NORTHSTAR-AT-TAHOE, Calif. — I’m sitting here at a ski resort, appropriate because the weather outside the window behind me looks more January than May. Snow continues falling on the cobblestones and the shrubbery, and trees are covered in white.
You’d think I’d be out chasing Lindsey Vonn for a quote. Instead, I’m chasing skinny guys in Lycra. But I couldn’t get a single cyclist. None of them made it here to the finish line of the first stage in the Tour of California. They didn’t even get started.
For an idea of how rare Sunday’s cancellation is, veteran cycling writers and race executives don’t remember weather ever canceling a stage anywhere in the world.
In the 2000 Tour de France, winds at the finish atop Mont Vontoux reached 150 mph and they lowered the finish line. I remember rain soaking Paris one year and they cut down the number of laps around the Champs-Elysees. They altered a stage in a recent Paris-Nice. That’s about it.
A lot is due to cycling being a spring and summer sport. You just don’t get freak storms as we had Sunday. It snowed all day. Temperatures reached as low as 28, and the 12-14 mph winds put the wind chill at 18. On clear days, these guys on descents reach close to 60 mph.
The Tour of California’s call was obvious. Just seven days ago, Belgian Wouter Weylandt died while desending Passo del Bocco during the Giro d’Italia. It had nothing to do with the weather. Sadly, it was pilot error. Weylandt looked back for a split second and his rear wheel clipped a short retaining wall, sending him sprawling 25 feet to the other side of the road.
In an eerie ode to the dangers of cycling, a Giro medical staff member who attended Weylandt said, “He didn’t suffer.”
I drove Sunday’s course before they canceled the stage. Sixty mph? I never hit 45. It’s a spectacular drive. From South Lake Tahoe, I drove up the west side of Lake Tahoe, surrounded by snow-covered fir trees and lined with villages and ski resorts right out of the French Alps.
But anytime I glanced at the view, I noticed how close I was from the edge of a narrow road with no embankment protecting me from the icy lake below.
The inaugural U.S. Pro Cycling Challenge comes to Colorado in three months. Cycling doesn’t need another tragedy.
