2010 Amgen Tour of California – 1st Stage

I drove 4 hours from shooting Caitlin and Nico’s very cool wedding near Santa Cruz last night so that I could check out the start of the Tour of California bike race near my home this morning. What an entourage the cyclists have! It appeared to be a motorcycle race at first as there were more CHP, tour, and photographer motorcyles than cyclists. And that was only half of it. They just kept coming .. there were CHP cars, sheriff cars, race marshall cars, announcer van, ambulance, helicopter, and all the team support cars with their bicycle racks. So lucky to have the largest bike race in the U.S. come so near my home. I picked a spot about a minute from my house and about 8 miles from the start in Nevada City which is a little out in the boonies. I arrived about 1 1/2 hrs early and struck up a conversation with an official in a van of race volunteers watching the intersection at Dog Bar and Wolf Creek Road, and sweeping off loose gravel. The driver came all the way from Georgia. I took a group photo of them and they gave me an Amgen Tour t-shirt, .. cool! The crowd grew into a regular neighborhood block party, hooting and hollering, even before the first official vehicles started coming by.

There were 4 break away riders first followed by 3 more riders about 20 seconds behind. Another 25 seconds and pack came through. No time to find and pick out Lance Armstrong , Levi or other big names, .. just shoot and check later on the computer. Yep, I got a photo with both Lance and the 1st stage winner, Mark Cavendish of Team HTC. Pretty cool! If you check my June 2008 blog archives you’ll find some excellent photos of Lance and Levi when they competed in the Nevada City Classic.

Part of the CHP motorcyle entourage preceeding the cyclists.

Must have been 50 of them.

Lots of these guys, too.

The first 4 to come up the hill.

Mark De Maar of United Health Care & Paul Mach of Bissell lead the breakaway.

Some of the crowd at the intersection.