As it turned out, the weather over the first part of the week was not great, to say the least. The thought of standing around waiting for a stage start in cold rainy weather wasn't particularly appealing, particularly since we knew that the riders weren't exactly going to be waiting around outside mingling with fans prior to the race if the weather was awful. And we would have had to get up and leave rather early (for a vacation) for the 1-hour drive from my brother's place in the East Bay area to San Jose. But then, looking more closely at the race profile, we realized that one of the sprint points was outside of Livermore, a lot closer than San Jose so we'd have more time to get there. So, that became our goal.
The race log/schedule suggested the racers would get to the sprint point by about 1:30 pm or later. We got to Livermore and had a bit of difficulty trying to find where exactly the sprint point was - we did find the race route, but no indication where the sprint would be (or else we were already past it at that point). It was almost 12:30 pm, so we went for lunch first then came back towards the route - the roads had already been blocked off, so we ended up at a corner past the sprint point (with a convenient parking lot for a park and school nearby). There were some people starting to gather, and best yet, it had stopped raining! Before any of the race came through, it appeared as if many of the classes at the nearby school came out to watch as well.
Pretty soon, a Livestrong van pulled up and they started handing out yellow Livestrong chalk and Lance posters. Ed got busy writing on the road with the chalk, not an approved Livestrong message but appreciated by PdC'ers...
And underneath, one for the DPF'ers out there:
I was monitoring the race progress on my Blackberry via the CN ticker; overall race leader Levi Leipheimer had apparently crashed before the sprint and we weren't sure if he would have caught up by the time he got to us. There was a breakaway of 4 riders, and before they arrived there were several rounds of CHP and other police and official vehicles. It was useful that they had one race vehicle giving some updates over a loudspeaker to the crowd. And then the break was there: Bauke Mollema (Rabobank), Brad White (OUCH-Maxxis), Jeff Louder (BMC Racing) and Brian Vandborg (Liquigas).
A few minutes later, the peloton came through (Levi had apparently caught up by then but we couldn't really see him) - Ed put his camera on auto-repeat shooting, which means then later you get to try to figure out who exactly you have photos of. You can't really see any of the race numbers because of the angle and all the rain jackets, so resorting to face recognition (and other characteristics such as Lance rides a different coloured bike than the rest of his team):
Chris Horner 3rd from left at the front, in black, with Lance Armstrong (yellow and black helmet) just behind:
Lance Armstrong at the far left (and Mark Cavendish further back, 2nd from the right):
Mark Cavendish on the left not looking too happy(#22), and I think George Hincapie 3rd from the left:
Peloton rounding the corner:
And then it was all over. In case there was any doubt that the publicity for the race was entirely based on Lance Armstrong, here's a photo of one of the banners in downtown San Jose that we saw later that day, as well as one of the billboard on top of Niketown on Union Square in San Francisco.
(at some point, Ed will probably get around to posting all of our vacation pics at the usual smugmug location...)
1 comment:
livermore? trying to remember, was that the first or second sprint of the day? we were at the second one.
so close. very nice.
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