Race Design Thread

[Netserk]

Yeah, a circuit with the same side of Comella and down to the border (so in opposite side of the road as I have them) done twice is more realistic. Very much a traditional format to have the TT use most of the road race circuit.

EDIT: Or did you have a flat route only in mind?

Alternative ITT route

43.3 km, +527 m. Bike ride in Andorra la Vella, Parròquia d'Andorra la Vella

ridewithgps.com

 

[Netserk]

Oh, I forgot an image of the last time a race ended in Andorra la Vella.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Yeah, a circuit with the same side of Comella and down to the border (so in opposite side of the road as I have them) done twice is more realistic. Very much a traditional format to have the TT use most of the road race circuit.

EDIT: Or did you have a flat route only in mind?

Alternative ITT route

43.3 km, +527 m. Bike ride in Andorra la Vella, Parròquia d'Andorra la Vella

ridewithgps.com

I was thinking more like your first suggestion, so there is some uphill in there but it's not like an MTT. Including a climb the size of La Comella in the TT wouldn't be that dissimilar from something like, say, Mount Fløyen in 2017.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 7: Denver - Denver, 64km

Ah yes, it’s an American stage race, so what would it be without a criterium? And what would be a better setting for it than the state’s capital and largest city?

With a city the size and stature of Denver I don’t think it’s really particularly productive to go through the full history of the city like I often do with these routes, since I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the majority of you will be well aware of the Mile High City, but I will add a bit of colour here and there. The official population of Denver is around 700.000, but because of the surrounding urban areas that its growth has absorbed, almost 3.000.000 can be considered natives of the Denver metropolitan area; it is the 19th largest city in the US and sits at the confluence of two rivers just to the east of the Rocky Mountains. The land here was originally designated as territory belonging to the Cheyenne and Arapaho native tribes as part of what was then the western outposts of Kansas, but as was so often the case during US expansion, the discovery of gold in the nearby mountains in 1858 (often characterised specifically as the Pikes Peak Gold Rush, although Pikes Peak itself is some way south) meant that this was swiftly reversed and speculators descended upon the region; Montana City was established on the site of present-day Denver as a mining town, though it was short-lived and soon replaced by neighbouring Auraria. Land speculators from Kansas established an outpost at the river confluence in order to try to undermine the upstart town and named it Denver after the then-governor of Kansas in an attempt to curry favour (unaware that he had resigned in the intervening period since they set out to establish the city), and set it up as a frontier town offering drink and gambling to miners and speculators and integrating it into wagon and eventually rail routes.

When the land that would eventually become Colorado was definitively won by defeating the natives in the Colorado War and subsequently was defined as a territory of the union, Denver was chosen as its capital owing to its terminus status for overland travel. The city continued to grow rapidly and attract migrants until the price of silver crashed in 1893, but by then it was the second largest city east of Nebraska and in what we would now know as the Mountain and Pacific time zones.

Being one of the major metropoles of the region and one of the few examples in America of a largest city also being the state capitol, unsurprisingly Denver is the centre for sport in Colorado, and one of 13 cities that have at least one team in all four major sports leagues of the US - although it is the smallest such city. The oldest is the Denver Broncos, the NFL team which started out in the AFL in the 1960s and has won four of its eight Superbowl appearances, with its heyday being in the late 90s with John Elway as the figurehead. The next oldest is the Denver Nuggets from the NBA, originally founded in the ABA in 1967 as the Larks, but renamed to the present name in 1974, winning their first title in franchise history as recently as 2023. The other sports followed in the 1990s, with the Colorado Rockies being added as an expansion franchise in 1993, and then the struggling Quebec Nordiques being relocated to the city in 1995. Initially the team was to be called the Rocky Mountain Extreme but thankfully this was nixed and replaced by the more reasonable Colorado Avalanche, known as the ‘Avs’ colloquially. The refusal of Eric Lindros to play for Quebec meant they got away with an absolute haul of talents and prospects in a trade that meant that they had essentially a fully-fledged championship team sent to them from the word go, winning their first Stanley Cup in their first season in Denver, and winning two more since. The city also hosts the MLS team the Colorado Rapids, one of the founding members of the league.

In addition to this there are a host of college sports teams, most notably the Denver Pioneers, and also for many years there was a CART (and subsequently CCWS) race held in the city, initially a downtown street circuit in the early 1990s, then a temporary circuit laid out in the car park of the Pepsi Center (now Ball Arena). It was also the host city for the first two UFC events back in 1993-4; it was also originally awarded the 1976 Winter Olympics but eventually this award was rescinded after voters rejected a public-funding ballot. The list of people from Denver is too long to get into, but we should probably mention a few of the cyclists, right?

Ron Kiefel was the first rider of major note to come out of the city, as a few 80s riders originated from here as the Coors Classic/Red Zinger Race gave them a route to prominence; Kiefel won a bronze medal in the TTT at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, then turned pro with 7-Eleven in 1985 and in fact became the first American Grand Tour stage winner at the Giro that year, winning a transitional medium-mountain stage to Perugia. That would be his career best, although he won several stages of the Coors Classic and the Tour de Trump. Greg “H-Bomb” Herbold, a hall of fame mountain biker, is also from Denver, as is former national champion Gregory Daniel, who took a couple of years at the World Tour with Trek-Segafredo. But - sadly - the best known Denverite to world cycling is a former Dauphiné stage victor and winner of the Route du Sud who also won a number of smaller races in the US but is now best known as the sport’s most prominent snake oil salesman, Jonathan Vaughters.

Self-serving ***

As the capital and metropole of the USA’s most cycling-supportive state, Denver has played host to a slew of races over the years, often hosting the Coors Classic and its successors. Stages in the city tended to be circuit races, usually flat ones, as the city’s position is such that this is more or less inevitable; although the urban sprawl extends out to the foothills of the Rockies, the fact of the matter is that downtown Denver is some way removed so you would have to do an out-and-back in the manner of the 2012 London Olympics course to make a Denver stage too topographically interesting, and even then it would be a long and flat run-in. 1983 saw an interesting development on this format with a split stage, an ITT and a criterium, and similar formats were used in future years before the race spluttered out in the late 80s, having potentially grown a bit too big with its detours to California and Hawaii and no longer being able to afford to shut down a major metropolitan centre for the race.

When the USA Pro Cycling Challenge was introduced, however, part of the promotion was taking the race to the people, rather than vice versa, and the final stage ended with circuits of downtown Denver. Elia Viviani gifted the sprint win to teammate Daniel Oss who had been leading him out, as the Liquigas train was so dominant in the race. The following year a 15km ITT took place in the city as the final stage of the race, which was dominated by the US riders; Taylor Phinney won the stage, but Christian Vande Velde crucially overhauled his 9-second deficit to Levi Leipheimer to snare the GC on the final day, with Tejay van Garderen also vaulting ahead of his elder compatriot on the day as well. A near identical course was used as a sprint circuit the following year, linking up to 15,1km for eight laps, which with a neutral zone made for a 117km final stage. Peter Sagan won the sprint and though the circuit idea would be dropped, sprints in Denver were reinstated as the way to end the race until it ran out of steam, as almost every short stage race seems to think that it deserves a Champs Elysées parade stage for reasons I don’t really get. Alex Howes - another Denver native - won a short Boulder to Denver stage in 2014, and John Murphy won a Golden to Denver stage in 2015.

When the Colorado Cycling Classic was inaugurated in 2017 as a smaller version of its predecessor, they experimented with the out-and-back Denver idea to make a tougher stage, with this being the result. As you can see, the mountains are a long way from the finish, but nevertheless it did prove eventful for the GC, with a two man breakaway of Sergei Țvetcov and Manuel Senni staying away by almost a minute, with the Romanian taking the stage and his Italian fellow fugitive the GC. This would be followed by a second Denver to Denver stage on the final day, a similar circuit to that used in 2013, with Mihkel Räim winning a sprint. A somewhat more convincing Denver medium mountain stage was used in 2018, but it was less effective from a GC point of view as the group pulled back the break and Pascal Eenkhoorn won a sprint of a reduced bunch, before again a circuit race on the final day which was won by Travis McCabe. In the women’s version of the race, commenced in 2018, Jennifer Valente won a crit stage and Kendall Ryan the road stage (though this was only 55km in length); after the men’s race was cancelled the women’s race lasted one more year, with Chloe Dygert winning comprehensively in 2019.

Kendall Ryan wins in Denver in 2018

Although these kinds of short circuit stages aren’t seen commonly in UCI accredited stage races, we did used to see them a lot in the Open days - the Peace Race would include them and the Coors Classic did, and in races like the HTV Cup we see them to this day, frequently padding race length with crits and short circuits. And there can be no denying that that type of racing is highly characteristic and traditional in the American domestic calendar so it is not out of character to include. The stage that I have placed here is simply a pure criterium as mentioned - as this is the first day after the rest day it should be high speed antics, and I might even suggest having it take place in the evening for effect, although with the 2023 Vuelta TTT chaos in mind, that may be a bad idea. The stage consists of 30 laps of a 2,1km circuit (well, slightly over, hence the total being 64km rather than 63km) which is at the heart of Denver’s administrative district and surrounded by buildings of historical importance. It’s also little more than a classic American four-corner crit, of the kind that use wide roads and 90º square corners and come with blistering pace and slipstreaming start to finish. It’s not quite a pure four-corner crit, though, thanks to the curves on West Colfax Avenue to navigate around the Voorhies Memorial.

The final sequence of curves

State Capitol Building

The start and finish is outside the State Capitol, and we could have just circled Civic Center Park, but instead we go an extra block to the south, as this enables us to take 13th Avenue, passing between the Denver Art Museum and the Clyfford Still Museum opposite it, as well as passing the Center for Colorado Women’s History, which is at the opposite end of the architectural spectrum, being a classic colonial-style building as opposed to the striking, pointy modern architecture of the Art sector. We then return to Colfax Avenue to loop around the Voorhies Memorial, the Sadie Likens memorial (my confusing brain mixed Civil War philanthropist Sadie Likens with teenage torture and murder victim Sylvia Likens and thought this was a rather unusual memorial to house in a position among buildings of civic significance!) and the Pioneer Monument Fountain.

Civic Center Park. Finish at bottom right, direction approaching camera

This will be a sprint stage - obviously - which will bring riders back into the race after the rest day somewhat gently. I can have mercy sometimes. After all, they just had a long TT and a 4200m MTF. American racing features a lot of criterium racing, these stages were part of the old Coors Classic, featuring for example in Grand Junction in 1982, Denver and North Boulder Park in 1983, Sacramento in 1988, and Reno in 1987 and 1988 - so I felt that while they mightn’t be the most televisually exciting spectacle, they are very much part of making this feel like a ‘true’ American road race, something that gives the spirit of American racing to give the race something of its own character rather than being, as too many attempts at reviving American racing have been since the original Coors Classic went under, a facsimile of European races on American roads.

 

[QueenStagiaire]

Stage 7: Denver - Denver, 64km

Ah yes, it’s an American stage race, so what would it be without a criterium? And what would be a better setting for it than the state’s capital and largest city?

With a city the size and stature of Denver I don’t think it’s really particularly productive to go through the full history of the city like I often do with these routes, since I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the majority of you will be well aware of the Mile High City, but I will add a bit of colour here and there. The official population of Denver is around 700.000, but because of the surrounding urban areas that its growth has absorbed, almost 3.000.000 can be considered natives of the Denver metropolitan area; it is the 19th largest city in the US and sits at the confluence of two rivers just to the east of the Rocky Mountains. The land here was originally designated as territory belonging to the Cheyenne and Arapaho native tribes as part of what was then the western outposts of Kansas, but as was so often the case during US expansion, the discovery of gold in the nearby mountains in 1858 (often characterised specifically as the Pikes Peak Gold Rush, although Pikes Peak itself is some way south) meant that this was swiftly reversed and speculators descended upon the region; Montana City was established on the site of present-day Denver as a mining town, though it was short-lived and soon replaced by neighbouring Auraria. Land speculators from Kansas established an outpost at the river confluence in order to try to undermine the upstart town and named it Denver after the then-governor of Kansas in an attempt to curry favour (unaware that he had resigned in the intervening period since they set out to establish the city), and set it up as a frontier town offering drink and gambling to miners and speculators and integrating it into wagon and eventually rail routes.

When the land that would eventually become Colorado was definitively won by defeating the natives in the Colorado War and subsequently was defined as a territory of the union, Denver was chosen as its capital owing to its terminus status for overland travel. The city continued to grow rapidly and attract migrants until the price of silver crashed in 1893, but by then it was the second largest city east of Nebraska and in what we would now know as the Mountain and Pacific time zones.

Being one of the major metropoles of the region and one of the few examples in America of a largest city also being the state capitol, unsurprisingly Denver is the centre for sport in Colorado, and one of 13 cities that have at least one team in all four major sports leagues of the US - although it is the smallest such city. The oldest is the Denver Broncos, the NFL team which started out in the AFL in the 1960s and has won four of its eight Superbowl appearances, with its heyday being in the late 90s with John Elway as the figurehead. The next oldest is the Denver Nuggets from the NBA, originally founded in the ABA in 1967 as the Larks, but renamed to the present name in 1974, winning their first title in franchise history as recently as 2023. The other sports followed in the 1990s, with the Colorado Rockies being added as an expansion franchise in 1993, and then the struggling Quebec Nordiques being relocated to the city in 1995. Initially the team was to be called the Rocky Mountain Extreme but thankfully this was nixed and replaced by the more reasonable Colorado Avalanche, known as the ‘Avs’ colloquially. The refusal of Eric Lindros to play for Quebec meant they got away with an absolute haul of talents and prospects in a trade that meant that they had essentially a fully-fledged championship team sent to them from the word go, winning their first Stanley Cup in their first season in Denver, and winning two more since. The city also hosts the MLS team the Colorado Rapids, one of the founding members of the league.

In addition to this there are a host of college sports teams, most notably the Denver Pioneers, and also for many years there was a CART (and subsequently CCWS) race held in the city, initially a downtown street circuit in the early 1990s, then a temporary circuit laid out in the car park of the Pepsi Center (now Ball Arena). It was also the host city for the first two UFC events back in 1993-4; it was also originally awarded the 1976 Winter Olympics but eventually this award was rescinded after voters rejected a public-funding ballot. The list of people from Denver is too long to get into, but we should probably mention a few of the cyclists, right?

Ron Kiefel was the first rider of major note to come out of the city, as a few 80s riders originated from here as the Coors Classic/Red Zinger Race gave them a route to prominence; Kiefel won a bronze medal in the TTT at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, then turned pro with 7-Eleven in 1985 and in fact became the first American Grand Tour stage winner at the Giro that year, winning a transitional medium-mountain stage to Perugia. That would be his career best, although he won several stages of the Coors Classic and the Tour de Trump. Greg “H-Bomb” Herbold, a hall of fame mountain biker, is also from Denver, as is former national champion Gregory Daniel, who took a couple of years at the World Tour with Trek-Segafredo. But - sadly - the best known Denverite to world cycling is a former Dauphiné stage victor and winner of the Route du Sud who also won a number of smaller races in the US but is now best known as the sport’s most prominent snake oil salesman, Jonathan Vaughters.

Self-serving ***

As the capital and metropole of the USA’s most cycling-supportive state, Denver has played host to a slew of races over the years, often hosting the Coors Classic and its successors. Stages in the city tended to be circuit races, usually flat ones, as the city’s position is such that this is more or less inevitable; although the urban sprawl extends out to the foothills of the Rockies, the fact of the matter is that downtown Denver is some way removed so you would have to do an out-and-back in the manner of the 2012 London Olympics course to make a Denver stage too topographically interesting, and even then it would be a long and flat run-in. 1983 saw an interesting development on this format with a split stage, an ITT and a criterium, and similar formats were used in future years before the race spluttered out in the late 80s, having potentially grown a bit too big with its detours to California and Hawaii and no longer being able to afford to shut down a major metropolitan centre for the race.

When the USA Pro Cycling Challenge was introduced, however, part of the promotion was taking the race to the people, rather than vice versa, and the final stage ended with circuits of downtown Denver. Elia Viviani gifted the sprint win to teammate Daniel Oss who had been leading him out, as the Liquigas train was so dominant in the race. The following year a 15km ITT took place in the city as the final stage of the race, which was dominated by the US riders; Taylor Phinney won the stage, but Christian Vande Velde crucially overhauled his 9-second deficit to Levi Leipheimer to snare the GC on the final day, with Tejay van Garderen also vaulting ahead of his elder compatriot on the day as well. A near identical course was used as a sprint circuit the following year, linking up to 15,1km for eight laps, which with a neutral zone made for a 117km final stage. Peter Sagan won the sprint and though the circuit idea would be dropped, sprints in Denver were reinstated as the way to end the race until it ran out of steam, as almost every short stage race seems to think that it deserves a Champs Elysées parade stage for reasons I don’t really get. Alex Howes - another Denver native - won a short Boulder to Denver stage in 2014, and John Murphy won a Golden to Denver stage in 2015.

When the Colorado Cycling Classic was inaugurated in 2017 as a smaller version of its predecessor, they experimented with the out-and-back Denver idea to make a tougher stage, with this being the result. As you can see, the mountains are a long way from the finish, but nevertheless it did prove eventful for the GC, with a two man breakaway of Sergei Țvetcov and Manuel Senni staying away by almost a minute, with the Romanian taking the stage and his Italian fellow fugitive the GC. This would be followed by a second Denver to Denver stage on the final day, a similar circuit to that used in 2013, with Mihkel Räim winning a sprint. A somewhat more convincing Denver medium mountain stage was used in 2018, but it was less effective from a GC point of view as the group pulled back the break and Pascal Eenkhoorn won a sprint of a reduced bunch, before again a circuit race on the final day which was won by Travis McCabe. In the women’s version of the race, commenced in 2018, Jennifer Valente won a crit stage and Kendall Ryan the road stage (though this was only 55km in length); after the men’s race was cancelled the women’s race lasted one more year, with Chloe Dygert winning comprehensively in 2019.

Kendall Ryan wins in Denver in 2018

Although these kinds of short circuit stages aren’t seen commonly in UCI accredited stage races, we did used to see them a lot in the Open days - the Peace Race would include them and the Coors Classic did, and in races like the HTV Cup we see them to this day, frequently padding race length with crits and short circuits. And there can be no denying that that type of racing is highly characteristic and traditional in the American domestic calendar so it is not out of character to include. The stage that I have placed here is simply a pure criterium as mentioned - as this is the first day after the rest day it should be high speed antics, and I might even suggest having it take place in the evening for effect, although with the 2023 Vuelta TTT chaos in mind, that may be a bad idea. The stage consists of 30 laps of a 2,1km circuit (well, slightly over, hence the total being 64km rather than 63km) which is at the heart of Denver’s administrative district and surrounded by buildings of historical importance. It’s also little more than a classic American four-corner crit, of the kind that use wide roads and 90º square corners and come with blistering pace and slipstreaming start to finish. It’s not quite a pure four-corner crit, though, thanks to the curves on West Colfax Avenue to navigate around the Voorhies Memorial.

The final sequence of curves

State Capitol Building

The start and finish is outside the State Capitol, and we could have just circled Civic Center Park, but instead we go an extra block to the south, as this enables us to take 13th Avenue, passing between the Denver Art Museum and the Clyfford Still Museum opposite it, as well as passing the Center for Colorado Women’s History, which is at the opposite end of the architectural spectrum, being a classic colonial-style building as opposed to the striking, pointy modern architecture of the Art sector. We then return to Colfax Avenue to loop around the Voorhies Memorial, the Sadie Likens memorial (my confusing brain mixed Civil War philanthropist Sadie Likens with teenage torture and murder victim Sylvia Likens and thought this was a rather unusual memorial to house in a position among buildings of civic significance!) and the Pioneer Monument Fountain.

Civic Center Park. Finish at bottom right, direction approaching camera

This will be a sprint stage - obviously - which will bring riders back into the race after the rest day somewhat gently. I can have mercy sometimes. After all, they just had a long TT and a 4200m MTF. American racing features a lot of criterium racing, these stages were part of the old Coors Classic, featuring for example in Grand Junction in 1982, Denver and North Boulder Park in 1983, Sacramento in 1988, and Reno in 1987 and 1988 - so I felt that while they mightn’t be the most televisually exciting spectacle, they are very much part of making this feel like a ‘true’ American road race, something that gives the spirit of American racing to give the race something of its own character rather than being, as too many attempts at reviving American racing have been since the original Coors Classic went under, a facsimile of European races on American roads.

Richard Plugge approves.

 

[Samu Cuenca]

Surely that JV photo should come with a warning.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Surely that JV photo should come with a warning.

Netserk has failed to use NSFL tags for images in this thread twice in the last few days. Unless you mean the sartorial choices, in which case more fool you for expecting JV to not look like an absolute tool.

 

[Netserk]

Surely that JV photo should come with a warning.

Inline spoiler tags are to be advised:

 

[Max Rockatansky]

I mean, after the Ponferrada TT they turned down I can't see the UCI ever allowing it and we'd probably end up going back to the circuits version of the Worlds ITT from back in the Madrid-Stuttgart-Varese-Mendrisio days, but I can't say it wouldn't be really cool, and Envalira is hardly a monster climb, the power guys can definitely grind it out.

The altitude would be really interesting too.

Reminds me a bit of an itt in the Giro 93.

Envalira has 15k over 5%, 5k at 6,8% and 1k at 9,3%.
For Sestriere it's 12,1k over 5%, 5k at 6,3% and 1k at 7,9%.

Sestriere was 96 minutes for the winner Indurain. With 19 stages in his legs.

Nice one.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 8: Superior - Superior, 170km

GPM:
The Wall (cat.3)

When I decided I was going to do a Tour of Colorado, this instantly became the most important inclusion. In fact, I think this was the biggest omission and the main thing that hurt the USA Pro Cycling Challenge from ever truly adopting the support and attention that the Coors Classic once had had. Because this was the most obvious and perfect link to the past that they could possibly have incorporated into the race. It’s so simple, so effective and so easy to implement that it was a great disappointment not to see. This is something which is more or less ingrained into American cycling as part of their history, the nearest thing American cycling has to the icons of the Classics (as opposed to the big mountaintops), those sites that are part of cycling 101 - you know the ones, the Carrefour de l’Arbre, the Koppenberg, the Muur van Geraardsbergen, the Poggio di Sanremo, the Mur de Huy, the Cauberg and so on. Yes, this was part of a much smaller scene back in the day, but it’s part of the iconography of that scene in the same way as the Steiler Wand von Meerane was in the Eastern Bloc or Kiddevej is in Denmark. This is the legendary, renowned Morgul-Bismarck Loop.

The Morgul-Bismarck Loop is located so close to major urban centres in the likes of Denver and Boulder that it is very easily accessible, but it’s also away from major thoroughfares enough to be able to stay part of US cycling culture over 30 years after the fall of the original Coors Classic, as one of the most popular routes to ride for casual cyclists and as a training ride for many. This 21 kilometre loop is a hilly, undulating route which, in all reality, probably isn’t that likely to be anything like as decisive in modern cycling as it was back in the original run of the race, but it is nevertheless such an icon that it was always going to be an essential inclusion for me. The course likely looks somewhat different to the unspoiled battleground of the 80s, with this article bewailing how that landscape has given way to “scraped, naked hills” as the land has becoming increasingly close to the urban sprawl as Denver’s urban area continues to expand.

Historically the course has been a little shorter than the route that I have used, because back in the day the péloton was a mixed pro/am bunch and frequently it would be 7 laps with a hilltop finish at The Wall. I have elected not to have the HTF this time, and have an extra lap to reflect the stronger péloton. Winners on the Morgul-Bismarck Loop have included Viktor Demidenko, back in the days when the Soviets would come and send strong teams, as depicted so iconically in American Flyers, Alexei Grewal, Chris Carmichael and 12-time Giro d’Italia stage winner Paolo Rosola. The circuit was the original choice for the 1986 World Championships when Colorado bid to host, and Coors Classic race director Mike Aisner pushed hard for the circuit to be selected for the Championships, but politics prevented this and the bid was amended to the Colorado Springs circuit eventually chosen. From 1987 onward, the stage was revised to more closely reflect what I have here, with an extra lap, so these stages might offer a better reflection of what we can expect, but I would suggest that the most likely outcome for this one, being so deep into the race, is either a baroudeur’s stage for the breakaway, or a reduced sprint or final lap shoot-out.

The top of The Wall, finish of the Morgul-Bismark one-day race on the US national calendar. Here we see Flavia Oliveira win the women’s race in 2014

The Wall as it appeared in 1986

The main reason I think this is the most likely outcome is that the changes in tech in the last 30 years as well as the increased professionalism of the péloton has meant that races stay together much longer nowadays; The Wall is not actually that difficult an obstacle if you just look at its raw stats; according to VeloViewer it amounts to 2,2km at 4,1% - although as you can see from the profile there, it’s a pretty inconsistent ascent, and the second half is much steeper; the last 800m is at something approaching 8% and includes the toughest ramp, with 80m exceeding 14% and a maximum of 18%. This ought to be enough to allow for some separation but the fact remains that the summit is 15,3km from the end of the lap so allowing for some tactical racing on the remainder of the circuit. The Wall is not the only obstacle on the course, it’s just the most famous. There is also The Hump, a short ramp on McCaslin right at the start of the circuit which gets up to 8%, but is overall around a kilometre at 4-5%, and was the first part of the loop to become infiltrated by modern development. It was tougher before, but reprofiling of the roads to account for the larger amount of road traffic has resulted in it becoming shallower and wider.

However, part of the joy of the Morgul-Bismark Loop was that, as attested by former Giro stage winner and Coors Classic ever-present Ron Kiefel, it was a circuit that nearly any type of rider could look to have hopes on. Strong one-day riders and classics men still had a chance; the only type that was precluded was sprinters, owing to the finish being at the top of The Wall. With the finish back in Superior, even they are added to the list of options. It is much missed by many of the adherents of US cycling’s golden age; people like Kiefel and Davis Phinney musing on the lost beauty of the course and the way that the massive increase in population and urban sprawl has encroached onto the circuit, meaning that although it is far from off-limits to recreational cyclists (and indeed wide shoulders and cycle paths have been included in the part that runs through the now larger urban part of the course to accommodate them), the massive uptick in vehicular traffic through these roads has robbed the loop of much of its tranquility and appeal to the Colorado cycling population, and that’s a real shame. It remains a popular ride for nostalgia and tradition, but the Morgul-Bismark of the 1980s is almost as lost as the symbolism of having US home hero Greg Lemond chasing a four-man Soviet attack and sprinting against Yuri Barinov at the top of The Wall.

The nearest thing we can give the world to the Morgul-Bismark Loop of old is a closed circuit race among the pros of the world and domestic péloton. That will see us closing the roads to regular traffic, and given today’s Continental Pros are the equivalent of yesteryear’s elite Amateurs (especially in the Eastern Bloc where the “amateurs” were pro in all but name), we would likely have an equivalent péloton with some top teams and some domestic Contis. It won’t be quite the icon of American cycling that the race was in the 1980s… but it’s as close as we can get it, and that’s worth something at least.

 

[Samu Cuenca]

It's been a while since I last posted a race in this thread. I've had some ideas for a second TdFF avec Samu and a third Deutschland Tour, but I never came around to finish them. Maybe I will complete them one day, but for now I've moved on to a different project.

It wasn't long ago that the Austrian racing scene was in "shambles". The Österreich-Rundfahrt/Tour of Austria has fortunately returned, and both the GP Vorarlberg and the Kirschblütenrennen in Wels now have UCI level status. The Oberösterreich-Rundfahrt and parts of the Tour of the Alps obviously also takes place in Austria.

But if we look at the women's side of the sport, there are no UCI races at all. There are of course multiple Austrian amateur/sportive/Gran Fondo events as well as a yearly Rad-Bundesliga, but I think the country and its riders and fans deserve a bit more.

The Österreich-Rundfahrt has never had a women's equivalent, and it seem the closest it's got may have been two time WC ITT medalist Christiane Soeder riding the final ITT of the 2009 race out of competition. However there has been at least one recent attempt to organise a stage race with an international field.

The Sportland Niederösterreich Womens|Kids Tour, with a combined elite/junior race and a U17 girls/U15 boys race, was originally supposed to be held for the first time in 2020, but it got cancelled due to the pandemic. It then ran in both 2021 and 22 before it was cancelled again last year. It is on the calendar for June 2024, but I don't know how likely it is to actually take place.

The race has so far been dominated by Polish riders. Aurela Nerlo was the inaugural champion and Daria Pikulik was victorious the following year. UAE's Karolina Kumięga also won a stage in 2021, while Katharina Fox is the only rider who won stages in both editions.

The '21 race also holds the honour of having been Antonia Niedermaier's first ever stage race. She led the youth classification during it, but one bad day meant she finished well behind in the end. Some of the other current young/up-and-coming Austrian, Czech, German, Luxembourgish, Polish and Swiss riders have also ridden the race.

Photo from the podium ceremony after the opening ITT in 2021 with Karolina Karasiewicz in blue, Kumięga in yellow, Niedermaier in white and Nerlo in red


The format of my race is loosely inspired by the NÖ Womens Tour. It will also have 5 stages over 4 days, and none of them will be overly long. It will visit more of the country though, and the Niederösterreich region won't actually feature at all (or at least not in the first edition). It's intended to be a 2.1 race and will be run by a different organiser than the men's Tour of Austria.

Stay tuned for more info.

 

[Samu Cuenca]

Fraustro Tour
(Horrible name, really, but it's more catchy and unique than Austria Ladies Tour, Österreich Rundfahrt der Frauen or Tour of Austria Women - Battle of Central Europe)

Stage 1a: Schwaighofen - Salzburgring, 15.5 km ITT

Day 1 will start with a time trial. I originally wanted to have it in the city of Salzburg, but then I discovered the nearby Salzburgring race track, which I found to be a much more interesting setting.

The Salzburgring track is 4.241 km long and has been used for various car and motorcycle races since it opened in 1969. It also hosts the annual Rad am Salzburgring with time trials and road races for people of most ages. This year you can even be crowned European champion on vintage bikes at the event, if you should fancy your chances. If roller skiing is more your cup of tea, there's also a Ski Classics Challengers race being held on the track in August.

Anna Kiesenhofer won the ITT at the 2022 RaS in the colours of Team Cookina Graz. Among her then teammates were Hungarian talent Petra Zsankó (the tall one) and middle-distance runner turned national RR champion Carina Schrempf (furthest to the right from our POV)

At the Rad am Salzburgring they do 3 laps around the track, but I didn't want to have too many riders out on it at the same time, so here they will only be doing one lap. The first 10 km takes place outside the track and includes a bit of climbing and descending. The full course allegedly has more than 200m of elevation gain, so it's not entirely flat.

I wanted to have an ITT with a bit of length to it, both because there are too few of them in general, but also since Austria currently has two very capable time trialists in Anna Kiesenhofer and Christina Schweinberger, who you'd hope to see on the start line. It is a half-stage, so it obviously couldn't be too long either, but 15.5 km is in the same ballpark as the ones they have in the Baloise Ladies Tour. For the Tour de France Femmes they believe a 6 km flat course is acceptable, but that's simply not good enough for me.

Since the field might be a bit unbalanced, this stage could create some healthy gaps between the riders, but I will try to make it possible for a weaker time trialist to gain time back, if she's a capable climber that is.

 

[Samu Cuenca]

Fraustro Tour

Stage 1b: Salzburg - Schwarzensee, 64 km

The first road stage starts in Salzburg, home of Mozart (and his chocolate balls, which I enjoyed as a child), music and Maria von Trapp. It was of course also the venue for the 2006 World Championships which, among other results, saw Marianne Vos win her first title, Gerald Ciolek triumph in the U23 race, and Alejandro Valverde failing to take advantage of Samu's perfect lead out

Vos doing Vos things. But can she do it on a windy day in Belgium 17 years and 5 months later? Yes, she can!

As promised, the climbers will get opportunities to showcase themselves in this race. For this stage, early positioning will be key, especially if your name is Petra Stiasny for instance, cause the worst challenge comes after just 8 km of racing. The Daxluegstraße from Mayrwies to the top of Heuberg is around 3 km at over 9% avg., so it's sort of a steeper, less scenic version of Lacets de Montvernier or a slightly easier copy of Xorret de Catí.

This climb will separate the wheat from the chaff no matter how hard it's raced, and since it is a rather short stage, I expect there to be gaps at the top. The descent is on a narrow road, but for most of it it's only half as steep as the ascent, so I don't think it will cause too many problems.

The next 7 km are false flat which are followed by another 7 km of mostly descending, before the riders arrive in Thalgau. Here begins the next climb, Alpenblick (3 km, 6.5%). The top is at around the half way mark of the stage.

The riders will then make their way to Fuschl am See and ride over the top of the St. Gilgener Berg, before they reach St. Gilgen at the Wolfgangsee. Where Salzburg is famous for The Sound of Music, this area is known for being the setting of the operetta Im weißen Rößl/The White Horse Inn, which had runs in both the London West End and on Broadway in the 1930s and is still being performed in various versions today. The eponymous hotel is located in St. Wolfgang, which we won't visit.

In the Danish film adaption, which was filmed in the area at the same time as The Sound of Music, the story was moved to Tyrol, since they didn't think the average Dane would be aware of Salzkammergut. The hotel scenes were filmed on Gaisberg, which creates a paradox where the lake is both on a mountain and at the same time also in a valley. However the audience didn't mind, and the film, starring Denmark's most famous comedic actor Dirch Passer as the lovesick waiter Leopold Brandmeyer, remains one of the most popular Danish movies from the 1960s and is still being broadcast on national television at least once a year.

The Kaiser Franz Joseph 1. has sailed tourists across the lake since 1873. Originally a steamboat, it was fitted with a diesel engine in 1954

Back to the race. After a bonus sprint in Strobl, it's time for the grand finale. While holidaying with my parents at the Wolfgangsee in 2007, I saw the nearby Schwarzensee on a map and decided to check out. This little climb thus became my first memorable climbing experience outside of Denmark and it'll therefore always have a special place in my heart.

It's around 2 km at over 8% average (I think quäldich is overstating it slightly), but it has a few respites along the way, which means it isn't harder than the worst Danish climbs, but it felt more like a proper mountain than anything I've ridden at home. There isn't a lot of space at the top, but since this isn't the biggest race in the world, I hope it will make do.

 

[Mayomaniac]

I'm not posting a lot here because of work (way too much writing and correcting text to do), but I'm working on a Geitennelking Tour of Turkey.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 9: Denver - St. Mary’s Glacier, 136km

GPM:
Lookout Mountain (cat.2) 10,7km @ 5,1%
Juniper Pass (cat.1) 20,8km @ 5,5%
St. Mary’s Glacier (Fall River Road)(cat.1) 14,8km @ 5,5%

Our last high mountain stage comes just before the final weekend (don’t worry, I have plans), and it’s a much shorter one with lower distance and lower gradients than the Pikes Peak MTF, to try to encourage a different fashion of racing; and also to a large extent because, you know, this is what you typically tend to get from mountain stages in Colorado; the gradients aren’t usually super tough, but the altitude and the length is what tends to get you. We’re going up above 3000m twice in the stage and 3/4 of its duration - albeit short - will be above 2000m, so Alejandro Valverde is not likely to be entering, shall we say.

We’re back in Denver for the start, so I shan’t repeat myself talking about the city, after all I did that for stage 7 so no need to go through it again so soon. Instead, let’s get straight to the first checkpoint on the stage, the city of Golden, which hosts an early intermediate sprint after less than 20km which has been flat to slightly-tending-uphill through the increasingly extensive urban sprawl on the western edges of the Denver metropolitan area.

Branding itself, as you can see, as “where the West lives”, this city of 20.000 was established during the Pikes Peak Gold Rush, and although it may seem that this was the inspiration for the nomenclature, it was in fact named after the early prospector Thomas L. Golden. From 1862 to 1867 it served as the capital of Colorado Territory, although after losing the railroad battle to Denver when the Denver-Pacific line grew far faster than the Central Colorado Railroad, this role became increasingly ceremonial and it lost economic primacy to its neighbour swiftly. Realising they would lose the race to establish connections to Cheyenne and bypass the Rocky Mountains, they switched their resources into connecting the prospecting towns, and as time wore on it became more famous as the home of the Coors Brewery, the famous beer brand going on, a century later, to lend its name to the most famous bike race the North American continent has ever seen, and remaining one of the town’s primary employers to this very day.

Golden has also seen a resurgence in recent years at the other end of the beer market, as far removed from the huge-scale corporate megalith that is the Coors company, Colorado has become the epicentre of the USA’s microbrewery culture, as the craft beer craze gathered pace. It is home to the baseball pitcher - a renowned ‘closer’ often tasked with finishing out late innings in tight games - Mark Melancon, the soccer player Lindsey Horan - currently captain of the US Women’s National Team and a midfielder with almost 150 caps to her name - and the cyclist Alex Howes, an established helper whose entire 15 year pro career was with the Slipstream Sports marque, first turning pro with them as a 19-year-old in 2007, before returning to the French amateur scene and then re-emerging at the end of espoirs to carve out a niche on the team for many years before retreating to live back at home in the US and focus on gravel racing, which he had increasingly been doing in lieu of road racing anyway in latter years, in his mid 30s. Usually deployed as a domestique or lead-out, his best results were largely in the home races in North America where he was granted more freedom to race for himself and his most successful year was 2017, when he finished 3rd in both the Colorado Cycling Classic and the Tour of Alberta, also winning a stage of the former. In recent times the city has hit a bit of internet notoriety via the controversial Daniel Larson, a TikTok “celebrity” of sorts who…Daniel is an aspiring musician but also extremely unstable, violent and abusive, and with an extremely uncomfortable obsession with an underage fellow musician and an absurd sense of entitlement who films his every waking moment to broadcast online to what he believes to be an army of fans who are in reality rubbernecking the car crash that his life has become like some kind of freak show. He is also both very manipulative and very gullible simultaneously, which has led to him becoming the target for online trolls who manipulate him into situations where his more negative traits will be triggered, creating “content” at the expense of the sanity and physical wellbeing of all around him. Just reading about him cost me a number of brain cells. Avoid at all costs.

Alex Howes

Golden has far more commonly been used as a stage départ than a finish in cycling, appearing a few times in this role in the Coors Classic. In 1982, for example, after a couple of stages east of the Rockies to start, the first real mountain stage was from Golden to Vail Pass, which Patrocinio Jiménez won, with Lucho Herrera winning an identical stage a year later; in 1984 Alexei Grewal won a stage from Golden to Copper Mountain, and in 1987 Raúl Alcalá won a stage from Golden to Estes Park shortly before the end of the race. In the rebooted USA Pro Cycling Challenge, it featured as a stage start in both the 2011 and 2012 editions - the former in a flat stage into Denver won by Daniel Oss, and the latter a mountain stage to Flagstaff Mountain, overlooking Boulder, which was won by Rory Sutherland. 2015 saw another stage into Denver, won by John Murphy, while the last visit of pro racing to Golden was in 2019, when Chloe Dygert won a circuit race as part of the women’s version of the Colorado Cycling Classic.

The Hausberg of Golden is Lookout Mountain, which featured prominently in that 2015 stage and as the opening of those Vail Pass stages that the Colombians won in the early 1980s. This is our first climb of the day and it is not super long but with a fairly tempo-grinding kind of difficulty at a little over 5%. It is mostly for its primary 7km averaging around 6% consistently, and then it reduces down in gradient to false flat until the high point of the road. PJamm has the profile of the main part of the climb but not the full ascent.

There is then a long gradual descent - only around 2-3% - for around 15km via Mount Vernon back to the southeast to Morrison rather than westward like in the 80s. We then have a long uphill false flat through Bear Creek; the first 2km or so average just under 6% but on a stage like this I don’t think it needs noting as a cat.3 climb. After this it gets more gradual and overall we are only seeing around 500m altitude gain in 25km which is hardly the most threatening in the world. We pass through Evergreen at the end of this uphill false flat, a popular recreation area with a population of just under 10.000, which offers prominent ice skating possibilities in winter; as a result of this it was chosen as the winter home of 1984 Olympic gold medallist figure skater Scott Hamilton. It is also the home of former Olympic cross-country skier Noah Hoffman, while Willie Nelson, South Park co-creator Trey Parker and wannabe-assassin John Hinckley Jr. have all lived in the municipality. But for us, more crucially, it is at the base of the hardest, southeast face of Juniper Pass - via Squaw Pass - the centrepiece of today’s stage’s climbing, being a 21km climb ascending over a kilometre of altitude up to a summit of 3400m, and cresting 45km from the finish. Mycols' profile also includes the preceding false flat giving us 28km at 4,5%, but the most detailed that I could see for the part that I’ve categorised is this one from PJamm giving us 20,8km at 5,5% - but look at the first 8km or so there with that 5km at over 8% and realise that this one wears its hardest gradients at the bottom. This is a good chance to attack from distance, and also a good chance to really put on the hurt by setting a hard tempo early, before the gradients ease off. There’s a further 6km or so at a little over 5% before we reach Squaw Pass, where we could descend northwards but instead we continue on skyward; there’s a brief false flat respite before three kilometres of around 5% and then it’s false flat to the summit.

Climbing Juniper Pass from the south

This now gives way to a long, long descent into Idaho Springs, descending some 1100m in 27km so averaging only around 4%. But much of this descent will be familiar to at least some of the péloton simply because it features as part of the Mount Evans (i.e. Mount Blue Sky) Hill Climb, more recently known as the Bob Cook Memorial Mount Evans Hill Climb in honour of the five-time winner of the race (in 1975-1980, save for 1979 when the race was not run), improving his own record time four times in the course of this run. This was a record number of victories, surpassing the four by inaugural winner Stuart Baillie, and since equalled by Mike Engleman (1991-1995 inclusive) and then surpassed by Scott Moninger, a former Navigators, Mercury, Health Net and BMC rider who won a colossal number of domestic races in the US in the 90s and early 2000s but seldom raced outside North America. Since the 80s, however, the increased attention on North American cycling following the success of the Coors Classic brought international attention and more professionals to try their hand at the hillclimb (albeit mostly still US-American or US-based riders), so winners include Alexi Grewal (3 times from 1981 to 1990), Jonathan Vaughters (1997, 1999 and 2003), Tom Danielson (2004, 2007 and 2009), Peter Stetina (2010), Lachlan Morton (2015) and Chad Haga (2017). The race has struggled to get back to operation after the pandemic cancellations and has run but with much reduced entry lists since. A women’s version was introduced in 1976 with a winners’ list including the likes of Linda Jackson (1995), Jeannie Longo (1998, 2008), Flavia Oliveira (2018) and record winner Mara Abbott (5 wins from 2005 to 2015) for whom it was practically a local race, owing to her tendency to struggle psychologically with adapting to racing in Europe, so she would parachute in for specific stage races and spend the rest of her time beating up on the US domestic péloton in her playgrounds of the mountains. The current records are held by Tom Danielson on the men’s side (1h 41’20” in 2004) and Jeannie Longo on the women’s side (1h 59’19” in 1998), both of which are extremely suspect, but hey, it’s cycling in the 90s and early 00s, and even more so in the US scene of that era and from riders who have both been busted multiple times, so what are we to expect?

The descent is basically the first 20km of this profile - mostly consistent and at 5-6% for the most important part between Echo Lake and Chicago Creek, bookended by false flat. I’ve then put the second intermediate sprint in Idaho Springs, a bedroom community for the Loveland ski areas and the site of the first gold discoveries in Colorado when the speculator George A. Jackson located placer gold at hot springs in the area which eventually became known as Idaho Springs. When the mountains were dug clean of gold, mining continued for other hard rocks and the city was also the epicentre of miners’ strikes and revolts in the early 20th Century campaigning for better working conditions.

It’s also the base of today’s final climb, the mountaintop finish at St. Mary’s Glacier. This semi-permanent snowfield sits above the unincorporated community of Alice, which is a pseudo-ghost-town which includes a car park used for access to the glacier. This high-altitude mining community has rather died off but has been repurposed with alpine-style refuges and chalets for hiking and accessing the mountainous wilderness, so there is enough infrastructure to accommodate a stage finish.

Glacial lake at St. Mary’s

The climb to St. Mary’s Glacier is not all that difficult; its overall stats are 14,8km at 5,5% and this follows a short uphill false flat from Idaho Springs to the junction out of Turkey Gulch. The profile on PJamm shows that the climb starts off benign before jumping up to its steepest stretch, from km6 to 10, at about 7,7%. Then it eases off slightly before jumping up to over 8% for kilometre 12, before more false flat and then 2km at 6% to finish. The steepest continuous kilometre is apparently over 10,5% so this will definitely give a platform to attack from - and as it’s a mountaintop finish I’ve given it the cat.1 status - but it’s also not so hard a climb that nobody will be able to attack earlier either. And at 3200m altitude, there’s also that factor to take into account. My hope is that this one should be a tough one from Juniper Pass onward, but you never know.

Stage finish at the bottom

 

[Mayomaniac]

Is there a single monster climb in the US where Danielson doesn't have the climbing record?

 

[Mayomaniac]

Mauna Kea?

I guess, continental USA seems to be still under his control

 

[Samu Cuenca]

Fraustro Tour

Stage 2: Bad Ischl - St. Johann im Pongau, 81 km

The previous stage had some shorter, steeper climbs, but today's event is more about the longer shallow stuff instead.

We start in Bad Ischl, 11 km east of the Wolfgangsee. After a sprint in Bad Goisern, the riders will approach the Halstätter See where they'll start the Pass Gschütt on the border between Oberösterreich and Salzburg. This climb is mostly false flat for the first 10 km, but the last 2.5 km from Gosau are at over 8%.

After the descent, the next climb awaits. The road to St. Martin am Tennengebirge is almost entirely false flat, so there will probably be a big-ish group together at the top. After a 20 km descent, we'll have the next bonus sprint in Bischofshofen, which is of course best known for hosting the last leg of the annual Vierschanzentournee ski jumping tournament.

The Davide Rebellin of ski jumping, Noriaki Kasai, was a runner-up in Bischofshofen thrice in his heyday. In 1999 he was leading the Four Hills Tournament by 0.4 points ahead of the last competition, but lost out to Janne Ahonen in the end

When the Österreich Rundfahrt does its Großglockner stages they usually end them with a short climb to Alpendorf, but here we're finishing in the town of St. Johann im Pongau instead. While there is a bit of climbing on this stage, I still expect the mainly easy gradients will mean a reduced peloton will duke it out for the win in a sprint.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Let's let Finland's pop-punk finest tell the story. After all, most bands record songs about love, loneliness, heartbreak, pain and so on. The Van Dammes, however, sing about what REALLY matters: ski jumping.

 

[Forever The Best]

He also won the Ski Flying World Championships at Harrachov in 1992.

 

[Samu Cuenca]

He also won the Ski Flying World Championships at Harrachov in 1992.

And he also made it through to the second round in one of the WC competitions in Sapporo last weekend, 35 years after he had done it for the first time.

 

[Samu Cuenca]

On the topic of ski jumping, I must also add that if I had done my research properly, I would have realised and mentioned that Wolfgang Loitzl comes from Bad Ischl. I had also forgotten that he actually made his perfect jump in Bischofshofen, but hey, it's been 15 years since I watched it.

 

[Samu Cuenca]

Fraustro Tour

Stage 3: Zell am See - Lienz, 93 km

Simon Eder, biathlon's answer to Noriaki Kasai, as well as his father Alfred, who had a very long career of his own, comes from Saalfelden north of Zell am See. The extraordinary shooter took his first of, so far, 3 individual World Cup victories in Russia 15 years ago


Seeing LS's use of the high mountains in Colorado obviously made it even more tempting to visit Großglockner in my race. I have however resisted the urge to do so. Climbing it from the northern side would also mean you'd get a more difficult descent, and even if you had the best possible women's field here, the riders wouldn't be used to descending down from 2500m.

With the inclusion of Tourmalet in last year's TdFF and Glandon/Alpe d'Huez this year and the Cormet de Roselend stage in the first edition of the Tour de l'Avenir Femmes, the current crop of riders will be exposed to more high altitude climbs and longer descents, but, although it definitely would be exciting, we're not quite at a level where such a major mountain stage would make sense in a race like mine.

I also envision this as being similar to the Tour de l'Ardèche; a race with a challenging parcours which will provide opportunities for up-and-coming riders and some that are often stuck in domestique roles in bigger races to showcase themselves and gain valuable experience. To achieve that you don't want to see too many riders abandon on the penultimate day.

It is possible for women to climb the Großglockner during the annual Glocknerkönig event.
Anna Kiesenhofer won her age group and finished second overall in 2015

So instead of the Glockner, the riders will be using the Felbertauernstraße. A 16 km climb to 1600m at 5% avg, and steeper towards the top will definitely be able to blow the race apart. When they reach the Felbertauerntunnel there's still over 50 km yet to come, including a long descent, so the stage won't be decided on the climb alone.

When they eventually approach Lienz there's still a challenge or two left. The road to Oberdrum through Oberlienz is over 10% for a lot of its 1.6 km duration. After a descent into town, the finish will be on the ramp to the Zettersfeldbahn Talstation, where Thibaut Pinot took a popular victory in the 2022 Tour of the Alps.

 

[Max Rockatansky]

Let's let Finland's pop-punk finest tell the story. After all, most bands record songs about love, loneliness, heartbreak, pain and so on. The Van Dammes, however, sing about what REALLY matters: ski jumping.

I have no doubt that he will continue forever. Just like the Great Kazuyoshi Funaki does.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Stage 10: Idaho Springs - Estes Park, 187km

GPM:
Berthoud Pass (cat.1) 17,8km @ 4,0%
Trail Ridge Road (cat.1) 19,7km @ 4,9%
Mary’s Lake (cat.3) 1,9km @ 6,7%

Relatively long and sapping transitional stage here which is somewhere between a medium and a high mountain stage, with the final large summit nearly 50km from home and no super steep gradients, but with the combination of altitude, length of ascent and suffering, and that it’s the penultimate day of an 11-stage race, hopefully fatigue will open up all manner of possibilities here, from a baroudeur, to a large breakaway, to GC action from distance, to GC action on a final climb, to a final puncheur shootout near the end between whoever survived the long, drawn out drags of earlier in the stage. The possibilities of how this one would end up are manifold.

We’re back in Idaho Springs for the stage start, I’ve already talked about the city in the last stage run-through so I shan’t repeat myself (I know, why break the habit of a lifetime…) and so will go straight to the road. The road more or less starts immediately heading uphill, toward the town of Empire, 10km and 250m height metres away from Idaho Springs. Officially only home to around 350 people despite its town status, it also hosts a Hard Rock Café which is named for the hard rock mining that the area is famous for; it is not affiliated with the chain, but they have been unable to get the café to change its name because it actually predates their adoption of the monicker.

We then start ascending Berthoud Pass, a long but not steep ascent named after the chief surveyor of the Colorado Central Railroad. Although the average gradient is only 4%, the high altitude - 3450m - makes it one of the hardest for motorists. The main body of the climb is two stretches that average 5% or so with a stint of false flat in the middle, and the southern face that we are climbing is chocked full of lacets and hairpins that add a bit of interest to what would be otherwise very much a tempo grinding kind of climb. The north side is also pretty gradual - even more so than the south - but it does have a couple of steeper kilometres around 6% near the start.

Berthoud Pass from the south

The descent from Berthoud Pass takes us down to the town of Fraser, one of the coldest cities in the contiguous United States, and one which is locked in a dispute with International Falls, Minnesota for almost 70 years over which settlement has the rights to the appellation “the icebox of the nation”. Its area includes neighbouring Winter Park Station, and the ski resort thereat. The flat stretch along the middle of the stage includes undulating, rolling terrain, and includes our first intermediate sprint in the city of Granby. The most populous habitation in Grand County, this is a relatively young city, opened up in the early 20th Century as a railroad town. It also briefly hit the news in 2004 when a disgruntled auto shop employee, Marvin Heemeyer, created his own “Killdozer” in his garage by armouring a bulldozer, and went on a rampage to take revenge on those he felt had wronged him; he eventually fired on and destroyed 13 buildings in Granby including the town hall. Eventually after the bulldozer got stuck inside a building, Heemeyer shot himself inside the makeshift tank; when the authorities eventually were able to blast their way into the cab, they found his corpse along with enough food and drink to last a week. He knew that once he climbed into that bulldozer and shut the door, he was not coming out.

Around 40km through the valley later, the road turns uphill again, for the final cat.1 climb of the race - and a well known and famous one which has been seen a good few times back in the old days: Trail Ridge Road.

Trail Ridge Road video - in reverse direction from that which we take

This long ascent reaches altitudes of over 3700m, despite even crossing the Continental Divide at Milner Pass some 450m lower than that. It’s essentially two separate sets of climbs at around 5,5% - 10km up to Milner Pass, then 8km after that - with a 2km false flat stretch in the middle dividing the two. It’s very much a tempo grinder - the steepest kilometre is just 6,4%, which is obviously far from a monster gradient that is going to scare anybody off. 3700m of altitude, on the other hand, is - this is in fact the highest altitude continuous highway in the United States of America.

We pass the high point of the Trail Ridge Road at around 45km from the line. This then descends slightly before a short - uncategorised - rise up to the secondary summit at Iceberg Pass. This lends it a similar kind of vibe to Soulor after Aubisque or Hochtor and Fuscher Torl on the Großglockner. More realistically, though, it’s more like La Colladiella and La Mozqueta in Asturias, as a double summit in terms of difficulty; the climb is much longer but lower gradient so the comparison to a monster like the Großglockner isn’t really fair. This is more the equivalent of something like the Col du Petit-Saint-Bernard, Port d’Envalira, the A-395 route to Sierra Nevada, Montevergine di Mercogliano or Port de la Bonaigua, before a similarly lengthy and gradual descent into today’s stage finish, Estes Park.

A spectacular backdrop in winter, Estes Park is known as one of America’s most attractive mountain towns, and is the westernmost boundary of the Fort Collins metropolitan area. In a clearing known before white settlement as “The Circle” by the native Arapaho, who would settle here in the summer, coming into contact with other tribes such as the Utes and Apaches who would also take advantage of the agreeable climate for abundant flora and fauna. Although erroneously often believed by folk etymology to derive from the Spanish for ‘East’, perhaps in conflation with the many other Spanish toponyms in the state (Colorado itself, Durango, Cañon City, La Mesa), the town was in fact named after Joel Estes, a Missouri native who settled here after encountering it during fur trapping expeditions, and established a ranch which was later expanded and a health spa added, attracting sick and infirm in search of clean air and respite. It was also the abode of the famous mountain man James Nugent, alias Rocky Mountain Jim, who lived and worked exploring the wilderness for several years until being shot in a dispute with the keepers of the town’s founding estate.

Estes Park expanded significantly following the founding of a road from Loveland in the early 20th century and the damming of the Big Thompson River. It has historically had its own ski areas but these have gradually declined to disuse as against competition from more reliable venues as transport infrastructure improves rendering the likes of Beaver Creek and Aspen more readily accessible. It is now perhaps best known for the Stanley Hotel, a colonial revival-style luxury resort building established in the early 20th century for the recuperation of wealthy eastern seaboard natives from tuberculosis. Over the years it has become an icon of the region and has played host to the likes of Bob Dylan and Emperor Akihito, but none more significant than horror writer Stephen King; in 1974 he checked in to the hotel at the very end of the season before it closed up for the winter as was customary at the time; staying in room 217, he found himself almost entirely alone in the vast, luxurious complex, eating alone with his wife in the banquet hall and then walking back to his room through these vast, unending corridors in eerie silence… and by his own words, he imagined just how unnerving it would be should somebody die there in those circumstances - and before he went to bed that night he already had the main body of the story that would become the iconic horror novel and film The Shining set in his mind.

The Overlook Stanley Hotel

Estes Park was also a common stage host in the Coors Classic, although it hasn’t cropped up in the revival races in the 2010s. In 1982 and 1983 it was host to a short circuit race (possibly even a criterium given the 64km duration), and in 1984 it hosted both the men and the women in similar fashion. The men would be there in 1985 and the women in 1986. It looks like a similar stage was used in 1981 as well but records are unclear from what I can find. However, no Estes Park stage was ever longer than 90km back in those days so this will be a remarkable difference in style - I suspect those stages were rather like the Đà Lạt stages in the HTV Cup where a crit in a mountain town follows after a mountain stage into it the previous day. The most well known victor here is probably Steve Bauer, but it’d be a close run thing with Davis Phinney and his wife, Connie Carpenter-Phinney, who are of course American cycling royalty. However, for those of a certain persuasion or in certain parts of the world, 1981 Peace Race winner Shakhid Zagretdinov may be more prominent, or at least would have been at the time, when he won the Estes Park stage later that year.

My stage has a little sting in its tail though; After all, the descent from Trail Ridge Road is only around 35km so when we arrive in Estes Park we’re still a little over 10km from the line. Therefore, instead, we have an intermediate sprint at Beaver Meadow when we reach the road approaching the town and then have an additional short loop around the perimeter of Estes Park, encircling Prospect Mountain, enabling a short ascent on Mary’s Lake Road to give the opportunity for some stage hunting or for making some small gaps possible for a final roll of the dice to make something of the day if somebody is trying to get gaps and the shallow gradients earlier on have not proved selective enough for their liking. The road up to the campground at Mary’s Lake, at the pass between Prospect Mountain to the east and Gianttrack Mountain to the west, is not the hardest anybody will ever see - 1,9km at 6,7% with a maximum of 12% - but it is at least a platform to work with and, cresting only 9km from the line, offers a final chance to open up time at relatively low risk. The flip side is that, like most of these roads, it is cut with fairly modern technology and is wide, spacious and has tarmac that would make Bavarianrider swoon.

The descent from here into Estes Park proper is mostly very straight so would favour the chase, if it were flat enough for power to make a difference. It depends how aggressive any chase is, really, since it’s about 2km of flat circling the lake and then 2,2km of sweeping downhill curves at ~4% before downhill false flat all the way until crossing the Big Thompson River 900m from the line. However, then it flattens out for safety reasons before a final left hander of 60º at 250m from home. It’s perhaps not ideal but I don’t think we should be worried about a bunch sprint. If we have a bunch sprint here, then a lot of the riders will only have themselves to blame if they get caught up in a crash of a group far larger than ought to be duking out a finish on a stage like this, especially given the altitude never gets below 2300m (Valverde is typing an angry message to me as we speak, with Óscar Sevilla co-signing) and we’re on stage 10 of 11. I envision a lot of potential outcomes for this stage, and a bunch sprint wasn’t one of them.