As professional cyclists, the holy grail is to show up to a place, jump on your bike, race your heart out, and get off your bike.  That is all you must focus on, and everything else is taken care of for you.  In Europe, cycling is very much like this, but in most other parts of the world the racers often have many more mundane, everyday concerns.

But one thing we simply take for granted: that there even exist start and finish lines!  The people and work behind those two lines is astounding, actually more impressive than many of the performance between those two lines.  As I’ve been to more and more races as a professional, and become more involved with the business of cycling as a professional sport, I have gotten a glimpse of some of the immense obstacles promoters must tackle to pull it all off.

As I’ve nursed my knee wound, which seems to be coming together (literally) quite well, I have witnessed the Tour do Rio from the sidelines–behind the barriers at the start, in the van during, and behind the podium at the finish.  And I’ve also been seeing how the multitude of race staff, organization, commissaires, medics, and doping controllers work together in concert to keep the show on the road.

The Tour do Rio has been one of my most memorable races for this reason.  I cannot remember ever as a rider experiencing a stage race without racing in it, and it’s been an eye opener.  The course design, figuring out how to pass through towns with spectators lining the avenues, take in the incredible climbs around Rio de Janeiro, descend safely through some wicked mountain peaks, and come together for a grand finale–these are some of the key ingredients that make a race grow and prosper and create incredible drama and marketing value for its sponsors.

The Tour do Rio has it in spades.  Often riders declare courses unsafe, sometimes even unridable, but the race must seek out incredible challenges to allow the cream to rise over the course of the tour.  Rio provides an epic backdrop for the drama, and navigating its back roads has been hair raising for sure, but the event has calmed down as all tours do throughout their stages.

We can only hope for more coverage in the future, including video, to capture this spectacle as it happens.  Hearing from the guys after each stage, there are more opportunities for attacks, regrouping, chases, and various tactics between teams to play out than almost any races we do in the US.  The roads are so demanding that it’s simply not possible to have a boring stage with a lone break that is slowly reeled in before a bunch sprint.  The Tour do Rio has taken a cue from the Tour de France in using middle mountains throughout the stages to make the race a fascinating battle between strong rolleurs and grimpiers, with teams required to constantly react to changing conditions.

I cannot lie: it’s been very tough spectating at the Tour do Rio, made all the more difficult by the epic courses and challenges and tactics that I’ve seen.  As a racer, we look for the start and finish lines to determine success and failure–to what races are we invited and how do we perform at them?  But what comes between them, oh, that’s the good stuff, the beauty–what keeps us coming back for more.

I can only hope we are so lucky to come back to the Tour do Rio in 2012, their third year running.  I’ll know what to expect, I’ll be ready for the considerable challenges, and I’ll look forward to the good stuff.