Lawson Craddock will be first area competitor in Tour de France.
Craddock first cyclist from area and second Texan in race
Lawson Craddock will be the first cyclist from the Houston area — and the only Texan other than Lance Armstrong — to start a Tour de France when the famed threeweek race begins Saturday at Mont-Saint-Michel on the Normandy coast.
The 24-year-old Craddock makes his Tour debut in his first season as a member of the U.S.-based Cannondale Pro Cycling Team. He’s coming off a fifth-place finish in the Tour of California after completing his first Grand Tour, Spain’s Vuelta, last fall.
Craddock called the opportunity “truly an honor and a dream come true. I’m looking forward to making the most of it. This race is iconic for a reason and I’ve been dreaming of it ever since I got on two wheels. I’ve worked really hard over my career to perform to the standards that I know I’m capable of.”
But, he added, “The easy part was making the team. Now I’ve got to prepare myself to race at a level that I’ve never raced at before and, most importantly, give the team a chance to succeed.”
Although the Cy Falls High School graduate goes off riding in support of Cannondale’s leader, Pierre Rolland of France, team president Jonathan Vaughters said an important objective during the three-week race, which finishes on the Champs Elysées in Paris July 24, “will be helping Lawson realize his potential in his first Tour.”
The 2016 race covers 2,182 miles and also detours through Spain, Andorra and Switzerland. Saturday’s first stage finishes at Utah Beach, one of the prominent D-Day landing sites in 1944. Included en route are what figure to be decisive summit finishes on Andorre Arcalis, Mont Ventoux, Finhaut-Emosson and Saint-Gervais Mont Blanc. There are nine mountain stages total and two individual time trials.
Craddock has also had top-10 finishes in two UCI World Tour races this season, finishing sixth in the Criterium International and ninth in the Tour of the Basque Country. Riding for Giant-Alpecin last season, he helped that team’s leader, Tom Dumoulin, stay in contention for the Vuelta championship until the final weekend.
A time-trialing specialist as a teenager, finishing second in the Junior World Championships in 2009 and third in 2010, Craddock has evolved into an all-around talent who could prove to be a general classification contender in the Tour, the Vuelta and the Giro d’Italia, cycling’s biggest stages.
Greg Lemond, with three yellow jerseys, and Armstrong are the only Americans to have finished first in the Tour de France, which dates to 1903, but Armstrong was stripped of his then-record seven titles for doping.