Phil Gaimon Journal: Racing on home roads

The Amgen Tour of California is usually known as a fun, chill race for the WorldTour teams. With good food, In N Out Burger, nice hotels, and safe, open roads, guys coming off of a hard spring beg for starts in Cali. In previous years, the race had built a reputation as a sprinter’s showcase, with a handful of GC guys duking it out on a mountaintop finish and a time trial, and then sitting back while guys like Mark Cavendish and Peter Sagan put on a show the rest of the week.

This year, they changed the script on us, with only two traditional sprint days: stage 1 in San Diego (which still had a lot of elevation gain, but Cannondale’s Wouter Wipper barely missed the win behind Peter Sagan). Then they made the sprinters drag their asses over 50,000 feet of climbs to make it the last sprint day in Sacramento, where Cavendish sealed the deal for his team.

As a SoCal resident, the first three stages were home turf for me. I’d been training at altitude, so I had enough breath on the climbs to say hi to my friends on the side of the road, and it was surreal to rip around the roads I train on with a world-class peloton. I’ve climbed Highway 2 up to Angeles Crest hundreds of times, but the group ride doesn’t go quite as fast as when Alaphilippe attacked for …

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