ARTHON, France — Danny Pate is sitting on the spacious, tiled back porch of a sprawling chateau on one of those warm French evenings you read about in romance novels. It’s Wednesday, and dusk is settling into the Loire Valley. Inside the ornately decorated bar just inside, the staffs of Team Garmin-Chipotle and the chateau are sipping champagne. There is nothing really to celebrate. They are merely in France.
For Pate, a Colorado Springs native and 1997 Falcon High School graduate, being in France isn’t yet cause for bubbly. Yeah, he’s in the Tour de France for the first time. He’s the Colorado kid on the Colorado team that has become the darling of the international cycling world.
Yet Pate looks out onto the massive lawn and centuries-old trees like a vet who has had more than his share of French pastry.
“It’s cool to be here, when you’re on the road and see the guys in the race, it’s the top of the sport,” he says. “It’s the highest platform of the sport. To be part of it is real cool.”
Excuse Pate if he’s not caught up by the international TV crews, or by cycling through mobs of autograph-seekers every morning and riding next to the sport’s biggest names. He’s a cycling purist, a man whose love of riding the sport’s biggest event isn’t much greater than his love of riding with his father as a young boy, which is how he became a cyclist.
Pate, 29, is already a bit hardened. He had one awful year in Italy and finds his greatest love in the soothing embrace of a local team that has banished the doping scene he left behind in Europe.
“I’m more of a person that is really into what I’m doing instead of looking too far ahead,” he says. “I really enjoyed all the stuff I was doing before. Even though I’m racing on the biggest platform, I don’t put it on a big pedestal.”
He tried that once and fell off. Well, he leaped off. He was perfectly happy riding for Colorado-Cycles as an amateur when Saeco, one of the top teams in Italy, whisked him off to the Italian Alps. He was 21.
Hardly anyone spoke English, and he couldn’t learn Italian much because the Italian his Russian roommate spoke didn’t sound much like Italian. Pate was miserable.
“It was one of those experiences that wasn’t the best, and I didn’t make the best of it,” he says. “The racing was really hard. I was (in) over my head. And just moving there was a hard change culturally and learning a new language right away.”
This was also 2000-01. Doping has never taken a hiatus in cycling, but in the late 1990s and earlier this decade, busts in Europe were rampant. Saeco officials didn’t push Pate to dope, but his ears were open in the peloton. He knew what was going around Europe.
Health issues were forefront with Pate, but so was morality.
“It’s the same as cutting a course and jumping through a course ahead and winning,” he says. “No one does that.”
Pate returned home and hooked on with Prime Alliance before getting in on the ground floor at TIAA-CREF, the precursor to Garmin- Chipotle. Team director Jonathan Vaughters had known Pate well before he won the time trial at the under-23 world championships in 2001.
Since then, he has made his mark, especially this year. He helped Garmin-Chipotle win the Tour of California in February, helped it win the team time trial to open the Giro d’Italia in May and was 14th in Tuesday’s time trial. After Wednesday’s 144.2-mile stage from Cholet to Chateauroux, in which the overall standings didn’t change, he stands 83rd, 5 minutes, 23 seconds behind.
“I see him medaling in the world time-trial championship or in an Olympics, maybe the next Olympics,” Vaughters says. “As far as the Tour de France, he’ll always be a strong time trailer. But he likes the role of being the machine for others. He has a big powerful engine.”
Says Pate: “That’s totally my spot. I’m fine being in that role. Plain and simple, some guys are better than me. People don’t know the importance of being a good teammate.”
So Pate has plenty to toast. He’s just building his thirst.
John Henderson: 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com
A foot soldier in the Argyle Army
Danny Pate knows his role with Team Garmin-Chipotle. The Colorado Springs native’s cycling career:
Turned pro: 2000 with Italian team
Previous team: Team TIAA-CREF
Born: March 23, 1979, in Colorado Springs
High school: Falcon
2008 accomplishments: Won time trials this year at the Tour de Georgia and the Giro d’Italia and was 14th Tuesday in the Tour de France time trial.
Strength: Time trials — “That’s totally my spot.”
Out of the saddle: Works on vintage cars and designs motocross courses
