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McCartney riding Olympic wave
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Things will be very different for Jason McCartney as he lines up Saturday in what will be his second crack at an Olympic medal.
Four years ago, after winning the qualifying race to make the U.S. Olympic team for the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, the Iowan was in sweltering Athens as a wide-eyed domestic pro lining up against the likes of Paolo Bettini.
Flash forward four years and McCartney, now 34, will be breaking a sweat again in the heat, humidity and smog of Beijing.
The thrill of being at the Olympics is still there, but long gone is the sense that he doesn’t belong.
“When I went to Athens, I had only seen these guys in magazines so I was a bit intimidated,” McCartney said after training on the Beijing Olympic course Thursday. “Now I’ve been racing against these guys day-in, day-out for the past several years, so in a lot of ways, it’s just another race.”
That 2004 Olympic appearance led to his breakthrough contract with the Discovery Channel team. Since the 2005 season, he’s been bashing elbows with Europe’s finest.
McCartney lines up for Saturday as a key member of the five-man U.S. team for the 245.4km men’s road race – the longest in Olympic Games history.
Joining McCartney are George Hincapie, Levi Leipheimer, Dave Zabriskie and Christian Vande Velde.
The boys got their first real good look at the seven-lap course the men will face, riding a few laps on the 23.8km circuit.
With a challenging climb up to the ramparts of the Badaling section of China’s Great Wall, McCartney said there will be plenty of room for the Americans to attack the pre-race favored teams of Spain and Italy.
“It’s a hard course. The climb will just wear guys out. It’s a long downhill, but it will be an interesting race,” McCartney said. “We were on the big ring on the training ride, but after seven laps, things will be different. There aren’t big teams here. Bettini doesn’t have 10 Italians to chase down breakaways. Anything is possible.”
On paper, Vande Velde and Hincapie are the team captains. Since they both stand good shots at a medal in Wednesday’s time trial, Leipheimer and Zabriskie might hold back a little unless they’re in good position to go for the podium.
McCartney believes his best chance will be to try to get into a breakaway, his specialty after racing in Europe the past four years.
“I could see a small break going away, not with too many guys. Definitely not a big group because there are enough teams who want to keep it under control until the last few laps,” he said. “The last climb into the finish isn’t too steep. It’s definitely a big-ring sprint.”
McCartney’s road to Beijing was different than from four years.
This time around he earned a coach’s bid to make the team, serving as somewhat a tip of the hat to his hard work.
His preparation for Beijing was thrown off by severe flooding of the Iowa River in mid-June. While McCartney’s home was left unscathed, many of the roads he regularly trains on near his home in Coalville, Iowa, were under water.
“The whole town was devastated. Everything that was in the 500-year flood plain got hit,” he said. “It did affect my training a little bit. I had to ride through cornfields to avoid some of the flooded areas. They closed a lot of roads and bridges because they thought there were damaged.”
By early July, he returned to Europe and enjoyed some of his best results of the season.
He was fourth overall in the Sachsen Tour and eighth in the Tour of Denmark, where he helped Team CSC-Saxo Bank teammate Matti Breschel win the race’s “queen stage.”
After Beijing, he returns to Europe to keep bashing elbows. Up next will be the GP Ouest Plouay, the Vuelta a España (where he won a stage last year) and possibly a trip down under for the Sun Tour in October.
While he’s not wide-eyed around the peloton, he admits he’s still surprised by what he’s seen in the Olympics.
The U.S. team is staying at the Athlete’s Village where more than 2000 are housed during the Games.
“Staying in the Athlete’s Village is pretty cool. We see this big, eight-foot-tall Russian women coming in,” he said. “The other day, the U.S. basketball team was in there. They we’re getting mobbed.”
McCartney said they don’t have to worry about over-exposure.
“We don’t get mobbed,” he said. “There’s Carlos Sastre over there – he just won the Tour de France, and he’s sitting there all by himself.”
