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2006 VeloNews Awards: Best of North America
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The end of the year always provides us with the opportunity to look back over the past season and choose those people and events that stand out in our own minds. What follows is a list of what we, as editors of VeloNews, saw as the highlights of the domestic road scene in 2006. See if you agree and take the time to read our complete 2006 awards in the latest issue of VeloNews.
COMEBACK OF THE YEAR: Health Net-Maxxis rider Greg Henderson broke his hip at the McClane Pacific Criterium on March 4, but initial x-rays missed the fracture. Henderson continued racing until an MRI revealed the injury five weeks later, keeping the Kiwi from defending his points jersey at April’s Tour de Georgia. The time off the bike motivated Henderson, who came back to take three sprint wins in a week at a stage of the Mt. Hood Classic, the Commerce Bank Reading Classic and the Commerce Bank Philadelphia International Championship.
MOST IMPROVED: When the team started as an under-23 developmental team in 2004, Jonathan Vaughters’s TIAA-CREF squad was more dainty than dangerous. The team began to show promise in 2005 as an under-25 formation, adding Will Frischkorn, but in 2006 Vaughters ditched the age limits, adding Mike Creed and Danny Pate and attempting an ambitious European schedule. Racing domestically, TIAA-CREF took the national under-23 road championship (Craig Lewis), the USPRO national criterium championship (Brad Huff) and Mike Friedman finished as the first American at the former national championship event in Philadelphia. At the USA Cycling Professional Championships in Greenville, South Carolina, Pate was the top non-ProTour road-race finisher, in third place, while Friedman took fourth in the national time-trial championship. At the national track championships in October, Friedman won the individual pursuit, Creed won the points race, and the team also took the Madison and team pursuit. These days, Vaughters’s claim to take the team to the ProTour in 2009 doesn’t seem so far off.
U23 RIDERS OF THE YEAR: In 2006, Mara Abbott (Rio Grande-Sports Garage) and Brent Bookwalter (Priority Health) showed that they were not only the strongest in the under-23 category, but that they are capable of racing with the big kids. After winning the national U23 time trial Abbot took the national U23 road race by making the selection in the concurrently held elite women’s race alongside Olympians Kristin Armstrong and Christine Thorburn. Abbott’s finishing time was a whopping 19 minutes faster than the second-place U23 woman. Bookwalter, who won the Tour of Shenandoah while many of the top domestic riders were at the Tour de Georgia, finished second in the national U23 road race when the TIAA-CREF team of winner Craig Lewis had him outnumbered. Bookwalter took revenge two days later by winning the time trial with a pace that was faster than the winning time in the elite men’s race.
REVELATIONS OF THE YEAR: In only her second season of bike racing, former downhill ski racer Alison Powers got her season rolling with a fifth overall at the Joe Martin Stage Race and wins at the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic road race and criterium. Powers, 27, whose season was split between Rio Grande-Sports Garage and Advil-Chapstick, then won the prologue at the Mt. Hood Cycling Classic, where she finished fourth overall, and took the stage 1 time trial at the Tour de ’Toona ahead of world time-trial champion Kristin Armstrong. Powers finished sixth overall in Altoona, and fifth in the NRC rankings. In men’s racing, second-year pro Shawn Milne (Navigators Insurance), 24, took two stage wins and the overall at the Fitchburg-Longsjo Memorial Stage Race in June and followed up with a surprise win at the Bank of America Invitational in August and another win at the Univest Grand Prix in September, ending the season 10th in the NRC rankings. In 2007 Powers will ride with Colavita Olive Oil, while Milne will ride for Health Net-Maxxis.
ENDLESS SUMMER AWARD: Riders from the Southern Hemisphere, including three Aussies, a Kiwi and an Argentinean, took five of the top eight spots on the NRC individual rankings. Maybe the American pros should forget Tucson this winter and head down under.
DAVID VS. GOLIATH AWARD: At the USA Cycling Professional Championships Jelly Belly rider Andy Bajadali was the only rider to stand up to the double-pronged ProTour assault of George Hincapie and Levi Leipheimer on the final trip over Paris Mountain. Bajadali cracked in the closing circuits, finishing sixth, but left his mark as the last domestic rider standing.
THE MONKEY OFF HIS BACK AWARD: After years of coming frustratingly close with Navigators Insurance, Chris Baldwin finally took that elusive NRC stage race win at the Tour of the Gila with his new Toyota-United squad.
THE MONKEY BACK ON HIS BACK AWARD: At the national time-trial championship, Baldwin was on his way to upsetting 2005 Tour de France prologue winner Dave Zabriskie when he crashed on the final turn of the course, just 400 meters from the finish, and placed second.
DON’T CROSS THE BOSS AWARD: When the new, big-budget Toyota-United team was launched in a February media blitz, no one would have expected that five months later owner Sean Tucker would fire team director Frankie Andreu for missing a trip to Nevada’s Tour de Nez in late June. Andreu said he told Tucker he needed to catch up with his family prior to heading to the Tour de France to do commentary work for OLN, and that the late-July termination came as a surprise.
BEST PUBLICITY STUNT: Okay, almost nobody showed up. Sure, riding flat laps around a windy Indianapolis Motor Speedway doesn’t determine a future Tour de France winner. And yeah, the guy who won, A.J. Smith, wasn’t actually allowed to place at the national time-trial championship, and if he had been allowed to, his time would have put him in 48th out of 53 finishers. But admit it, Discovery Channel’s Race 2 Replace got you talking, and maybe, just maybe, dreaming.
GOD OF THUNDER AWARD: At 6-foot-4 and 195 pounds, with a blond mullet he claims has been “clinically proven” to boost his competitive abilities, Priority Health’s neo-pro Tom “Thor” Zirbel lived up to his nickname, barreling into prologue wins at the Tour of Shenandoah and Tour de Nez, and time-trial wins at the Parker Mainstreet Omnium and the Valley of the Sun, where he also took the overall.
CYCLO-CROSS
NORTH AMERICAN MALE: Some riders can find a way to win no matter what the weather, mechanicals and fate throw at them. Ryan Trebon is not such a rider. Faced with horrendous weather or bike troubles, Trebon is easily discouraged and often unable to bounce back for a win. But when his head is in the game he’s unstoppable. Only a handful of men could keep the national cross-country champion within eyesight at ’cross races this season. Trebon won four of six rounds of the Crank Brothers U.S. Gran Prix of Cyclocross to easily take the title. Now he is in Europe testing his mettle against the best. Trebon placed 25th at the sixth round of the World Cup in Belgium on November 25. In 2006 he placed 15th at the world championships.
NORTH AMERICAN FEMALE: Although Canadian national champ Lyne Bessette gave her hell on a couple of occasions, Katie Compton was in a league of her own this season in North America. In seven UCI appearances Compton notched no less than six UCI wins. She only faltered once this season, at the Crank Brothers U.S. Gran Prix of Cyclocross finals in Portland, Oregon, where she crashed into a muddy hole obscured by standing water and could not regain lost ground. In 2004 and 2005 Compton had a similar story, winning each major race she entered. However in those years she only entered one big ’cross event per year — the national championships. Barring catastrophe, Compton will again don the stars-and-bars in Rhode Island December 17 before representing her country at the January 27-28 world cyclo-cross championships in Hooglede, Belgium.
BEST OF CLASS: Rad Racing Northwest in Washington and the American Cycling Association’s Mudskipper program in Colorado tied in our Best of Class award as two top-notch junior ’cross programs that get the kids on bikes and into the habit.
