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A Fred's Eye View: The velvet rope in Georgia; house guests in Redlands

Published: Apr. 13, 2005

The team start list for the third annual Dodge Tour de Georgia reminds me of the guest list for a trendy Hollywood club on a Friday night. In are the superstars, hometown heroes, good-looking up-and-comers, more Euro-trash than a Kraftwerk concert and a few darn lucky regular Joes.

Who's out? The somewhat jaded schmoes of the domestic peloton.

Now, being kept out of a club is an easy enough concept to grasp – it’s usually explained by a beastly man with forearms as big as your thigh. But being shot down by the Georgia crew is a tad more on the subtle side.

Take the Webcor Builders team. Based on previous results, Webcor arguably had a realistic expectation of an invitation to the big race this year. After all, the team shone last year with Chris Horner on the podium in third. Horner may be off to Saunier Duval this year, but in his place is Dave Clinger, who won stage 7 in 2003 and finished eighth on GC that year. The team also has its perennial sprint threat, Charles Dionne, who scored a podium finish in stage 5 of last year’s race.

Indeed, Webcor was so sure of racing Georgia in 2005 that it set aside the necessary travel budget for the event and made sure to keep the week wide open. The team was, so to speak, all dressed up and ready to party.

But weeks before the race, the invitation still hadn’t come.

“We would really like to know who’s in at this point,” said an obviously concerned team director Frank Scioscia a month before race day. “I’ve been hearing all sorts of rumors swirling around, but nothing concrete. They need to let us know one way or the other, but I don’t know how anybody could reasonably say we don’t belong at this race.”

The team spent the early months of this year playing the waiting game, no doubt checking the mailbox thrice daily, hoping a big peach-colored invitation would soon arrive.

It didn’t.

No phone call, either.

When Scioscia contacted the race coordinators after the initial team start list was released, sans Webcor, he got the bad news in an e-mail.

“You’d like to think they were trying to field the most competitive race, but obviously that’s not the way they’re thinking,” he said.

Of course everyone expects big showings from domestic teams Health Net-Maxxis, Navigators Insurance and Jittery Joes-Kalahari. But outfits like the national U-23 team and the TIAA-CREF squad – both of which were essentially pack fodder at last week’s Redlands Bicycle Classic – made the Georgia short list. Why, you ask? Well, it seems that fielding the most competitive race is not executive director Stan Holm's only objective.

“Obviously we want to field a competitive race,” he explained. “We have some of the best teams in the world here. But a big part of our purpose is also to help educate and spread cycling to younger generations. We’re always going to be partial to younger riders like the U-23 national team.”

Holm added that Webcor was “on the bubble” of making it in to this year's race. One could surely make the case that the team belongs on the racing side of that bubble as much as Eric Wohlberg’s Symmetrics squad, Colavita-Sutter Home or Kodak Galleries-Sierra Nevada.

But with a wealth of European and ProTour teams at this year’s Georgia, the two U-23 teams a shoe-in, and Health Net-Maxxis and Navigators undisputed powerhouses, there wasn’t a lot of room for anyone else.

In that kind of game – fair or not – someone is always going to end up the loser, and this year Webcor will have to wait outside while the others head in to the party.

The more poignant question is whether this trend will continue at Georgia. In its debut year, the race was open to smaller domestic teams like the haphazard West Virginia Cycling Team and Ofoto-Lombardi sports, which also rode last year.

But with a former podium-placing team sidelined for this year’s tour, the future could see even fewer domestic teams in the mix. While Holm is steadfast that he doesn’t want Georgia to “turn into a European race,” one can’t help but wonder if economics could change that.

After all, last year an estimated 750,000 tourists clogged Georgia’s roads to watch America’s second-favorite Texan battle Europeans on American turf. According to race officials, those tourists pumped $80 million into the state’s pockets in six days.

This year the state is predicting 1.2 million visitors. And if the crowds want to see ProTour teams race, chances are that’s what Georgia will give them. If that happens, there’s no telling which schmoes will be left standing outside the party, trying to sweet-talk the bouncer, next year.

House guests
A good deal of my time at last week’s Redlands Bicycle Classic was spent cruising the broad avenues of Redlands, California, horribly lost. I was in constant search of the numerous suburban homes that, for one week a year, open their doors to an army of skinny, chamois-wearing bike people.

You see, unlike other races, where finding a team’s hangout is no more difficult than locating the cheapest motel in town, at Redlands, the task requires basic skills in map-reading, directions-following, and neighborhood navigation. A host of skills that I apparently seem to lack.

No one is perfect.

Still, every time I did finally track down one of these host houses, the racers dazzled me with tales of oven-fresh banana bread, soft beds, and other examples of stellar hospitality. It seems that the good people of Redlands are not simply hosts for a bike race, but hosts for the racers themselves. And I could tell from the attitudes of the racers – many of whom have logged more motel time than Willy Loman - that the courtesy of the community was a welcome break from the norm.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if these hosts were somehow the unlucky losers of some sort of bike-geek lottery. I don’t know about you, but the thought of 15 ravenous complete strangers leaving grease stains on my furniture for a week isn’t exactly my idea of a good time. After all, the family members who took it upon themselves to host my collegiate swim team never openly complained, but they definitely hid the valuables and made sure to stock up on air freshener before we rolled in. And, to me at least, it always seemed that their smiles were a bit bigger as our van pulled out of the driveway than when it pulled in.

But to my surprise, the host families at Redlands actually appear to enjoy housing the teams. They volunteer for the task, often requesting that the same team come back to their house year after year; many have been housing teams for more than a decade. At the Jelly Belly stronghold, a great mural of past team photos going back to the early ‘90s adorned the wall.

At Casa de Webcor (usually known as the Rendler residence), Dan Rendler showed me his scrapbook of photos from the decade he has housed teams. The book is a virtual Chris Horner hairstyle guide, showing the Mercury, Saturn, Prime Alliance, and finally Webcor-jersey-wearing Horner sporting the ratty ponytail, SoCal tough-guy beard, and Mr. Clean skin top. It is quite the artifact.

Still, I left Redlands with a burning question: When is someone going to propose media housing?