A return to Gila - Lance Armstrong 2010

Big week for racing. First there was Liege-Bastogne-Liege. Then the Tour of Romandie kicked off today, a prelude to the first of the Grand Tours, the Giro d’Italia, which is (gasp) not even two weeks out. And then the winningest Tour de France racer ever will on Wednesday be…riding a non-UCI ranked event in New Mexico which nearly went extinct last season.

That’s right, Lance Armstrong is racing the Tour of the Gila again, along with teammate and defending champion Levi Leipheimer. Because the Gila is a national event only, Armstrong, Leipheimer and RadioShack teammate Jason McCartney have to jump through a few UCI hoops that caused some issues last year: only three riders from a ProTour or Pro Continental team can enter, and they can’t race in ProTour team kit.

So, like last year, they’ll race under the Mellow Johnny’s bike shop banner. But this is a not a lark; while Alain Gallopin heads up the effort at Romandie, none other than RadioShack general manager and head honcho Johan Bruyneel will be driving the team car at the Gila.

(RadioShack won’t be the only team in disguise; three Garmin-Transitions riders - Tom Danielson, Dave Zabriskie and Tom Peterson - will race for Zabriskie’s DZ Nuts company.)

Armstrong’s presence at the Gila last year may have helped save the race. The event is a longstanding fixture in domestic racing but ran into serious funding difficulty. Then, in March, SRAM - a sponsor of Armstrong’s team (Armstrong also has a small ownership stake in the company) - stepped up for title sponsorship. Rumors of Armstrong’s attendance began circulating at the beginning of April and his appearance drew fans and media to Silver City for the event.

But that doesn’t explain why Lance is racing there again. Last year, he was recovering from a broken collarbone and needed to get some race miles in before heading to the Giro d’Italia. The Gila was a great option: close, lower-profile and lower-stress than most European events, but with lots of vertical.

This year, RadioShack isn’t racing the Giro and Armstrong’s pre-Tour preparation hasn’t been derailed by any crashes. As Bill Strickland points out, it’s usually a loser’s game to try to read Armstrong’s intent. But I’m a loser, so I’ll bite: why is Armstrong heading to Gila?

I have no firm info to back it up, but my hunch is that he’s going there because he enjoyed it. The Gila for Armstrong played a role akin to his trip to Boone, North Carolina in 1998. That spring, defeated and demoralized in his attempted return to racing, he considered retiring. A riding camp in the rain with Chris Carmichael and Bob Roll changed his perspective and, well, we all know what happened after that.

Prior to his crash at the Vuelta Castilla y Leon last year, Armstrong looked like a 38-year-old guy who’d been out of the sport for three years. He was a bit heavier than we remembered. He wasn’t time-trialling as well. His fellow pros said he looked nervous and out of place in the pack.

But after an intensive rehab and training session in Aspen, Armstrong’s trajectory was straight up - second at Gila behind Leipheimer; 12th at the Giro, riding into form and looking thin and fit; and then third in the Tour. The racing at the Gila was central to that recovery.

Even more than that, though, the Gila was where Armstrong first seemed to enjoy his return to racing. Prior to that, he was dividing time between training and Livestrong initiatives, prominently tweeting every time drug testers showed up and claiming various conspiracies aimed at preventing him from racing the Tour.

At Gila, he was relaxed. His Twitter feed grew lighthearted with jokes and pictures of the dinner table. He seemed, for the first time since his comeback, to actually be having fun. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s why he’s back.

Courtesy of bicycling.com