Cycling Still Has Ace in U.S. : Race: Donald Trump withdrew money, but help came from Delaware. Competition, including LeMond, starts today.

America’s dip into big-time bicycling was jeopardized last year when Donald Trump’s empire shuddered on its Atlantic City foundations.

Trump, reeling from debt-laden real estate investments, withdrew $2 million from the two-year-old Tour de Trump bicycle race. That left America’s biggest cycling venture without a sponsor.

But the 11-day, 1,100-mile road race along the Eastern Seaboard did not disappear.

The race, which begins today at Wilmington, Del., has resurfaced with a new sponsor, international sanctioning and some of the world’s best-known cyclists. And, alas, a new name.

The Tour Du Pont, as in the Delaware du Ponts, will end in Wilmington on May 19 after wending its way through Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Va., and smaller towns and hamlets in the Appalachian Mountains.

The tour is the only U.S. race sanctioned by the International Cycling Federation. As a result, some elite professional teams are entered with such cyclists as Greg LeMond of Wayzata, Minn., Erik Breukink of the Netherlands, Sean Kelly of Ireland and Steve Bauer of Canada. The four built their reputations on the roads of the Tour de France.

“The quality of our field has jumped, but we could do better,” said Steve Brunner, a spokesman for Medalist Sports, Inc., which owns and operates the Du Pont event. “We don’t have Pedro Delgado or Laruent Fignon. We’re still going through growing pains.”

Delgado, of Spain, and Fignon, of France, are two of cycling’s biggest stars. Also absent from this year’s Du Pont are Italian racers such as Claudio Chiappucci and Gianni Bugno. The Italians are so skilled that their presence in any race drastically alters its pace.

But because the Du Pont is sandwiched between the Tour of Spain and the Tour of Italy, some riders bypassed it to ride in Europe.

Still, the race is one of the season’s highlights for U.S. competitors. This is their one chance to compete against Europeans in an American setting.

“We’re not using this to train for the Tour de France (starting on July 6),” said New York’s Mike McCarthy of the Subaru-Montgomery team. “This is our big race.”

National teams from the United States, the Soviet Union and Germany are entering amateur cyclists to gain international experience against the professionals.

This year’s race is expected to be decided in three successive mountain stages, starting on the sixth day at Richmond, Va., and ending at the Virginia ski resort of Wintergreen.

“It is a lot more difficult of a course than people realize,” Brunner said. “People think of the Eastern U.S. as basically flat. But the riders say this course can test them.”

As with most spring tours, predicting favorites is difficult. Dag-Otto Lauritzen of Norway won the Tour de Trump in 1989, Raul Alcala of Mexico in ’90. Riders such as LeMond use the spring to train for the major summer events.

LeMond, who has won the Tour de France three times, including the last two, is having his best spring in years. He said recently he is three months ahead of last year’s training schedule when he was so sick he could barely stay with the stragglers in the Tour de Trump.

“I’m more powerful and want to place in the top five at this year’s race,” he said.