CYCLING’S CANADIAN SHOP WINDOW
Bruno Langlois’s black Velo Cartel baseball cap stayed clamped to his head all week. The 2016 Canadian champion took the opportunity of the convened cameras to advertise his soon-toopen café-cum-coaching centre in a Québec City suburb. At 38, this is likely to be his last appearance. Langlois lives on the course and rides its roads daily.
“The best race of the year,” he says emphatically. “It’s in front of home crowds with the best riders in the world.” He fits into a Canadian composite team alongside the better-known Canadians with European experience, Antoine Duchesne and Ryan Anderson, as an experienced hand to guide Canada’s young hopefuls being exposed to the WorldTour.
One of those prospects is Pier-André Côté. At 20, he was the youngest in the race. Côté is the name his team manager Kevin Field reaches for when asked which of his riders is most likely to make it into the WorldTour. In Québec, Côté hit the day’s four-man break with Israel Cycling Academy’s Tyler Williams, Katusha’s Baptiste Planckaert and Lotto Soudal’s Tosh Van Der Sande. Saddle height trouble cost Côté energy but he endured for 130 kilometres before the Côte de la Montagne found him out with 65km to go. “The goal was to give me opportunities to get my name spoken, and that’s what I did,” he said after the finish.
He was a DNF, but he hung around long after most of the other riders had headed back to the hotel. Like Langlois, he was also as local as they got. He’d moved to Québec City to study maths and accountancy. He stayed talking to friends, family and the local journalists who’d write about his dream ride in front of home crowds the next day. In fact Côté, like a significant fraction of the peloton, was thinking of bigger goals around the corner: the World Championships in Bergen.
“It’s a circuit and so it’s the same dynamic,” Côté said of the similarities between the two. “And the climb in Norway will be a lot like the one in Montréal. It’s a good preparation and an awesome opportunity to ride with the best guys in the world. The guys here will be stronger. It gives me confidence.”
A Canadian composite team has always ridden the two races here. And on three occasions a Canadian has gone on to place highly in the U23 Worlds road race. Guillaume Boivin was third in 2010 and Hugo Houle was fourth in 2012, while Adam de Vos finished in ninth in 2015.
“It’s our little secret recipe,” Field said. He explained how the Tour of Utah (and this year the Colorado Classic) offer racing at altitude, before the riders come down for a break, race the Tour of Alberta and then these two WorldTour sharpeners .
Field explained that Cycling Canada is also anxious to improve the chances for young Canadians to make it into the professional ranks. “I tell our kids they need three things to make it,” said Field. “They need a big performance, they need the consistency across the season and they need connections.”
The Québec races can contribute to all three, but they’re also a shop window for Canadian cycling in general.