for the VC Reporter, 5/14/09
Ventura lifestyle is about to get considerably faster, at least for the weekend, when the inaugural Ventura Bike Stage Race comes to downtown bringing, stage racing back to the county for the first time in a decade. Hundreds of racers will test their mettle against challenging courses at face-numbing speeds, the inexorable clock and each other over two days and three stages, with some $15,000 in cash and prizes on the line. Sponsored by Community Memorial Health Systems and the Amgen Cycling Club, the event’s proceeds will benefit the “Breakaway From Cancer” initiative.
Among the event’s hundreds of riders will be numerous national champions from around the world, including Australian National Champion Rory Sutherland, 2006 Tour de France winner Floyd Landis and former Ventura County resident Thurlow Rogers, a national and world champion and veteran of the 1984 Olympic Games who recently moved to San Diego.
The event kicks off on Saturday morning with the individual time trial, in which racers commence in 30-second intervals, racing the clock over a 1.7-mile course from Main Street past City Hall out to Prospect Street and back. They’ll have precious little time to recover before the second stage commences, the Criterium, a fast, freewheeling pack sprint around a three-quarter mile downtown loop with a high-speed descent on Oak Street and a dash up Main Street to the finish. Day 2 moves the event to Ojai for the third and final stage, a 5.7-mile circuit race through the scenic valley. The results of all three races are tallied to determine the overall winner.
While each event is crafted to test such disparate skills as endurance, climbing and sprinting, it’s often the fast and unpredictable Criterium that emerges as the crowd favorite, packing upward of one hundred riders together at top speed to navigate the tight municipal course, jockeying for position over numerous laps and more than an hour to be in position for the final sprint to the finish. “When you watch a group of that many riders packed so closely and at such speed, from outside it can look really chaotic,” explains national and world champion, Olympic silver medalist and Ventura native Mari Holden. “But when you’re inside of it, the feel is totally different – the riders are going with the flow in a very organized manner.”
The Criterium comes down to tactics and endurance, as stronger riders set a fast pace to try and break away, or to tire out the field before the headlong rush of the bell lap. It is not unheard of for zealous cyclists to resort to unsavory practices such as elbowing each other or even tossing a water bottle into the spokes of a competitor. A key point in the event will occur as riders plunge down Oak Street to make the hard left into the Main Street sprint, and with so much energy and motion synchronized into an interdependent flow, unpredictability is the ever-present status quo. “Crashes are an inevitable part of bike racing,” Holden notes. “With so many riders so close together, sometimes it’s unavoidable” – as the pack negotiates the course at speeds upwards of 40 miles per hour, if one rider falls he can take out dozens of others with him. Given the phased nature of the race, where all stages count toward the final result, a fall might not necessarily end a racer’s overall campaign. However, since a key aspect of stage racing tests a rider’s ability to recover from one stage and face the next refreshed, a high-speed close encounter with the pavement — and the resulting possibility of broken bones, contusions or worse — can spell disaster for an athlete’s chances.
Running point for the event is Ventura local Colby Allen, a project manager for county biotech mainstay Amgen and also a rider in the 900-strong Amgen Cycling Club. “Road racing is California’s No. 1 spectator sport; some 2.2 million spectators turned out for the last Tour of California,” Allen notes. “This is a sport where you don’t have to buy a ticket, or even go into a stadium, and you get to watch some of the most highly trained, competitive athletes in the world go head to head — on machines that most of us have known how to ride since we were 5 years old.”
Holden likewise notes that the race celebrates a skill that nearly all of us share. She is returning home for the event to host a women’s two-day cycling clinic and ride. For the retired champion, the event is a bit of a dream come true: “I always wanted to see a race like this in Ventura,” she states. “There are so many great cyclists in the area, and it’s such a great place to ride.” Holden’s clinic is styled to promote the sport as the fun and accessible centerpiece of a healthy lifestyle for nearly anyone. “Many women are intimidated by the idea of racing,” she notes. “It can seem so technical and challenging.” Her clinics demonstrate the simplicity and universality of the sport, an ethic that is reflected in the structure of the stage racing, which assigns racers to competitive classifications based on their number of previous races, performance, age and gender. Clinic information and registration can be found at www.active.com, where participants can register for both the Saturday clinic and a Sunday road ride.
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