Colorado Files: What’s in a name?

Obscure names belie what lays ahead for the peloton, writes Anthony Tan in Colorado Springs.

Garden of the Gods, Crested Butte, Steamboat Springs… you'd be forgiven for thinking you accidentally logged onto a porn site, or were reading about the misadventures of Dirk Diggler (a.k.a. Mark Wahlberg) in the 1997 cult film, Boogie Nights.

It's okay, relax… They happen to be some of the towns the peloton will visit during this week's USA Pro Cycling Challenge.

Sunday's pre-race press conference was reasonably entertaining – as far as press conferences go, anyway. Perhaps the highlight was the showing of a 30-second promo from Versus, the pay TV channel that will be broadcasting the race live each day in the US.

The voiceover was almost certainly a baritone, and the dramatic script – with equally dramatic background music – went something like this (when reading out loud, make sure you emphasise the capitalised words):

"Cadel Evans got the better of Andy Schleck at the Tour de France, but NOW it's time for a RE-MATCH, as they go HEAD-TO-HEAD in the Rocky Mountains. They'll face each other, HIGH altitude and HUGE mountains, as well as some of America's TOP riders, as they battle for GLORY in the first U-S-A-PRO-CYCLING-CHALLENGE. Watch it LIVE on VER-SUS from August 22 to 28!"

If it was supposed to rattle Cadel and Andy, it didn't.

Sitting alongside one another, centre stage, they looked at each other for a moment – before cracking up.

"I don't see this race as a rematch between Cadel and me," said Andy Schleck, "that's going to be next year at the Tour de France.

"Of course I'd like to beat him," he said, accompanied by his typical boyish grin, "but it's not like a goal, [not] why I'm here. There's other riders here who can win this race, and there's no bad riders here. It's not a personal match between Cadel and me."

As John Henderson of the Denver Post wrote Sunday: "The seven-day Pro Cycling Challenge may be an amusing feature on the pro circuit, but it's a slasher movie in the eyes of the pros.

"Some riders are approaching Colorado like campers approach bear-infested forests," Henderson said, who received a deadpan reply from HTC-Highroad's Bernie Eisel, when he asked how long it would take the German lead-out-man-extraordinaire to acclimatise.

"For Colorado? I think never," Eisel said.

Unlike Evans, who arrived a week ago and has done little training since the Tour finished on 24 July, the younger Schleck told reporters that he's been out here since 9 August – staying in nearby Steamboat Springs for almost two weeks, at just over 2,000 metres' above sea level.

Waxing lyrically about Wednesday's queen stage that tackles the race's two highest climbs, Cottonwood and Independence Pass, both over 3,600 metres' altitude, Henderson said: "If riders exhaust their energy getting up Cottonwood, there's no way they can recover up Indy.

"Riders could fall back like empty beer cans."

Perhaps by week's end, riders' heads may be spinning so helplessly out of control, they may well think they've died and being reincarnated as porn stars.

Follow Anthony on Twitter: @anthony_tan