Tour of California: 8 conclusions from the men's and women's races

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The overall winners of the men's and women's editions of the 2019 Tour of California: Anna van der Breggen (Boels Dolmans) and Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates)(Image credit: Getty Images)

The 2019 Tour of California came to a close last week, with Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates) leading home a youthful men's podium, while Boels Dolmans dominated the women's competition, taking two stage wins and the overall title with Anna van der Breggen.

Van Garderen and his EF teammates found themselves uncomfortably far from the front on the technical final run-in to Morro Bay. As Deceuninck-QuickStep picked up the pace on the front, van Garderen touched wheels in the bunch and hit the deck with just over seven kilometres to go. After several mishaps delayed his chase, van Garderen and the EF train got up to steam and were gaining ground when they came upon more chaos caused by another crash at 3.2km, just shy of the magical three-kilometre line that is supposed to absolve any time lost to such mishaps. When the provisional results came in, van Garderen lost 51 seconds and had dropped to 13th place behind new race leader Kasper Asgreen (Deceuninck-QuickStep), who finished 10th on the stage won by teammate Fabio Jakobsen. That didn’t stand, however, as confusion reigned in team parking before word started to filter in that officials had revised the results. Van Garderen said he was told he was out of yellow, then back in, then out, then finally back in again.

Oh, to be a fly on the wall of that UCI jury meeting room at the Morro Bay Community Center. There wouldn’t have been any team representatives in the discussion, but people from race owner AEG and race technical director ASO often are. Ultimately, the responsibility fell to the Belgian Philippe Marien, president of the commissaire panel, and fellow jurists Chuck Hodge, Christian Magiera and Andre McCord. Deceuninck-QuickStep were obviously upset with the call, and Astana told Cyclingnews they launched an official protest, not because it would affect the race outcome, but because the ruling was, in their view, completely unjust. Jumbo-Visma’s George Bennett, the 2017 overall winner who would have been one of the GC riders benefiting from the initial results, said he believed the jury knew they made the wrong call.

Not unlike the infamous ‘Leipheimer Rule’, when the 2007 Tour of California jury extended the three-kilometre rule to nearly 10km to cover a crash of then-race leader Levi Leipheimer, there is no legitimate reading or interpretation of the rules as written that would have justified ‘The van Garderen Decision’, until you understand and fully embrace the guiding principle that there are no rules in cycling, only suggestions and guidelines based on circumstances and who’s involved. (PM)

Mark Cavendish’s proclaimed recovery from Epstein-Barr didn’t manifest itself in his performance last week in California. The Manxman started the week at the pre-race press conference saying that he had finally been declared below the threshold for being considered ill for the first time in two years, and he was ready to challenge for wins. That didn’t happen on the pancake-flat first stage in Sacramento, where Cavendish finished 30 seconds off the back in 109th. He struggled to make the time cut on the high-altitude climb to Lake Tahoe, where he was heard yelling at a teammate who dropped back to help him to ‘just leave him alone’. He finished the stage second to last, 36:09 behind the winner.

Cavendish never cracked the top 100 before dropping out of the race during the final stage on the first category 3 climb of the day, which ended with a sprint in Pasadena in front of the Rose Bowl. Cavendish won a similar stage there in 2015, just one of his 146 official career wins. Although he told Cyclingnews the previous day that he felt OK, had been improving throughout the week and would like to challenge for the win again in Pasadena, the opening climb on Angeles Forest Highway proved too much, and he put an end to a lacklustre week.

His hopes for climbing a few more steps up the ladder in California never materialised, however, and his un-Cavendish performances continue. It’s concerning that Cavendish says he only recently cleared the threshold for not being considered ill for the Epstein-Barr virus but has attempted several as-yet-unsuccessful comebacks over the two years since he was diagnosed. Cyclists put serious stresses on their bodies, and for them, determining when they’re ‘ready to return to work’ takes a little more care than it would for, say, the average journalist.

The mental image of Cavendish chastising a teammate who’s been sent to help keep him in the race is not a positive one for him or his fans, who like to see the Cavendish who is a patron of the peloton, looking out for fellow riders, talking up races and expressing his passion for the sport he so obviously loves. To paraphrase one of the team directors Cyclingnews spoke with at California concerning the mercurial sprinter: Cavendish needs to take three months off. Go home. Don’t drink any caffeine. Don’t eat any sugar. Don’t exercise. Lay on the sofa and watch TV 12 hours a day. Tinker with his cars. And definitely don’t think about cycling. (PM)

The 2019 Amgen Tour of California featured four of seven stages that were over 200km, more than the previous five editions combined. With an elevated level of climbing again this year, there were a lot of tired riders by the end of the race. The added length led to some long hours in the saddle, with a succession of days on stages 2, 3, 4 and 5 adding up to nearly 24 hours of racing, the longest coming on the stage 2 high-altitude climb to South Lake Tahoe. Deceuninck-QuickStep’s Kasper Asgreen won the stage in 6:17:11, and the race closed in on six hours each of the next two days. A tailwind assist on stage 5 from Pismo Beach to Ventura pushed the peloton to just under five hours, setting up the final GC fight on the climb to Mt. Baldy and a concluding sprint stage around the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

The California race has always faced the challenge of trying to cover a lot of ground in just a week of racing. The ‘Golden State’ is the third biggest in the US, and the expansive geography means the host cities throughout the race can be spread out. In 2016, when the race travelled from San Diego to Sacramento in just eight stages, complaints about long transfers were rampant. At the post-race press conference that year, ‘King of California’ Peter Sagan complained of being “just all day on the bus.” The transfers have been shorter since, and they were again this year.

"But at the same time," Skujins added, "obviously, the Morro Bay day, I would say it was a little too much, but also because of what the wind was like. The next day when it was a tailwind we did it in five hours and it was great. It was exciting racing. We had a really strong breakaway going, and we could’ve made it pretty, pretty close to the line if the situation was a little bit different. There’s a time and place for the long days, and I really love the long days, but maybe this year there was just one too many."

"Some of the stages were long, and that’s all they were, just long," Britton said. "You could probably get some great pictures on Highway 1 [during stage 4 from Laguna Seca to Morro Bay] and everything, and it was cool finishing in Morgan Hill [stage 3] I guess. Maybe the finish would have been different without the wind, but then you talk to people in the pack and you talk to people at home, like my dad, who has watched a lot of bike races, and he said ‘that was the most boring race I’ve ever seen'.

Although Sagan won the opening sprint in Sacramento, he was unable to add a record 18th stage victory as a slew of younger riders rose to the occasion on difficult courses that featured a level of mid-to-late-stage climbing that normally would have favoured the three-time world champion. After Sacramento, however, Sagan lost out to up-and-coming Dutchman Fabio Jakobsen (Deceuninck-QuickStep) during stage 4 on an uphill finish where Sagan has won before. UAE Team Emirates’ Jasper Philipsen, 21, slipped past Sagan for second place there.

Pogacar was well positioned to pounce on the Queen stage climb to Mt. Baldy, where he rode within himself until it was time to shed his rivals and track down one more rider up the road. He slowly reeled in the final attack from Higuita, then schooled the Colombian through the final switchback, slowing enough to take the quicker inside line after studying the finale on paper beforehand. While their more well-known colleagues grabbed the headlines at the Giro d’Italia across the Atlantic, a host of promising young riders in the Golden State staked their own claims to the future. (PM)

Last year, the organisers of the Tour of California were applauded for offering equal prize money for the three days of racing and doing away with the dated 'podium kiss' tradition during award ceremonies. This year, organisers faced a group advocating for Caltrans to re-write its roadway permits to force equal race days for men’s and women’s events, and they were heavily criticised for not offering adequate TV coverage of the women’s race.

Kathryn Bertine has teamed up with the Committee for Equity in Women’s Surfing (CEWS) co-founder Sabrina Brennan to attempt to amend/close the loopholes in California Assembly Bill 467, which focuses on paying women and men equally in competitions on California state land. But the bill still allows the exclusion of women from competitions on state roadways and state land and is silent on equal racing days. In the meantime, Brennan, who is also the founder of Sport Equity, has sent a letter to the Director of Caltrans asking the state agency to update its permit requirements to reflect equal access to roadways.

Cyclingnews asked Kristin Klein, president of Amgen Tour of California and executive vice president at AEG Sports, how such permitting changes would affect the race but she said that it was hard to comment at this time. "We will need to cross that bridge when we get to it. There are just too many variables in terms of the production of a bike race of this magnitude with all the different agencies that we work through, all the various permits that are required. There are so many different variables." (KF)

They lived up to every expectation during the demanding three-day race held from May 16-18. Van der Breggen won the opening stage into Ventura and took the overall lead, which she held through the following two stages and secured her second overall title. Hall followed the pre-race script to perfection with a victory atop Mt. Baldy in front of her family and friends. She had Van der Breggen’s support in winning the stage but they both crossed the line side-by-side, while Ashleigh Moolman-Pasio (CCC-Liv) finished a close third place.

The Tour of California used to be one of the biggest attractions for world-class sprinters because it notoriously offered sprint opportunities through circuit finishes and flatter stages; sprint aces like Peter Sagan, Mark Cavendish, Alexander Kristoff and Marcel Kittel have all won stages in California. This year’s edition was one of the most challenging in the 14-year history of the Tour of California. The route covered almost 21,000 metres of elevation gain, with 25 categorised ascents, along with a summit finish on Mt. Baldy. In addition, there were four stages over 200km.

In the pre-race press conference, Mark Cavendish (Dimension Data) said the only clear opportunity for this sprinters this year was on stage 1 into Sacramento. Bora-Hansgrohe’s Peter Sagan secured his 17th stage victory at the Tour of California in that stage and moved into the first leader’s jersey. The racing played out in favour of the sprinters on certain other stages, however; on stage 4 in Morro Bay won by Fabio Jakobsen (Deceuninck-QuickStep), stage 5 in Ventura won by Ivan Cortina (Bahrain-Merida), and stage 7 in Pasadena, but they weren’t as straight forward, and the stages included significant amounts of climbing. (KF)

They were active in the race from stage 1, when Stites rode in the breakaway and took the early lead in the young rider classification, and McCabe sprinted for second place behind Sagan in Sacramento and wore the sprinters jersey on stage2. Hoehn was involved in the stage 3 breakaway and earned the mountain classification jersey for that effort. Hernandez was part of the stage 4 breakaway and earned the Amgen Breakaway from Cancer Most Courageous Rider jersey. Hoehn was in the breakaway again during stages 6 and 7 and he secured the final Most Courageous jersey. Throughout the seven-day race, USA Cycling riders were in almost every major break, totalling more than 22-and-a-half hours in the breakaway, more than five hours longer than any other team.

"The dynamic at the Tour of California is always tricky," said team assistant director Mike Creed. "Sometimes it’s a lot of sprinters’ teams, so it’s super controlled. Sometimes it’s like now, where it’s all GC, so it’s not so controlled. You kind of have your hopes, but you’re also trying to tell the guys to differentiate between realistic goals and ambitious hopes. We made realistic goals, and I think we actually got our hopes." (KF)

Growing up in Missoula, Montana, Pat competed in his first bike race in 1985 at Flathead Lake. He studied English and journalism at the University of Oregon and has covered North American cycling extensively since 2009, as well as racing and teams in Europe and South America. Pat currently lives in the US outside of Portland, Oregon, with his imaginary dog Rusty.