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Tour of America planner: 'I’m crazy, but I’m not that crazy'
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Frank Arokiasamy, the man behind the proposed 27-stage Tour of America in 2008, realizes racers and race fans are skeptical of his plans for the race from New York City to San Francisco. Nonetheless, he has hired a 25-person team to handle logistics, sponsorship, team management and other hurdles — including convincing people that he is serious.
“I’ve been working on this for the last five years,” Arokiasamy said. “It started, actually, while I was watching the Tour de France, July 2002. I was watching the American really dominate the race. I got frustrated because … I couldn’t watch the race, I couldn’t watch Lance race, I couldn’t see U.S. Postal race [in the United States].”
Arokiasamy, a business consultant in California with a Ph.D. in economics, said he understands some people think he is overly optimistic to run a stage race through more than 20 states.
“I’m crazy, but I’m not that crazy,” he said. “I did a lot of investigation. Investigating what needs to be done to make this work. I talked with hundreds of people. More listening than talking to them.”
He then hired a crew of 25 people, including former pro racers, “powerful people who knew what they were doing.”
“We had a retreat, and got together and we talked about whether this was achievable,” he said of the weeklong event held in a rented house. “And we all came out unanimously and said that it was.”
Putting on a single-state race, such as the Tour of California, requires a massive amount of logistical, governmental, financial and volunteer support. Multiply that times 22, and you have Arokiasamy’s Tour of America.
Another huge hurdle would be the money. His team has budgeted the event at $30 million, $11 million of which would be prize money. Arokiasamy plans to achieve this with 27 sponsors, each coughing up $1 million. He already has an investment fund from an unnamed source funding the start-up.
Working in corporate America has given the project a head start, he said.
“We started having serious negotiations,” he said. “At this point it would be inappropriate to talk about who these people are. There will be a press conference sometime in the future where we do show you who is going to put up the money, and who is going to ante up.”
Should the race actually happen, the overall winner would get $1 million. But unlike other races, every last finisher of the stage race would take home a check, he said.
“We are going to pay everyone who finishes the race a minimum of $5000,” he said. “We are going to dish out $218,000 every day. The reason why we would do that is to get the best cyclists, the best teams to America to race.”
Reactions to the news at Interbike where the race was announced were fairly uniform — “what?!”
Slipstream-Chipotle team director Jonathan Vaughters was among those in the highly skeptical camp. Jittery Joe’s rider Cesar Grajales, who is going to Rock Racing next year, said it “would be great,” but he isn’t holding his breath.
Yet another obstacle is the length. At 4000 to 4500 miles, the Tour of America would be more than 2000 miles longer than the Tour de France. (The 2007 Tour was 2207 miles.) At a time when long events are coming under fire for health concerns, a race of this distance isn’t immediately winning favor from the UCI.
Arokiasamy said he did speak with the UCI, representatives of which said the same thing many racers said — “it’s too long.”
“That is something that we will look at. And talk to the teams and find out what they want,” he said. “Everyone is right. Some of these stages are too long.”
The preliminary stage framework was just a starting point that could be trimmed down once his team starts looking at the specifics of each day’s stage, Arokiasamy said.
But all in all, he said, the idea is to go big.
“In some sense, it may be overboard. It may be [swinging] for the fences,” he said. “But then again, hey, this is America. That’s what we do. We want big. We want powerful. We want wonderful. We want grueling.”
Time will tell whether Arokiasamy gets what he wants.
