This thread is just for fun. Had a thought while lying awake last night with my post-vaccine fever. Disregarding all the “real world” reasons why it would never happen, if you could organize a grand tour in the US, what would it look like? How would you lay out the route/stages? Start and finish cities? There’s so much varied terrain across the country, I feel like you could put together some cool routes.
I’d go East to West so the Rockies would be more towards the end. Prologue TT on the east coast, a few days in the Appalachians, some crosswind fun in the midwest, maybe a quick deviation to West Texas (but I’m biased as a Texan) before hitting the Rockies. Finish off with a couple of hilly days in the coastal range and then a flat ending along the So Cal coast.
Truth is, we have enough land mass and varied topography in the USA to host multiple Tours, without overlap.
From heli shots of the causeway through Florida Keys, to the Appalachians, to the rolling hills of Texas, to the epic California coast, to the Pacific NW, and the forests New England, I sincerely believe a world audience would devour the coverage.
I have often daydreamed about a Tour of the Finger Lakes (upstate New York). Go for October so you get cool weather and the leaves changing, just loop around the lakes, rolling hills for days. The wineries would be ecstatic.
No worries, just want to say they’re willing to share climbs in Europe. The dauphine or Paris-nice occasionally have the same climbs that will later be seen in the Tour and nobody seems to mind. It’s often seen as recon. Plus with the tour of California “on hiatus” any concerns of overlap would be moot anyway. I wouldn’t mind seeing mount baldy or lake tahoe get attacked twice in a year, there’s multiple courses that can weave in certain features and it’s the riders that make the stage less the course. And I can’t imagine Utah would mind the extra tourism attention garnered by a US grand tour rolling through showing off the scenery.
but of course, i was just mentioning it as an example. I would bet a pretty decent hilly/mountain stage could run through the adirondacks finishing on the approach road for white face mountain. decent hilly fun to be had all over, just smaller mountains on the east coast.
Figures for existing Tours are pretty miserable. See the last TDF for example which was considered one of the best for viewership. Eurosport had a peak of 360k viewers on stage 1. By stage 2 they’re down to 140k.
Best was FTV2 with Alaphilippe in yellow and all the French tuned in. Peak viewership around 3.6 million on FTV2 and massively reduced all other times.
There’s a reason why we don’t have more Tours, they’re expensive and costs are hard to cover. Same applies for smaller races. Actually saw the Scottish race organiser go bust recently heavily in debt to stakeholders. Commentators etc unpaid.
I’d love to see a really big US Tour, would have to be interesting location wise. I never saw a single full stage of the Tour of California. Too mind numbing. But so is most stage racing for the general population.
The solution is probably to speed it all up and visually enhance the experience through AR and VR and data analytics. eBikes with rider power meters and onboard cameras so viewers can select any rider in the peloton to watch POV style from their phone app at any time and see all data they wish would be a massive step towards a sustainable and enjoyable mass watching viewership.
Teams also need reworked conceptually. Who on earth gives a monkeys about multiple hyphenated obscure sponsorship names teams. That doesn’t fit into tribal identity dynamics which make other sports so popular. Other sports centererd around popular players are almost always not team sports (tennis for example).
Cycling as a sport is regressive and you can thank the UCI and traditionalists who bought into their self servicing charade all these years for holding it back.
We should have exciting global Tours and cycling World Cup type events where teams compete in a league that matters, something where the overall structure of a year’s racing has meaning in a way a larger population can follow year round and spend money year round supporting it.
For now it’s just a niche and within that niche we have increasingly small niches.
Popularising racing has wider societal benefits in getting commuters on bikes, diversity and better pay for riders, especially women, hence why I’ve little time for traditionalists.
An even bigger nightmare is the fact that almost all the roads in the U.S. are administered by local governments. The feds only administer the interstate highways and freeways. The state governments handle a few more. But the vast majority of roads you’d want to race on are governed by counties or cities. Can you imagine the titanic task it would be to coordinate road closures and policing with hundreds of different transportation bureaus and law enforment agencies across the country?
