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2006 Tour of California Comes to San Jose!
On Tuesday February 21st my brother-in-law Lou and I took the afternoon off and headed to downtown San Jose to watch the finish of Stage 2 of the inaugural Tour of California. Many of the world's top cycling teams, along with their best riders, took part in this week-long Tour of much of the Golden State.
Cycling fans will immediately recognize many of the names of the riders in the field, which included dozens of the top cyclists in the world. On a gorgeous sunny early-spring day in the bay area, Stage 2 was won by Lance Armstrong's longtime lieutenant (and winner of one of the big-mountain stages of last year's Tour de France) "Big George" Hincapie, pictured in his time-trial gear at right. The actual sprint finish was over in the blink of an eye, but prior to that the thousands of people that had gathered to cheer the riders to the finish got to watch the race action on a big-screen TV that had been set up near the finishing line, enjoy the festival atmosphere and check out all the sponsors' booths and tents. Not having had much of a lunch, we lingered especially long at the Clif Bar booth, where there were generous free samples of about a dozen different flavors of their famous energy bars to be had. ("Bicycle Race? What (burp) bicycle race?").
About a minute after the bulk of the field came through the finish the police let people walk across the finishing straight if they wanted to get a better vantage point for the arrival of the rest of the riders (who were as much as 20-plus minutes down the road, and we did so.
Just as I started crossing, I noticed racers Floyd Landis (pictured at left), a.k.a. "The World's Fastest Mennonite" - which is literally true, since he hails from a traditional Mennonite community in Pennsylvania, and is surely faster on his bicycle than any horse-drawn carriage would be - and Dave Zabriskie (who wore the leader's yellow jersey for a few days in last year's Tour de France before suffering a nasty crash in the team time trial) cruising toward the intersection behind me on their bikes, chatting amiably - they'd doubled back beyond the finishing line and were heading toward their respective team vans. A little while later we were hanging out near the Phonak van (that of Floyd's team), and wound up standing next to a couple young ladies, modestly dressed and not unattractive, and wearing the traditional white lace caps of Amish and Mennonite women. I can see the tabloid headlines now:
Floyd Landis stalked relentlessly by cycling-mad Mennonite groupies!
Will some lucky young lady get to hitch this top rider to her buggy?
http://hogranch.com/mayer/ToCA2006.html -- Last Revised: 22 Feb 2006
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