Tour of Utah needs your help. I got a call from T-Mac (Terry McGinnis), Race Director of the 2008 Tour of Utah bicycle stage race. This is a multi-day pro-am cycling event on the prestigious NRC calendar, and will draw all the best U.S. domestic bike racers. Local icons like Burke Swindlehurst (T-Bird) and Jeff Louder will likely be gunning for glory, but there will be only one king crowned after the final ascent up Little Cottonwood Canyon, the same climb as the annual Snowbird Hillclimb. My best finish in the Snowbird Hillclimb was 3rd, behind Dave Z. and T-Bird, but that was just starting at the bottom and racing to the top. These poor bastards in the 2008 TOU will ride a hundred miles or so AND THEN duke it out up the final climb. With a $75,000 cash prize list and a grand prize of a new car to the winner, TOU is back after a hiatus, and from the looks of it, living large indeed. But putting on a multi-day pro bike race all over the state is a messy affair of tangled logistics, and T-Mac needs some motorcycle riders to volunteer for various support duties, such as assisting UHP in traffic marshaling, neutral support, and chauffeuring race officials from one spot to another. I will likely volunteer for a day or two, but T-Mac needs all the help he can get. If you are a Utah-based moto rider with any sort of scoot, email T-Mac and offer up some assistance. Now let me tell you a little bit about my friend T-Mac: we were former team mates in our younger days on the X-Men Cycling Team, and T-Mac helped me win a lot of races at the Rocky Mountain Raceway “Tuesday Night World Championships.” T-Mac was tenacious then, and is even more tenacious now as he continues to fight some nasty cancer. And, did I mention he is race director for the grandest bike race Utah has ever seen? This guy is tough, but needs a little help.

 
View of my old arse. Stage 1. 2006 Tour of Utah. Photo by T-Mac.
 

So my phone rings and it’s an unfamiliar SLC number. Turns out, it is founder and CEO of DZ Nuts chamois creme, Dave Zabriskie. Dave is a professional cyclist with Team Slipstream and a former winner of the Maillot Jaune in the Tour de France. In that opening time trial a few years back, he shocked the world by beating all comers including a retired, silly well-known Texan (see Dickipedia) and everyone’s favorite recreational drug-using former Eastern bloc talent-squanderer Jan Ullrich to claim the leader’s jersey in dramatic fashion in the world’s most televised biking contest. Dave has had his flashes of brilliance on the bike since that historical moment, but some who know him well would argue his real talent is in making people laugh. Here’s to Dave and his wife and new baby, and to a speedy recovery from a nasty fall in the Giro d’Italia, right after helping his team win the opening time trial (editor’s note: Dave is still the only American to have won a stage in all three of the Grand Tours). Shaka.