travelling across the Continental Divide after the discovery of Gold in Pikes Peak and Idaho Springs. While mining dried up in the early 20th Century, it was replaced in 1961 by the skiing community, as runs were pressed and cut into the hillside and the town swelled once more. It is now the adopted home to a number of America’s winter sports stars, again mostly in the showier and more modern disciplines like freestyle and moguls, but also including skeleton luge racer Katie Uhlaender. But also, somewhat unexpectedly, goth/industrial royalty in the form of Ministry frontman Al Jourgensen, whose family settled in Breckenridge after moving from Cuba in his childhood.
Breckenridge also has a cycling history, thanks largely to the ultra-endurance MTB race, the Breckenridge 100, that takes place every July and includes three large summits across the Continental Divide. Its close proximity to popular stage host Vail meant that it did not appear with any frequency in the Coors Classic, but since the reintroduction of pro racing to Colorado in the early 2010s it has been a common stage host. Stage 5 of the first edition of the USA Pro Cycling Challenge in 2011 finished in the town after a long and gradual uphill false flat from Steamboat Springs with the only major climb of the day right at the start; Elia Viviani won a bunch gallop ahead of Jaime Castañeda, a Colombian sprinter who the finish better suited but just doesn’t have the top end speed of Viviani. The following year it was a stage start only, but another finish came in 2013, in a stage which went from Aspen over Independence Pass and then Hoosier Pass south before finishing with a descent into Breckenridge, being won by Mathias Fränk ahead of Lachlan Morton, with the two opening up a small gap ahead of Peter Sagan and Tejay van Garderen with the remains of an escape group and then the bunch coming in at +44”. 2014 saw an easier stage from Woodland Park, though with the same run-in over Hoosier Pass and then a small hilly circuit around Breckenridge itself, which Laurent Didier won from the break ahead of Janier Acevedo and Rob Britton. 2015 saw a clone of the 2013 stage with Rohan Dennis winning solo, before the Australian doubled up winning a 13,5km ITT around Breckenridge the following day. After the demise of the USAPCC, the Colorado Cycling Classic in 2017 featured a stage which was a circuit race finishing that loop around the town from the 2013-15 USAPCC stages, seeing Alex Howes win the stage ahead of Taylor Eisenhart, in a finish which enabled the latter to take the race lead.
My stage actually starts directly with a climb, the Hoosier Pass ascent which was the main attraction of that 2014 stage. It’s actually not a bad cat.2 climb - the total ascent is 15,4km at 3,6% though the start of this is through the town itself, so we actually depart a couple of kilometres into it and have a neutral zone in the false flat area shown at under 2% on this profile. The last 5km average 6% and the 10,5km that we have average 4,5%, so this is mostly tempo grinding but at least it’s long enough to be noteworthy. It just looks tiny on the profile because of what comes later.
Descending Hoosier Pass takes us into a large altiplano area, a long grassland flat which will be the backdrop for most of our stage and all of the rest of the first half of it at least. This sparsely populated area - the largest urban centre is the town of Fairplay, population of 724 - is nevertheless one of the most famous - sort of - places in all of Colorado. That is because of a fictional small town which has been placed in this basin to recall the childhood of a couple of friends from the foothills west of Denver, which has gone on to worldwide renown and acclaim - this is the South Park Basin, and the eponymous small town was created as a title to one of the most ubiquitous animated series of the last 30 years. Initially a (deliberately) crudely-animated vehicle for sophomoric toilet humour and foul-mouthed arguing that earned the series a counter-cultural popularity, over time the series has developed into an on-the-nose and irreverent satirical show that no culture, self-identity, creed or belief system is above being lampooned by.
This long plateau is broken up only by a cat.3 climb to Wilkerson Pass. And even then probably giving points is generous. A false flat uphill and then downhill follow all the way through Woodland Park - which hosted that stage start in 2014 - to the town of Cascade. Established as a tourist destination in the 1880s, being the best point from which to access Pikes Peak, it was used as a spa town and popular for the beauty of the train ride into the town as much as the fresh air and facilities on arrival, with Cascade Cañon and Falls being particularly popular. Often passengers on said train would be collected at the station and then taken on wagons up to Pikes Peak’s hill station and onward to the summit. However this was rendered obsolete by the establishment of a cog railway from Manitou Springs, and many of the large hotels in Cascade closed in the 1920s. However, one thing that has really helped Cascade stay relevant is the road up to Pikes Peak and its popularity due to the historic significance of the summit. And due to, of course, the most famous thing about the mountain to modern generations: the International Hillclimb.
The highest peak in the Front Range, Pikes Peak takes its name from the explorer Zebulon Pike who was one of the first American settlers to explore it (although he did not reach the summit and the first successful conquering of the peak was 14 years later in 1820). Before Pike’s expedition it was known by the Spanish as ‘El Capitán’ for its position of prominence in the initial range of the Rockies; Pike himself called it “Highest Peak” for rather self-explanatory reasons, but it became known as “Pike’s” in colloquial speech and the name has stuck. The summit also gives its name to the Colorado Gold Rush of the late 1850s and early 1860s, so named because potential speculators travelling west knew they had arrived when the mountains appeared in view, and Pikes Peak would be the first sighting of the Rockies that they would have. The peak has long since been tamed, with cog railways to the summit and, in 1939, a ski resort being built on its slopes, though this would fall into disrepair and close in 1984. Most importantly, though, there was a road.
The Pikes Peak International Hillclimb (or PPIHC for short) is the second longest-running motor race in the US, after the Indianapolis 500 (the Mount Washington Hillclimb predates both, but has not run continuously). It has the same sort of unique position on the motor racing calendar as the Isle of Man TT does in motorcycle racing; it is self-sanctioned and not part of any series, but attracts a wildly diverse field running from rank amateurs through to elite rally and sportscar drivers. It was the brainchild of the entrepreneur Spencer Penrose, who had funded the expanding of the narrow carriage road used to bring tourists from Cascade to the upper reaches of the mountain into what is now the Pikes Peak Highway, and first ran in 1916. Many classes were added over time, with stock cars, motorcycles and also some wild competition in the open class, where entrants were free to make all manner of unregulated modifications to their vehicles specifically targeting the race, in much the same way as no matter what the sportscar calendar consists of, vehicles are designed with Le Mans in mind. The combination of the need for extreme cornering stability along with the oxygen demands on the vehicles at the ever-increasing altitude meant specialised vehicles were created for the PPIHC in a way unique on the American calendar.
Until 1984, the event was largely a provincial affair, but as the decade wore on, Europeans progressively showed more interest in the event, with Michèle Mouton winning the event outright and then an award-winning short film being made about Ari Vatanen’s pursuit of the course record in 1988. Since 2002, the previously all-gravel route had started to be paved following a lawsuit by the Sierra Club against the city of Colorado Springs, under whose jurisdiction the road fell. This was due to the significant damage through erosion that was created by the event as the loose-packed dirt and gravel was spewed down the mountainside by the hundreds upon hundreds of entrants in the hillclimb. The asphalt was laid down on the final section in 2011, which was seen by many as the death of the true spirit of the Peak; the ten minute barrier was broken by Nobuhiro Tajima that same year, and the nine minute barrier soon followed in 2013 at the hands of Sébastien Loeb, who was even closer to the eight minute mark than the nine. In recent years electric vehicles have dominated, due to not suffering in the altitude, and Volkswagen broke the eight minute barrier in the hands of Romain Dumas in 2018. Despite the tarmac being safer to handle on than the loose gravel, the increased speed that has resulted has increased the risk considerably too, and motorcycle racing has been discontinued as of 2021, the same year the new summit complex was opened.
Of course, however, while it was never accessible to the Coors Classic and the Mount Evans hillclimb is the most famous similar type event for cyclists in the region, the enforced paving of the Pikes Peak Highway road has meant that since 2011, it is now available for cycling as well. And this creates a monster. An absolute monster.
Yes - 31km at 6,6%. This is what they call brutal, and it stands up strong against any European climb that I can come up with. In fact, I’ve even gone the Télégraphe+Galibier route and categorised that first first 9km independently, then starting the final climb at the end of the false flat, close to the start of the PPIHC motor race, and even then it’s still quite demonstrably an hors catégorie ascent - being 17km at 8%, and that with a short amount of flat in it. There’s 11km at 9% in the middle (the first part of the section I’ve classified as Pikes Peak) from the first steep ramps after the hillclimb start up to the Devil’s Playground, so that in and of itself would probably merit HC status.
Just for the part that I have categorised, this puts it in the same kind of ballpark as Col de la Madeleine south, Chamrousse via Col Luitel, Blockhaus from Scafa (the steeper route) and the Col de Portet. Except this is at 2000m higher altitude, cresting at over 4200m and providing a challenge even to those well versed in the Latin American péloton and climbing those Colombian and Venezuelan monstrosities like La Línea and Letras. There are very few comparables for the whole climb that are known to racing unless we think of doublets like Télégraphe-Galibier or Sierra Nevada via Monachil. They are like Fuji-San via the Fujinomiya Trail, Doi Inthanon (38km at 6%), Ovit Pass in northern Turkey, Roque de los Muchachos and other such monsters known only to traceurs and cyclotourists. Perhaps Cerro de la Muerte in the Vuelta a Costa Rica is the most likely comparable but even then, it is far more consistent than Pikes Peak.
This one is really going to create some huge gaps. With a climb like this, a Unipuerto stage is sufficient, just like a Mont Ventoux or a Genting Highlands, especially in the field that will be racing this. The climb is so hard it’s going to guarantee time gaps regardless of the lack of previous climbing. And if they ever raced this in real life, we’d be looking at some major gaps. Major gaps.
GPM:
Hoosier Pass (cat.2) 10,0km @ 4,5%
Wilkerson Pass (cat.3) 1,8km @ 5,5%
Crystal Creek Reservoir (cat.2) 9,3km @ 6,5%
Pikes Peak (HC) 17,0km @ 8,1%
OK, time for an absolute peak performance, as we start challenging the UCI’s acceptability limits, with a monster mountain stage that despite being more or less Unipuerto is one of the most brutal stages ever seen at this level, thanks to the combination of extreme altitude and just the sheer monster difficulty of the mountaintop finish.
We start at over 3000m of altitude already, in the ski town of Breckenridge. This town was settled by prospectors and named after one of their party back in 1859, and has a permanent population of around 5.000, although the town absolutely swells to many times this size every winter with the colossal population influx of tourists to the local ski resorts. It was founded to serve miners and speculators travelling across the Continental Divide after the discovery of Gold in Pikes Peak and Idaho Springs. While mining dried up in the early 20th Century, it was replaced in 1961 by the skiing community, as runs were pressed and cut into the hillside and the town swelled once more. It is now the adopted home to a number of America’s winter sports stars, again mostly in the showier and more modern disciplines like freestyle and moguls, but also including skeleton luge racer Katie Uhlaender. But also, somewhat unexpectedly, goth/industrial royalty in the form of Ministry frontman Al Jourgensen, whose family settled in Breckenridge after moving from Cuba in his childhood.
Breckenridge also has a cycling history, thanks largely to the ultra-endurance MTB race, the Breckenridge 100, that takes place every July and includes three large summits across the Continental Divide. Its close proximity to popular stage host Vail meant that it did not appear with any frequency in the Coors Classic, but since the reintroduction of pro racing to Colorado in the early 2010s it has been a common stage host. Stage 5 of the first edition of the USA Pro Cycling Challenge in 2011 finished in the town after a long and gradual uphill false flat from Steamboat Springs with the only major climb of the day right at the start; Elia Viviani won a bunch gallop ahead of Jaime Castañeda, a Colombian sprinter who the finish better suited but just doesn’t have the top end speed of Viviani. The following year it was a stage start only, but another finish came in 2013, in a stage which went from Aspen over Independence Pass and then Hoosier Pass south before finishing with a descent into Breckenridge, being won by Mathias Fränk ahead of Lachlan Morton, with the two opening up a small gap ahead of Peter Sagan and Tejay van Garderen with the remains of an escape group and then the bunch coming in at +44”. 2014 saw an easier stage from Woodland Park, though with the same run-in over Hoosier Pass and then a small hilly circuit around Breckenridge itself, which Laurent Didier won from the break ahead of Janier Acevedo and Rob Britton. 2015 saw a clone of the 2013 stage with Rohan Dennis winning solo, before the Australian doubled up winning a 13,5km ITT around Breckenridge the following day. After the demise of the USAPCC, the Colorado Cycling Classic in 2017 featured a stage which was a circuit race finishing that loop around the town from the 2013-15 USAPCC stages, seeing Alex Howes win the stage ahead of Taylor Eisenhart, in a finish which enabled the latter to take the race lead.
My stage actually starts directly with a climb, the Hoosier Pass ascent which was the main attraction of that 2014 stage. It’s actually not a bad cat.2 climb - the total ascent is 15,4km at 3,6% though the start of this is through the town itself, so we actually depart a couple of kilometres into it and have a neutral zone in the false flat area shown at under 2% on this profile. The last 5km average 6% and the 10,5km that we have average 4,5%, so this is mostly tempo grinding but at least it’s long enough to be noteworthy. It just looks tiny on the profile because of what comes later.
Descending Hoosier Pass takes us into a large altiplano area, a long grassland flat which will be the backdrop for most of our stage and all of the rest of the first half of it at least. This sparsely populated area - the largest urban centre is the town of Fairplay, population of 724 - is nevertheless one of the most famous - sort of - places in all of Colorado. That is because of a fictional small town which has been placed in this basin to recall the childhood of a couple of friends from the foothills west of Denver, which has gone on to worldwide renown and acclaim - this is the South Park Basin, and the eponymous small town was created as a title to one of the most ubiquitous animated series of the last 30 years. Initially a (deliberately) crudely-animated vehicle for sophomoric toilet humour and foul-mouthed arguing that earned the series a counter-cultural popularity, over time the series has developed into an on-the-nose and irreverent satirical show that no culture, self-identity, creed or belief system is above being lampooned by.
This long plateau is broken up only by a cat.3 climb to Wilkerson Pass. And even then probably giving points is generous. A false flat uphill and then downhill follow all the way through Woodland Park - which hosted that stage start in 2014 - to the town of Cascade. Established as a tourist destination in the 1880s, being the best point from which to access Pikes Peak, it was used as a spa town and popular for the beauty of the train ride into the town as much as the fresh air and facilities on arrival, with Cascade Cañon and Falls being particularly popular. Often passengers on said train would be collected at the station and then taken on wagons up to Pikes Peak’s hill station and onward to the summit. However this was rendered obsolete by the establishment of a cog railway from Manitou Springs, and many of the large hotels in Cascade closed in the 1920s. However, one thing that has really helped Cascade stay relevant is the road up to Pikes Peak and its popularity due to the historic significance of the summit. And due to, of course, the most famous thing about the mountain to modern generations: the International Hillclimb.
The highest peak in the Front Range, Pikes Peak takes its name from the explorer Zebulon Pike who was one of the first American settlers to explore it (although he did not reach the summit and the first successful conquering of the peak was 14 years later in 1820). Before Pike’s expedition it was known by the Spanish as ‘El Capitán’ for its position of prominence in the initial range of the Rockies; Pike himself called it “Highest Peak” for rather self-explanatory reasons, but it became known as “Pike’s” in colloquial speech and the name has stuck. The summit also gives its name to the Colorado Gold Rush of the late 1850s and early 1860s, so named because potential speculators travelling west knew they had arrived when the mountains appeared in view, and Pikes Peak would be the first sighting of the Rockies that they would have. The peak has long since been tamed, with cog railways to the summit and, in 1939, a ski resort being built on its slopes, though this would fall into disrepair and close in 1984. Most importantly, though, there was a road.
The Pikes Peak International Hillclimb (or PPIHC for short) is the second longest-running motor race in the US, after the Indianapolis 500 (the Mount Washington Hillclimb predates both, but has not run continuously). It has the same sort of unique position on the motor racing calendar as the Isle of Man TT does in motorcycle racing; it is self-sanctioned and not part of any series, but attracts a wildly diverse field running from rank amateurs through to elite rally and sportscar drivers. It was the brainchild of the entrepreneur Spencer Penrose, who had funded the expanding of the narrow carriage road used to bring tourists from Cascade to the upper reaches of the mountain into what is now the Pikes Peak Highway, and first ran in 1916. Many classes were added over time, with stock cars, motorcycles and also some wild competition in the open class, where entrants were free to make all manner of unregulated modifications to their vehicles specifically targeting the race, in much the same way as no matter what the sportscar calendar consists of, vehicles are designed with Le Mans in mind. The combination of the need for extreme cornering stability along with the oxygen demands on the vehicles at the ever-increasing altitude meant specialised vehicles were created for the PPIHC in a way unique on the American calendar.
Until 1984, the event was largely a provincial affair, but as the decade wore on, Europeans progressively showed more interest in the event, with Michèle Mouton winning the event outright and then an award-winning short film being made about Ari Vatanen’s pursuit of the course record in 1988. Since 2002, the previously all-gravel route had started to be paved following a lawsuit by the Sierra Club against the city of Colorado Springs, under whose jurisdiction the road fell. This was due to the significant damage through erosion that was created by the event as the loose-packed dirt and gravel was spewed down the mountainside by the hundreds upon hundreds of entrants in the hillclimb. The asphalt was laid down on the final section in 2011, which was seen by many as the death of the true spirit of the Peak; the ten minute barrier was broken by Nobuhiro Tajima that same year, and the nine minute barrier soon followed in 2013 at the hands of Sébastien Loeb, who was even closer to the eight minute mark than the nine. In recent years electric vehicles have dominated, due to not suffering in the altitude, and Volkswagen broke the eight minute barrier in the hands of Romain Dumas in 2018. Despite the tarmac being safer to handle on than the loose gravel, the increased speed that has resulted has increased the risk considerably too, and motorcycle racing has been discontinued as of 2021, the same year the new summit complex was opened.
Of course, however, while it was never accessible to the Coors Classic and the Mount Evans hillclimb is the most famous similar type event for cyclists in the region, the enforced paving of the Pikes Peak Highway road has meant that since 2011, it is now available for cycling as well. And this creates a monster. An absolute monster.
Yes - 31km at 6,6%. This is what they call brutal, and it stands up strong against any European climb that I can come up with. In fact, I’ve even gone the Télégraphe+Galibier route and categorised that first first 9km independently, then starting the final climb at the end of the false flat, close to the start of the PPIHC motor race, and even then it’s still quite demonstrably an hors catégorie ascent - being 17km at 8%, and that with a short amount of flat in it. There’s 11km at 9% in the middle (the first part of the section I’ve classified as Pikes Peak) from the first steep ramps after the hillclimb start up to the Devil’s Playground, so that in and of itself would probably merit HC status.
Just for the part that I have categorised, this puts it in the same kind of ballpark as Col de la Madeleine south, Chamrousse via Col Luitel, Blockhaus from Scafa (the steeper route) and the Col de Portet. Except this is at 2000m higher altitude, cresting at over 4200m and providing a challenge even to those well versed in the Latin American péloton and climbing those Colombian and Venezuelan monstrosities like La Línea and Letras. There are very few comparables for the whole climb that are known to racing unless we think of doublets like Télégraphe-Galibier or Sierra Nevada via Monachil. They are like Fuji-San via the Fujinomiya Trail, Doi Inthanon (38km at 6%), Ovit Pass in northern Turkey, Roque de los Muchachos and other such monsters known only to traceurs and cyclotourists. Perhaps Cerro de la Muerte in the Vuelta a Costa Rica is the most likely comparable but even then, it is far more consistent than Pikes Peak.
This one is really going to create some huge gaps. With a climb like this, a Unipuerto stage is sufficient, just like a Mont Ventoux or a Genting Highlands, especially in the field that will be racing this. The climb is so hard it’s going to guarantee time gaps regardless of the lack of previous climbing. And if they ever raced this in real life, we’d be looking at some major gaps. Major gaps.
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