Tour of California Off to Raucous Beginning
The best part, Levi Leipheimer said, was standing at the start line for a professional cycling race and hearing the crowd go wild.
“I felt goose bumps,” Leipheimer said. “I’ve never had that before.”
The noise helped carry Leipheimer, who is from nearby Santa Rosa, to a decisive victory in the opening prologue of the inaugural Tour of California cycling race.
The first route of the eight-day, 600-mile event brought riders along the Embarcadero, onto Bay Street and Stockton to a left turn on Lombard and up the crooked streets to Coit Tower. An estimated 200,000 fans lined the course. Viewers were perched in trees and on roofs and were standing 10-deep near the finish line.
“All that noise,” second-place finisher Bobby Julich said. “As an American you don’t get that often. It made me super-motivated.”
Leipheimer’s goose bumps quickly went away, though. He powered through the 1.9-mile prologue course in 4 minutes 53.43 seconds.
The hometown advantage seemed to embrace many Americans. The top five finishers (and six of the top seven) were all from the U.S.
Julich of CSC was second in 4:58.19 and Discovery Channel’s George Hincapie, who won the mountainous 15th stage of the 2005 Tour de France, was third in 4:59.11. Phonak’s Floyd Landis of San Diego was fourth and Julich’s CSC teammate Dave Zabriskie was fifth.
Zabriskie, who won the prologue at last year’s Tour de France, just ahead of eventual champion Lance Armstrong, lost a chain and nearly came to a stop or he might have challenged Leipheimer for first.
Leipheimer, 32, rides for the German Gerolsteiner team. He said it took no arm-twisting at all to convince his squad to leave Europe, train in Santa Rosa for a week and compete in this new event.
“Everybody wanted to come,” said Leipheimer, who finished sixth in last year’s Tour de France.
With the Tour of California as his early-season focus, Leipheimer was in such good shape and riding with so much extra adrenaline that he rode up the steep, breath-sapping hill to Coit Tower with an extra-large chain.
“I felt like I was riding on air,” Leipheimer said. “This was something special. It really did feel like a Tour de France atmosphere.”
Leipheimer had been the third-to-last starter. In the prologue riders take off one-by-one and attack the course single file. Switzerland’s Fabian Cancellara, the 38th starter, took the lead and held it until Julich, the 102nd starter, finished five minutes faster.
“I was surprised to be where I was,” the 34-year-old Julich said of his briefly held lead.
“But I also heard that Levi was having an amazing ride so I didn’t expect to hold the lead.”
Today’s 80.2-mile stage heads from Sausalito to Leipheimer’s Santa Rosa home.
“I’ve been dreaming of wearing the leader’s jersey into Santa Rosa,” he said. “It’s what I’ve been training for.”
Discovery Channel, Armstrong’s former team and the one he has part ownership in, and CSC, the Danish-based team of the Los Angeles-based company, are considered the strongest here and the prologue results showed that strength. CSC had three riders in the top six and Discovery had five of the top 11.
Leipheimer, whose aim is to be the top rider at the finish Sunday in Redondo Beach, said the field would separate in Tuesday’s second stage from Martinez to San Jose and Wednesday’s time trial outside of San Jose.
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Road to Redondo
Levi Leipheimer, below, of Santa Rosa won the opening prologue of the inaugural Tour of California Sunday. The eight-day, 600-mile event ends with a circuit race Sunday in Redondo Beach. A description of each stage:
* Stage 1, today: 84 miles from Sausalito to Santa Rosa.
* Stage 2, Tuesday: Stage finishes in downtown San Jose.
* Stage 3, Wednesday: A 17-mile individual time trial on the outskirts of San Jose.
* Stage 4, Thursday: Stage begins in Monterey and finishes 130 miles later in San Luis Obispo.
* Stage 5, Friday: The race winds through the Central Coast and ends in Santa Barbara.
* Stage 6, Saturday: Santa Barbara to Thousand Oaks.
* Stage 7, Sunday: Circuit race in Redondo Beach.
Source: www.usacycling.org