OUCH’s Floyd Landis, along with most major domestic teams, highlight the Battenkill start list

By Andrew Bernstein

It’s a format not commonly seen in American races, but team managers preparing for this weekend’s Tour of the Battenkill say their teams are ready for the one-day race’s combination of dirt and paved roads and steep climbs.

Dubbed by organizers as “America’s Queen of the Classics,” the race is held on a combination of dirt roads winding through dairy farms and undulating hills at the foot of Vermont’s Green Mountains. The race starts and finishes in Cambridge, a small village in eastern New York. The scenery and terrain justifiably draw comparisons to Belgium’s “bergs,” and its spot on the calendar, coinciding with Europe’s cobbled classics, is no accident, attracting racers looking for results in a race offering a different feel than your standard office park crit.

Of standouts planning to take the start in Sunday’s Tour of the Battenkill Pro Invitational, Floyd Landis is likely the biggest name, but his OUCH Pro Cycling team will see a challenge from BMC Racing riders Tony Cruz and Jackson Stewart, both recently returned from racing European classics including Paris-Roubaix and Schelderprijs — where Cruz finished fourth.

OUCH manager Mike Tamayo said his team’s chances, or those of any other team, will depend on racers’ ability to handle changing course conditions. The 200-kilometer race, contested on two laps of a 100-kilometer loop, will take racers over about 30 miles of dirt roads, broken into eight sections.

“It’ll be interesting to see who from these teams can handle diving onto a dirt road at 30 miles per hour,” Tamayo said. “It’s going to be an interesting dynamic.”

With the caliber of the teams lining up Sunday, fans anywhere along the course can expect an exciting day of racing.

“In one-day races you’ve pretty much gotta leave everything out there on the course,” said Glenn Mitchell, manager of the Bissell Professional Cycling Team, which will bring six riders. “We don’t have a huge team going, so we don’t want to miss a break. If you miss a dangerous move, you could have to use too much energy bringing it back, so we want to have one person in every break, let the course do the work, and wait until the third hour to see who’s doing well.”

The Pro Invitational is a new addition to the five year-old Tour of the Battenkill. The Sunday event will be the exclamation point on Saturday’s pro-amateur event, for which about 1,700 racers are registered. On Saturday, amateur racers in 17 categories will race over 100 kilometers, while pros will contest an 82-mile race over many of the same roads to be featured Sunday.

Although promoter Dieter Drake was not successful in a last-minute bid to have the race placed on the UCI calendar when the Tour de Georgia announced it would not hold a race in 2009, the race still attracted a top-flight field of domestic pro teams.

Lining up with OUCH, Bissell, and BMC are 19 other teams, including Team Type 1, Kelly Benefit Strategies, DLP Racing, Team Mountain Khakis, and a slew of regional elite teams, including Spooky-Kenda, GS Mengoni, Bike Reg-Cannondale, IF Racing, and the Empire Cycling Team, among others.

The Canadian UCI-registered Team Planet Energy, managed by Steve Bauer, will bring 2008 winner Bruno Langlois.

“You can never underestimate your competition, and we’ve had a hard travel schedule leading up to this, but we’re coming with the plausible expectation of winning,” said BMC manager Gavin Chilcott. “We have as good a chance as anybody there.”

In addition to Landis, Tamayo said the race’s dirt roads could suit Tim Johnson, OUCH’s multi-time national cyclocross champion.

“It could be an advantage for him,” Tamayo said, “if the weather’s bad, it’ll definitely go his way — if the roads become wet it’ll create a disparity between riders.”

Chilcott said his team might not ordinarily line up for a race not listed on either the UCI or NRC schedules, but said BMC was excited to support the development of one-day racing in the United States.

“Dieter Drake has a very solid vision of a one-day classic style event that can push the limit of the kinds of courses you can do. We feel that our team is well prepared because of the races we do in Europe, but more importantly, we support the development of races like this, so we want to show our support by participation in the event,” Chilcott said. “The United States is doing a good job at developing stage races right now, but we don’t have many solid one-day events.”

Still, Chilcott and other manager said they hoped ToB would be able to secure a spot on a national or international calendar in coming years.

“We’re hoping it has good exposure and next year it will upgrade,” said Glen Mitchell, manager of the Bissell Pro Cycling Team.

UCI or NRC status means the chance for teams to accrue points in various ratings systems — points that Mitchell said are used to evaluate riders and in recruiting sponsors.

Promoters are expecting as many as 50,000 spectators to line the roads in New York’s rural Washington County — no small feat considering the county’s population is 61,000.

FILED UNDER: News / Road TAGS: Tour of the Battenkill