Leipheimer credits team support for win
Levi Leipheimer won the 2nd annual Amgen Tour of California this year, wearing the golden leader's jersey from the prologue in San Francisco to the finish in Long Beach.
US-based fans of cycling also won, as they got to witness — more than 1 million firsthand — some of the biggest names in the professional cycling competing on US soil.
Sure US riders Leipheimer, George Hincapie, Fred Rodriguez, Chris Horner, Bobby Julich, Christian Vandevelde, Jason McCartney and Dave Zabriskie and others are world-class cyclists. But this race also featured such riders as Ivan Basso, world champions Fabian Cancellara and Paolo Bettini, Jens Voigt, Stuart O'Grady, Thor Hushovd, and many more.
And those guys just didn't put in face time. Voigt and O'Grady both made strong runs on the golden jersey; Bettini won a stage, Cancellara led the individual time trial until the last few riders.
Although he led from the beginning to end, it was no walk in the park for Leipheimer and the Discovery Channel pro cycling team. While Leipheimer put himself in the lead — by one second — in the prologue and strained to give himself a 21 second lead over Voigt after the individual time trial, the Discovery team kept battling to reel in breakaways and attack by Team CSC.
After Stage 6, in which Hincapie drove the peloton with a broken wrist, Leipheimer told the press:
“I don’t have any words to describe how much my team supported me today. They really had to dig deep. To be honest, we weren’t exactly calm, but now you know why this team has won the Tour de France. Everyone came out today to make us lose, but it’s no fluke that this team has won the Tour de France seven times.”
The Americans did great. Leipheimer first, McCartney third, Julich fourth and Vandevelde sixth. The US-based Discovery team put two in the top 10 and protected Leipheimer day after day.
A US team, Toyota-United, put its sprinter, Ivan Dominguez, first across the finish line in the final stage in Long Beach.
Let's see if all this bodes well for the upcoming Tour de Georgia (April 16-22) and Tour of Missouri (Sept. 11-16) stage races and spells success for Discovery in the Giro d'Italia and Tour de France.
For results, see CyclingNews or VeloNews.
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