20 Days to Tour of CA

It's hard to believe we are just three weeks away from the start of the Tour of California. More and more sponsors are lining up behind Amgen.

Read this article "Peddle Power" from the San Francisco Business Times.

I think this quote is a bit over the top.....

"We're going to rival the Tour de France."

.....but I do agree to dream big!

There are 16 teams lined up for the start, and the most interesting squad appears to be United Pro Cycling Team. There is very little known about this high profile domestic team, but expect a press release and big splash soon before the race.

If you check out the team lineup for the Tour of California you'll see it's a 50/50 mix of US based and European based teams. Certainly not a bad mixture for an inaugural event, but if they are ever going to realize their dream then more Euro based teams must participate. Not only participate, but bring a stronger team aside from their lone US citizen with a few token helpers.

One team that may be in over their heads, but stand to really gain from the experience is TIAA-CREF led by Jonathan Vaughters. TIAA-CREF is loaded with young up and coming talent with eyes on the future, and to go against teams like Discovery and T-Mobile will hopefully be good for development.

There's a fine line that sometimes shouldn't be crossed when you have young talent in development going against experienced grown men. The only way to know if you made a mistake is to try and see what happens.

It reminds of a comment made to me by Ed Lynch, then minor league director of the San Diego Padres, who went on to become General Manager of the New York Mets a few years later. Ed walked the field during workouts one day in Spokane talking to each player. As a former big league pitcher Ed had everyone's respect, and because of this and his intimidating size everyone listened when he spoke.

Ed said, "The only difference between you and guys in the big leagues is experience. You have talent, everyone on your team has talent, but you lack experience. That's the difference."

In other words, use this time to gain experience and focus more on development and less on results. Baseball is careful to expose younger less experienced talent against stronger fully developed major league talent. Players are exposed incrementally to players better than they, and it's more of a mental leap than it is a physical one. Athletes on any level, if they're honest about their ability, know when they're overmatched and out of their league. In baseball, you know.

In other words, just because someone has talent is not good enough reason to expose them to more experienced athletes. It should be more about development, and in most cases this should be done amongst your peers and not superiors.