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Inside Cycling: Aisner and the Coors Classic

Published: Apr. 29, 2005
Inside Cycling: Aisner and the Coors Classic
Inside Cycling: Aisner and the Coors Classic

America’s “breakthrough” professionals in the early 1980s, Greg LeMond and Jonathan Boyer, both developed their stage-racing skills at Colorado’s Red Zinger Bicycle Classic, which became the Coors Classic in 1980. No other bike race in the United States has had so much influence on the sport. Not only did it develop riders, it brought new ones into the sport, provided untold publicity (local, national and international), and made Boulder one of the epicenters of American cycling.

While it was the race that was responsible for all those important developments, it was the man behind the race — Michael Aisner — who provided the platform to make them happen. Aisner, who was raised in Florida, came to the Colorado race as an ace marketing professional.

Among his previous assignments was obtaining worldwide publicity for French actress Brigitte Bardot’s campaign against the killing of baby seals for their fur in the Arctic. And he has an ongoing consulting contract with another strong animal activist, famed chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall.

After being hired by Zinger founder Mo Siegel of Celestial Seasonings to publicize the new bike race, Aisner was so taken with the sport that he bought the event from Siegel for a dollar, and then re-launched it as the Coors International Bicycle Classic in 1980. The sponsorship of the Coors brewery, which is based just down the road from Boulder in Golden, Colorado, opened up the potential of the race, both in expanding its length and increasing the quality of the field.

Coors didn’t extend an open checkbook to Aisner — far from it — and he had to save money wherever he could. Whereas the Tour de France is organized from plush offices within sight of the Eiffel Tower, the Coors Classic (which strived to be America’s Tour) was run out of Aisner’s basement in the (then) low-cost Table Mesa neighborhood of Boulder. If you poked your head around the corner, you did get a nice view of the Flatirons, the signature red-rock formation that dominates the town — and maybe that was better than being located in a metropolis.

In other words, Aisner’s organization had no pretensions. The (very) small staff worked enormous hours to make the race the best it could be. Besides squeezing as much sponsorship money out of Coors as possible, Aisner and his team obtained a whole raft of presenting sponsors, associate sponsors and official suppliers; they negotiated hosting deals with towns like Aspen, Denver, Grand Junction and Vail (and later took the race to California, Nevada and even Hawaii); they set the challenging routes, obtained the necessary support of the UCI, and paid for top European and South American national teams to attend the race; and they all worked a few different jobs on the race itself (Aisner, for example, doubled up as race announcer and overall organizer).

One of Aisner’s major coups was getting the mighty Soviet Union national squad to come to the Coors Classic in 1981 — at the height of the Cold War, and less than a year after the United States had boycotted the Moscow Olympics over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Even though they were “amateurs,” the Soviet cyclists were the match of any European pro team.

Besides its leader Sergei Soukhoroutchenkov, the newly crowned Olympic road champion, the Red Army team boasted such extraordinary athletes as Yuri Kashirin (the current Canadian national coach), Yuri Barinov and Oleg Logvin. Logvin and Kashirin both won Olympic gold medals in the team time trial. And the team had the immense experience of their coach/director Viktor Kapitanov (the 1960 Olympic road champion) to guide them.

The Soviets dictated the tactics of the nine-day race, but they could never get rid of a 20-year-old neo-pro named LeMond, who had the support of a young Renault-Gitane team, which in reality wasn’t much support at all. Even so, LeMond eventually outclimbed the Olympic champs in the Rocky Mountains to score an improbable overall victory.

That 1981 edition was a race that the general public could relate to: a homegrown kid beating the Evil Empire — although the Soviet riders were a big attraction wherever they went, including a July 4 fireworks display at the University of Colorado’s Folsom Field. And a crowd estimated at 40,000 showed up for the race finale around North Boulder Park.

The NBP criterium stage a few years’ earlier was the first bike race ever seen by Davis Phinney, then a schoolboy, who would go on to earn some first-time accolades of his own for American cycling. Phinney was a Boulder native, but the Coors Classic caused many others to move to the Colorado town and help make it one of the most influential places in expanding the sport of bike racing in the U.S.

In upcoming weeks I’ll write more about LeMond as he headed toward more breakthroughs, along with the development of North America’s first professional team, sponsored by 7-Eleven. So on both sides of the Atlantic, American cycling was on the move. And a big part of it was the Coors Classic and Michael Aisner.