No More Queen Stage

One of the things I was looking forward to doing while in Mankato this week was ride the route for the Nature Valley Grand Prix’s queen stage into my hometown. I worked my ass off in ‘07 and early ‘08 (back when I didn’t suck…oh those were the days!) to get selected for the race, finally did get offered a guest spot to do the invitation-only race in ‘08, and will forever regret letting the worst team director known to man prevent me from putting on a different jersey to do the event. (For the record, she led my ex-pro development team bankrupt as early as June of that year, even though three of the seven original riders weren’t even racing anymore, “resigned” from both the team and her job at the shop, burned every bridge possible, and thank god I haven’t heard from her since.)

But I guess that was my one chance because this year, 2009, I broke ribs early on, rode like a sack of potatoes after that, and never rode with the fire I did in previous years (maybe the problem there is in ‘07 and early ‘08, the sky was the limit for me, whereas this year I only wanted to be as good as I used to be—lower expectations, lower performance). And looking ahead to 2010, Mankato has lost the stage. Dave LaPorte, the very cordial and very fair director of the race, already says he’s looking elsewhere for hosts for the queen stage. Mankato’s city government sounded pretty iffy on their commitment to this beautiful stage, and, for one reason or another, the people just never really came out in full force for one of the best stages of one of the top stage races in the entire country. Check out this picture from the epic climb and epic lack of people watching the action (thanks to Frank Rowe and CyclingNews.com for this):

I’m not surprised we’re losing it, I guess. But I am disappointed. I tried to keep the faith when the newspaper was printing the rumors the last few days, but, yeah, I guess it was futile. It’s been a tough time for me on the bike ever since my ‘08 season—cut drastically short, to boot—made me pretty jaded about the sport in general. There’s a lot of politics and bullshit as you climb the rungs of the ladder (like anything, I guess).

Being a Cat 1 for me since then has been more of a chore in training and like wearing a hat of shame whenever I’m not flying in the races. I’ve tried a lot of different things to get the raw passion back I used to have—took time off, went to a more “fun” team, tried to work with younger or lower cat riders to have their enthusiasm feed off me, go back to the collegiate scene, do more training camps, etc. But nothing has gotten me quite to where I used to be. I thought one last nice goal would be to use next summer—my last one before I start a strenuous PhD program—as my last run at shining in my hometown race in my home state (where I completely embarrassed myself in previous years, both with my riding in ‘05 and ‘06 and my mouth the following winter). Now that’s gone too. And I’m not quite sure what to do…

Tags: Cat 1 Shame Hat, Dave LaPorte, Mankato, Minnesota, Nature Valley Grand Prix, Nature Valley Stage 5, No More Queen Stage, NVGP