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| September 1, 2006
A race for respect BY JORDAN E. ROSENFELD
On just about any given day in the county, cyclists can be seen spinning their wheels up steep grades, along eucalyptus-lined roads and even behind cars on city streets. Some of them might even be training for the Carrera de San Rafael, which is making a comeback next week after a two-year break. It’s a break that must seem like eons to many local cyclists. Since the last time Carrera racers put foot to pedal, the once-pure sport of cycling has stolen the thunder from baseball and track as the poster sport for professional-athlete dopers, thanks to front-page-news steroid allegations levied at such cycling stars as Lance Armstrong, Jan Ullrich, Ivan Basso, Marco Pantani and, of course, 2006 Tour de France “winner” Floyd Landis. With that sort of baggage, one could argue that the timing of Carrera’s return couldn’t be worse. On the other hand, considering the sport needs a major boost (of the non-anabolic variety), perhaps an event that can remind the public why cycling was embraced in the first place is just what the local bike scene needs. Marin’s spirit of bicycle enthusiasm was a major part of the inspiration for Will Matthews, a bicycle hobbyist and former bike store manager, to launch a bike race back in 1999 called the San Rafael Cycling Classic. Matthews’s labor of love grew so popular and large over its five-year run that it eventually became too much work for him to do on his own. After the two-year hiatus and offers of support from businesses and bicyclists alike, Matthews got to planning for a bigger and more self-sustaining race. Not even the shadow of the Tour de France doping scandal could dampen his plans. He renamed the race the Carrera de San Rafael. (Carrera translates to “race” in Spanish.) “Since we took two years off we wanted to create a new identity for it, and make it distinct from all the other ‘cycling classics.’ The name not only sets us apart, it plays up the history of San Rafael,” says Matthews by phone from his home in Novato. On September 9, the streets of downtown San Rafael will once again play host to the fast-paced criterium-style race from 10am to 3pm, with activities and a shopping expo until 5pm. • • • • WILL MATTHEWS FIRST dreamed up the San Rafael Cycling Classic as an extracurricular activity derived from his love of bicycle racing, while managing a pair of bike shops in San Rafael and Mill Valley. He considers himself more of a bicycle hobbyist, one who still enjoys a good ride on country roads, but says his racing days are long behind him. He appreciated the sport of racing, however, and knew there was a big audience in this bike-friendly county. “I recognized that downtown San Rafael was the perfect venue for this sport because it’s centrally located to spectators, sponsors, media, transportation—and that it could really become an event,” says Matthews. “But I didn’t know anybody who could help me pull it off, so I just walked into the redevelopment agency in downtown and about nine months later we had our first race.” His first race, which was helped along by the San Francisco Grand Prix (now extinct), attracted a decent crowd and some serious professional bike racers—enough to make Matthews think he was on to something. “One accomplished local pro rider was sitting next to me during the race and he said, ‘Has it dawned on you just how much of a success this already is?’ The experience was gratifying. After the first one I was hooked.” The event got bigger than he imagined, with hundreds of racers, thousands of spectators and some 60 merchandise vendors; but Matthews was running it by himself for the most part. “I had a large following of dedicated volunteers and I certainly begged and borrowed wherever I could, but it got so large and costly that I couldn’t do it by myself.” Local business leaders came to him in 2005 with resources that weren’t available to him before, making the return of the race possible. “We have legal help now and deeper connections into the business community,” he says. Matthews feels confident that the new Carrera de San Rafael has the “solid foundation” to become a “legacy event,” which means it can continue into the future, while drawing elite sponsors, more professional racing teams and larger crowds of spectators. “The value for everybody in an event like this comes once the event has been running for a while. If it happens once or twice, the city doesn’t benefit, but over time there is more ownership and recognition,” he says. “We’re quite confident that we can make this happen into the future and bring more recognition and create a great race.” A “great” race is as much driven by its sponsors and media exposure as it is its racers. Other determining factors are venue, weather and the enthusiasm of the participants. “Marin County has such a deep history with cycling that it is appropriate that we have a good event here,” he says. Indeed, just about every book on the history of bicycling in America points back to Marin County as the birthplace of the mountain bike. A group of enthusiastic Marin bicyclists back in the 1970s, known as “The Canyon Gang,” are credited as being the first to race bikes with special tires known as “ballooners” down Mt. Tam, launching copycat bikes around the country, and eventually the style of bike most often seen on trails. Colorado-based bike-race announcer Dave Towle cites the Bay Area as one of his favorite places to work. “People are so knowledgeable, the crowds know who the racers are and know about the history of the sport. I think many of the fans probably ride themselves, so they know what the athletes are going through,” says Towle, one of the few full-time bike race announcers in the field. Towle was the former announcer for the San Francisco Grand Prix and will announce at this year’s Carrera. • • • • WHEN PEOPLE THINK of bike racing, they tend to be most familiar with the type that requires television viewing—long-distance races like the Tour of California or the Tour de France, which require endurance riders racing hundreds of miles. The Carrera, however, is a “criterium,” a sprinter’s course in which racers ride around a short circuit and then repeat, totaling about 50 miles when all is said and done. The women race for 60 minutes, while the men race for 90. Criterium races are considered “spectator friendly,” as people can sit in one central location for the entire race right up close to the riders. “Principally speaking, the course is around Fourth, D, Fifth and A streets,” says Matthews. “It’s like the Indy 500 without the pit stops; they just go around and around.” Towle has seen many kinds of races, but he feels that none are as exhilarating to watch as a professional criterium. “Racing at the pro level is spectacular. They’re banging into each other and yelling. I’m sure there will be a crash in the men’s race, which just shows you how intense it is,” Towle says. “These are truly the gladiators of the road out there. American racing is so fast and technical and it plays out in a short time frame all right in front of you. I love the sounds that go with it—the clunking of the changing gears, the racers yelling at each other and the wheels whizzing by. It would almost be cool to have a race with no announcing to let the race speak for itself.” Just because the criterium is repetitive, doesn’t mean it’s a boring event. It’s anything but. “Bike racing is the kind of sport where it’s not just about the fastest guy, but the smartest. When you find out about what tactics are going on, you realize there’s a lot of strategy at work,” says Towle. Bike racing is far more of a team event than most people realize. Teams devise strategies ahead of time, not unlike a sport such as football, relying upon the strengths of individual riders to improve the chances of team-member wins. • • • • YOU CAN CALL bicycle racers obsessive, determined, even insane or foolish, and many of them wouldn’t find these terms the slightest bit offensive. “Racing is an addictive sport and it’s kind of obsessive because you have to focus so much energy to train,” says Kristen Drumm of Novato. She and her sister Helene are both racers, and considered serious contenders in the women’s race at the Carrera. “Racing brings out this aggressive quality in me, and I can do things I don’t normally do. It’s very mental and when you’re hurting and really tired and have to keep going two more miles but you want to stop, you have to push yourself beyond your normal limits.” Drumm, 37, has been racing for 16 years and claims she was “hooked” on the sport almost immediately. “These races are so hard and sometimes I ask myself why I’m doing it, but when I finish and cross the line, all of a sudden I feel like I accomplished something. There are certainly endorphins and adrenaline involved, and maybe that’s why we keep coming back to kill ourselves,” she laughs. She hasn’t suffered a serious crash since the beginning of her career (when she broke her collarbone), but she knows it’s a possibility. “My mentality is, I’m going to go down sooner or later and I have to be prepared. I try to avoid it and ride smart, because I prefer to have my skin on me. But sometimes others around you don’t have those skills. If someone goes down in front of you, that’s it.” On the downhill portion of the Carrera, riders get going so fast that hay bales are set up as a precaution against the inevitable crash. “The last turn down Fifth is downhill, and then you have to make a 90-degree turn, so you’re flying at say 35 miles an hour in a pack. That’s a dangerous corner,” she says. Ben Jacques-Maynes, 27, is one of the few professional riders in the country who makes his living solely from the sport. He rides for the Kodakgallery.com/Sierra Nevada Cycling team, and will be one of two of the team’s riders at the Carrera. “You have to work hard because racing hurts. You win races by persevering through the pain. Mental strength goes a long way,” he says. “To me a criterium is more than just running in circles; it’s a chess match. I always say that there’s a thousand ways to win a race, but only one is going to work today, and you have to try and find that way.” At the professional level, he says, men generally only have until their early 30s to race in “prime physical condition.” “Your years of hard work build upon each other to give you the highest aerobic capacity and muscle strength. The accumulation of all that comes together each year and after a certain point you have a harder time recovering from the effort and can’t do the hard work you used to be able to do. Age catches up with you. I figure I’ve got about five, maybe seven, good racing years left in me.” Jacque-Maynes trains between 20 and 30 hours a week depending on the specific program for which he’s training. Other than the Carrera, he’s also training for the U.S. Professional Road Race Championship in Greenville, South Carolina. “Criterium isn’t necessarily my forte, but I’ve had good results. Usually with a more difficult course like the San Rafael course, which has some hills and tough corners.” • • • • AT THE MOMENT it’s nearly impossible to talk about bike racing without mentioning two people: Lance Armstrong—seven-time Tour de France winner and possibly the most well-known bicycle racing celebrity of all time—and American Floyd Landis, the 2006 Tour de France winner, whose victory is almost certain to be denied due to results of unnaturally high levels of testosterone found in his blood. Towle believes that the combination of money, power and sports inevitably creates a pressure mix that is bound to drive some athletes to extreme lengths in order to perform at a level that will ensure they keep their sponsorship. “It’s not about cycling having a problem, it’s about sports having a problem,” says Towle. “The truth is, people just want their superstars, their great athletes. Many people would rather not know about what these guys are doing so long as they win. If you took all the drugs away, Floyd Landis would still be the winner of the Tour de France. He isn’t being given a chance to regroup and get his story straight.” Matthews doesn’t feel the doping scandal has cast any kind of shadow over the Carrera specifically, though he knows it registers in people’s minds. “To me, the Landis issue seems a whole world away, because as far as I know, no professional team in the U.S. has access to or resources to get ahold of the sort of doping programs that are being spoken about for the Tour de France. I guess it does have an effect on the sport because in the court of public opinion, there’s a guilty-verdict issue when these stories hit, and very little resolution when they get cleared up. But I believe that most of the people who come to races like the Carrera are doing it for the love of sport.” Jacques-Maynes takes a more stringent view since he has ridden, and lost, races where winners were later discovered to have been using performance-enhancing drugs. “Some unscrupulous racers see doping as a method to increase performance and opt out of the hard work. I reject that wholeheartedly. I’d rather not win and know I gave my all than win even one knowing I cheated,” says Jacques-Maynes. “Defeating drugs in sports should become the number one goal of racers through collaborative efforts. The racing federation and the race teams should bond together to squeeze doping out of our sport. “I will vouch for any of my teammates as being clean. We may not win every race, but when we do, it sure feels good.” • • • • ONE OF THE ways Matthews has added “extras” to Carrera in its new inception is to help raise money for charitable bike-related organizations. This year he teamed up with the Marin County Bicycle Coalition (MCBC) to help raise money for its “Safe Routes to Schools” program. Safe Routes to Schools promotes kids biking or walking to school rather than being driven by parents. “We teach skills on how to use their bikes, age-appropriate technical riding skills, safety concepts and environmental education about how riding a bike can help reduce greenhouse emissions,” says Kim Baenisch, MCBC’s executive director. “A few years back we found out that 21 percent of morning commute traffic in Marin was due to parents shuttling kids to school. We started our program in 2000 with 10 high schools and now we’re in 40-plus schools.” MCBC will provide information and kid-friendly activities at the race expo and will offer free valet bike parking from 10am to 5:30pm. As well, its annual member appreciation party, the “Big Bike Bash,” featuring a silent and live auction, will take place from 1 to 5pm on A Street between Fourth and Fifth streets. Members get in free, and those interested in joining can get a special discounted rate of $25 at the door on the day of the event. “We’ve been focusing our attention on the smaller percent of bike riders who use their bikes to commute, but now we want to pay attention to the 82 percent of bicycle riders who are recreational riders, many of whom will be turning up at the Carrera,” says Baenisch. • • • • BOTH THE NEWLY launched Amgen Tour of California (this August was its first year) and the return of the Carrera de San Rafael seem to bode well for the sport of bicycle racing all around. Matthews says that he is in talks to participate in the creation of “another signature pro-cycling event in the Bay Area,” but can’t say more than that. “Lance Armstrong has definitely helped raise awareness but I think that racing in America has just gotten more popular. I know that the governing body that sells licenses, USA Cycling, has sold more licenses this year than in any previous year. “The sport is gaining respect.” For the sake of races like Carrera, one can only hope the scandals of a few don’t diminish that respect. The entire Carrera de San Rafael event features seven total races (including one for children and one for juniors, ages 15-17) that vary in length from 20-90 minutes each. Admission is free to spectators, though special front row seats, with lunch provided, are available for $35. An Expo downtown will feature health and fitness-related products for sale. For more information visit www.carrerasanrafael.com.
PHOTO BY JEFF TSE |
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Bicyclists in Marin are nothing if not passionate.  |
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