Tour of Alberta bike race not for the faint of heart
Cycling, with its pelotons, domestiques and musettes, has a charming lexicon all its own, so it’s fitting the Tour of Alberta is putting a local accent on the vocabulary by setting a route for the six-day race that includes five sections of ‘Canadian pave.’
Now, ‘pave’ is a flexible word. A foodie, for example, might yearn for a main course of Pave Madagascar, which is a tasty slab of steak, or perhaps crave a nibble of Pave d’Auge, a flat, square, washed-rind cheese found in the Auge region of France.
You’d be unlikely to find either in a musette, or food bag, that a domestique, or worker cyclist, might ferry up the peloton, or pack, to his team’s lead rider.
Anyway, in cycling, pave refers to cobblestone, the treacherous-when-wet pebbled road surface you so often see Tour de France competitors bouncing and jouncing over and, not infrequently, crashing painfully onto.
Out there in Strathcona County, south of Cooking Lake, lie roads that tour organizers are “affectionately calling Canadian pave, but what the locals call ‘dust-control’ roads. These rough sections are just part of what the 120 cyclists will navigate during Stage 4 of the six-stage race that moves from Calgary on Sept. 2 to Edmonton on Sunday, Sept. 7.
Those sections are in addition to three segments of dirt road, as the Tour goes off the pavement for a change of pace, and texture. Of the two, the ‘Canadian pave’ portions may present the bigger challenge.
“Calling them paved is generous,” said Jeff Corbett, the technical director for Medalist Sports, who outlined the details of the six stages during a conference call on Wednesday. “They’re barely paved, we’ll put it that way.
“Sometimes the barely paved roads are actually tougher than the dirt roads because there’s a lot of crumbling bits, here and there.”
The inclusion of ‘Canadian pave’ was one of many intriguing features revealed Wednesday when Tour organizers announced the details of the route. The prologue, or time trial, in Calgary, that opens the Tour, for example, starts just beside the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame. That circuit will see riders wheel around Canada Olympic Park, with the cyclists grinding up the serpentine road that climbs to the top of the Olympic bobsled run to the opening-day finish line on Sept. 2.
The Tour winds up in Edmonton on Sunday, Sept. 7, the 11-lap circuit taking the cyclists up and down into the River Valley 22 times in all, with the stage and the Tour finishing at Churchill Square.
“It’s not a mountain, but the cumulative effect of all the climbing throughout this circuit race is definitely going to wear on some people,” Corbett said of the Edmonton stage of the Tour.
He reckoned local racing fans could very well see the outcome of the race determined over the demanding 11-lap Edmonton circuit, as opposed to some races, like the Tour de France, in which the final stage is largely a ceremonial one.
The routes have been set with a view to their being fan friendly. The other stages include a circuit race in Lethbridge; a road stage from Innisfail to Red Deer; and a Wetaskiwin-to-Edmonton segment that precedes the ride through Strathcona County and all those bone-jarring rides over ‘Canadian pave.’
They are the sort of off-pavement excursions, by the way, that major cycling stage races have been including for a while now.
“We had tremendous response from the peloton (pack), when we included ample dirt sections in the race in Colorado, the U.S. Pro Challenge,” Corbett said. “I think they’ll enjoy what we’ve given them here, it adds a little bit of extra flavour to this stage.”
Tour organizers will deploy water trucks to hose down the rough roads, in the interests of minimizing the dust clouds that would obscure the competition for the riders and spectators alike.
Early assessments of the route were positive, as you’d expect.
Ryan Anderson, a 26-year-old from Edmonton who rides for Team Optum, and was the top Canadian in the inaugural 2013 Tour of Alberta, was struck by that Calgary prologue, with its steep finishing grade, for starters.
“That Stage 4, with all the rough and dirt roads, I think that’s going to be a pretty cool stage, especially with the sections coming so late in the race.”
Will Routley won a Canadian road cycling championship in Edmonton in 2010 on an up-anddown course similar to the one the cyclists will race on in Sept.
“Everybody thought, going in, that it didn’t seem like any of those hills were particularly challenging,” Routley said. “But it’s just the fact that you’re hitting them again and again in quick succession.
“If things are pretty tight, it will make for some pretty aggressive racing.”
And if things aren’t so tight, it’s possible the leaders will have achieved separation somewhere along those stretches of “Canadian pave.”
Calling them paved is generous. They’re barely paved. Sometimes the barely paved roads are tougher than the dirt roads
JEFF CORBETT