Stage 3: San Francisco to Santa Cruz | Adventures With Aussies, Catching the KOM Fight, and an Epic Finish Line Battle

Today’s adventures involved hanging out with some cool Aussies from Fly V Australia.

The starting parade of cars gone down the “Start Chute”, we tried to ditch/stay ahead of the race, heading straight to the feedzone and then to the end in Santa Cruz.

Well, we didn’t make it to the feedzone. But as always, just when I think something horrible has happened, the other side of that coin is that it’s actually a blessing in disguise.

We were stopped at the road at the top of the first KOM, not allowed onto or down the course. So we – team owner Chris White, team doc Jonathan Edwards, operations manager Andrew Werthington, and Ian Goodwin – parked the car and set up shop at the top of the KOM. I didn’t actually know it was the LINE of the KOM until after, for a better view, I’d gotten a boost onto the shoulders of doc Jonathan Edwards and saw the red KOM-finish streak in the middle of the crowds on the wet road. Sweet!

The blessing is that, from this vantage point, I got the BEST videos of KOM winner Davide Frattini (Team Type 1) and the 4 others in the lead group, as well as the whole RadioShack Team at the front of the chase streaming over the mountain. Of course, I caught all of the team, medical, commissaire, and police cars as well – the fanfare and ruckus of the cars is one of my favorite parts of the caravan.

Afterwards, we quickly navigated our way through heaps of people, cars, and bikes down onto the freeway to circumnavigate the race.

“Let’s play ‘I Spy!’”

And so three Americans and two Aussies played I Spy on a rather visually-plain freeway ride down to Santa Cruz.
We may speak the same “language”, but there were definitely linguistic challenges. After Aussie Ian’s “c” word, “cat eye” – the Aussie term for car REFLECTORS, the three of us Americans threw our hands up and our excitement for the game fizzled.

But fizzled excitement didn’t last long. Thanks to continual race updates via Twitter, we stayed engaged with the race. We landed in Santa Cruz into a sea of weirdos and hung out at a Peet’s coffee. Hilarity ensued as Chris tried to describe a “flat white” to the barista. In the end, we ended up getting some version of a latte/short macchiato. I was happy to be in the company of people who drink as much coffee as I do.

We caught primo press real estate for the finish.

I was stoked to be able to share the live broadcast of the finish line festivities including THE GRAND FINISH, which was apparently cut off from the live coverage on Versus.

Check out that video here, if you missed it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQExqAeMctY

What an exciting finish, with Levi Leipheimer (Team RadioShack), Michael Rogers (HTC-Columbia), and David Zabriskie (Garmin-Transitions) charging through the final bends and mixing it up until the final inches.

No day on the road is complete without a good Zabriskie quote, and so I end with his quote from the press conference:

“I had good feelings today.”