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Op-Ed: Fields of dreams
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The upcoming Tour of California will showcase one of best fields ever assembled in North America. With current and former champions of the Tour de France, Paris-Roubaix, world championships and other big races scheduled to attend, many have asked - is this the best field ever assembled in the United States? Let's take a look.
Before the California race started bringing top European teams to this continent, there were other great stage races that boasted star-studded fields, starting with Canada’s Tour de la Nouvelle France in the early-1970s through the final edition of the Tour DuPont in 1996. But there’s no question that the three world road championships held on this side of the Atlantic have drawn the hottest lists of starters in North American history.
World championships
The 1974 world road championships were held on the tough Mt. Royal circuit in Montréal, and the pro men’s race produced a last lap breakaway the ended in a sprint victory for the sport’s most winning racer Eddy Merckx of Belgium over the legendary Frenchman Raymond Poulidor.The worlds would return to Canada in 2003 at Hamilton, Ontario, where another late break saw surprise Spaniard Igor Astarloa “steal” the title from his better known compatriot Alejandro Valverde, with Belgium’s great classics rider Peter Van Petegem in third.
The only time the world pro road title race was held in the United States was in 1986 at the Air Force Academy circuit in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The Italian superstar Moreno Argentin scored the rainbow jersey in a two-man break ahead of the excellent Charly Mottet of France, while former world champ Giuseppe Saronni of Italy took the bronze-medal sprint.
World Cup
North America had its own World Cup classic in the early-1990s, the Grand Prix des Amériques in Montréal. The 1990 edition probably saw its strongest field when two-time Paris-Roubaix champ Franco Ballerini was the winner ahead of Swiss strongman Thomas Wegmüller, a Roubaix runner-up in 1988.
Philadelphia’s famed International Championship once toyed with the idea of getting World Cup status, and though it has seen some big-name winners its 20-odd years of existence it has never boasted a truly great field.
Its almost 40 years now since European stars first came to these shores for a major stage race. That was for Québec’s Tour de la Nouvelle France in 1971 and ’72. It was a weeklong race of mostly flat stages dominated by sprinters, and both editions were won by Belgium’s Guido Reybroeck, who was the Mark Cavendish of his day. The strength of the field can be gauged by some of the event’s stage winners, including 1968 Tour de France winner Jan Janssen, Belgium’s Mr. Paris-Roubaix Roger De Vlaeminck, and famed Italian sprinter Dino Zandegu.
An early attempt to establish major stage racing in the U.S. was made by the organizers of the Tour de France, who put on the first (and only) Tour of America in 1983. It was a four-stage race held in Virginia, with a finish on a circuit next to the White House in Washington D.C. The overall winner, thanks to winning the time trial that was included, was the multiple world pursuit champ Bert Oosterbosch of the Netherlands, with Australian star Phil Anderson in second. The field at that race suffered because there was a scheduling clash with Paris-Roubaix, so multiple Tour champion Bernard Hinault returned home for that classic after being the official starter for the Tour of America,
Coors Classic
Hinault would race in the U.S. though before his retirement, at both the 1985 and 1986 editions of the Coors International Classic. He was runner-up to teammate Greg LeMond in ’85, while Hinault reversed the standings the next year, with Phil Anderson in third.
That 1986 Coors saw the strongest field the race ever assembled, and because it immediately followed LeMond’s first Tour victory over Hinault, it attracted huge crowds from its prologue start in San Francisco, through Northern California and the Sierras, Nevada and Colorado.
The final time trial at Niwot, near Boulder, would prove to be the last TT victory of Hinault’s storied career. He retired from the sport at the end of that season. The final stage of the 1986 Coors, in north Boulder, saw a solo victory by Argentin, who went on to win the world title a week later in Colorado Springs.
Trump/DuPont
The Coors Classic bred the East Coast’s Tour de Trump, which morphed into the Tour DuPont. It received the highest ever ranking on the UCI international calendar in 1996, given the same category as the Tour of Switzerland, the Dauphiné Libéré and Paris-Nice.Of course, that ’96 edition was dominated by Lance Armstrong, who demonstrated the qualities that would later take him to seven Tour de France titles. His main opponent that year was the Swiss star Tony Rominger, a past Giro d’Italia champion and three-time Vuelta a España winner, who eventually placed third behind Armstrong.
Thirteen years after that last DuPont win, Armstrong returns to American stage racing in California. His presence inevitably tilts the balance in favor of those who claim that this will be the greatest ever field of starters in an American stage race. But those worlds’ fields were stronger.
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