International Bicycle Race : Team Is Too Strong, So Competition Is a Joke

VAIL, Colo. —  The powerful 7-Eleven cycling team, which set out to make the United States a world-class force in bicycle racing, may inadvertently be undermining the Coors International, America’s premier race.

It is a simple case of overkill.

The Southland Corp.’s convenience store chain corralled so many of this country’s top riders that competition in this year’s Coors 19-stage race has become a joke.

There have been 15 stages since the 1,376-mile event started Aug. 5 in Hawaii. Riders for 7-Eleven have won medals in all 15, have won five gold medals and stand 1-2-3-4 in overall results with only four stages remaining.

The dominance of Andy Hampsten, Jeff Pierce, Davis Phinney, Raul Alcala and Ron Kiefel is so complete that when the tour reached Colorado last weekend, 7-Eleven riders finished 1-2-3 in both the Tour of the Moon Saturday and the Aspen Circuit Race Sunday.

Olympian Roy Knickman, riding for Team Gore-Tex, is the best of the others and he is nearly 18 minutes behind Pierce, the overall leader.

Competition is so lacking that the 7-Eleven riders have taken to passing wins out among themselves.

Alcala, the brilliant young Mexican from Monterrey, won the first two races in Hawaii. Hampsten, the team leader in the Tour de France, won the Grand Junction Tour of the Moon, an 83-mile ride through the Colorado National Monument’s seeming lunarscape.

“I’d never won a stage before, and my teammates love me and let me win because they know how much it means to me,” Hampsten said.

The next day, in the Aspen-to-Copper Mountain ride, Hampsten took it so seriously that he wore a Groucho Marx mask and mustache for nearly the entire distance. It wasn’t until he started over 12,095-foot Independence Pass that he took it off.

“Going up the last hill, when I began to have trouble breathing, was the end of the mask, but it was a lot of fun,” he said.

Phinney, considered one of the strongest criterium riders in the world, won the Aspen Circuit Race through the streets of that ski resort.

Hampsten became a double winner Wednesday with a record-breaking 26-minute 33.43-second ride in a 10-mile time trial from Vail Village almost to the top of Vail Pass.

The time-trial course, starting from Vail’s 8,154 feet above sea level and climbing to 9,570 feet, is the highest in the world. The start is higher than any of the mountain passes in the Alps crossed during the Tour de France.

Hampsten’s time bettered the record of 26:56 set last year by five-time Tour de France champion Bernard Hinault of France. Hinault’s 1986 ride was 50 seconds faster than anyone else’s and was a major factor in his becoming the Coors champion.

Hampsten discounted his breaking Hinault’s record because he was aided by a brisk tailwind.

“I’m glad I broke it, but that wasn’t my objective,” Hampsten said. “The tailwind made conditions much different from last year.”

Pierce, who is an anomaly in that he lives and trains for mountain races in San Diego instead of in the mountains, won perhaps the most visible cycling race in history when he led the final sprint of the Tour de France beneath the Arc de Triomphe last month.

That win alone, on world-wide TV, could probably justify 7-Eleven’s entire budget.

Pierce has not won a stage here but will probably be the overall champion because of his consistently high finishes.

That’s the way the 7-Eleven team has it planned.

“I’m perfectly happy to see Pierce, or perhaps Raul (Alcala) win,” Hampsten said. “For me, I would love to win but I do not plan on attacking one of my teammates. It would be a great honor for me to have a teammate win.

“In the meantime, the team plans to win as many stages as it can. I like it this way. Usually in a stage race, I am more concerned with doing well in the overall standings and conserving myself, but now I can concentrate on launching myself into first place in each stage.”

Whether it is the 7-Eleven team scaring off competition or the logistics of starting in Hawaii, racing in California and Nevada before arriving at the Coors birthplace in Colorado, the fields are down.

Only 52 riders are entered in the men’s competition.

“There is too much travel involved in going to Hawaii,” Pierce said. “So much hangs on a person’s ability to adapt to plane travel.”

Aside from the American 7-Eleven team, not a single rider who competed in the Tour de France, is here.

“We would have liked to have 80 riders, which is our usual size,” said Mike Aisner, the race director. “This year, we got caught in a squeeze between the Tour de France (which ended July 26) and the World Championships (which start Sept. 6) in Austria. The riders didn’t want to come all the way over here and then go right back.”

Italy, which fielded a non-Tour de France team, has a double winner in Paolo Rosola. The Crazy Horse, as the Italians call him, won in a solo breakaway Monday in the Copper Mountain race, and Wednesday he narrowly beat Phinney on a last-lap sprint in the Vail Village criterium.

Phinney, doing most of the work in a 35-lap breakaway, and two German riders, Andreas Kappes and Volker Diehl, jumped the pack along with Rosola early in the race and held on for the entire 45 laps.

“I knew what I was getting into, riding with a couple of guys who weren’t pulling their share, but that’s the way it happened,” a disconsolate Phinney said.

Although the fields are small, the crowds aren’t. The entire 1.1-mile circuit through Vail was lined three and four deep to see if Phinney, a local favorite who grew up in Boulder, could win his fifth Vail criterium.