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Tuft, Meier back from Europe to race BC SuperweekSvein Tuft still remembers his welcome to Pro Cycling moment well.
It came at BC Superweek in 2001, when the late-blooming Langley native got into a breakaway group at the historic Tour de White Rock and realized it included Canadian cycling legend and local product Brian Walton.
Now, almost a decade later, Tuft returns to BC Superweek as a local legend himself. In addition to an impressive Olympics and World Championship and Pan-Am Games medals in 2008, the 33-year-old comes back from Europe having recently raced in the prestigious the Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a Espana with a powerful Garmin-Transitions team on the Pro-Tour, the NHL of cycling.
While Tuft greets any such praise with a sincere aw-shucks smile, he admits being on the other side of the development cycle that started with that first encounter with Walton is a big reason he will line up at the Tour de Delta that Walton helped found when BC Superweek starts next Friday, July 9.
"That was huge for me being in a break with Brian Walton," Tuft said after lapping an impressive field of US pros to win the Yaletown Grand Prix on Canada Day. "I didn't have a clue other than people telling me, `that's Brian Walton' and for me that was a big thing. It's the same for guys coming here so to be able to race back home in BC, where I started, any chance I get to do that, I partake."
Tuft says stiff competition has been a big part of the growth of cycling in Canada, and an important part of developing more young riders for the future. He points not only to Christian Meier, a former Langley resident who now races with him on the Garmin-Transitions team in Europe and will join him at BC Superweek, but also to their former teammates on the locally based Symmetrics squad that was a force in North American pro cycling before folding two years ago.
Tuft singles out ex-teammates like Andrew Pinfold, now with United Healthcare Pro Cycling, fellow Canadian Olympian Zach Bell and his teammate on the Kelly Benefit Strategies team, Ryan Anderson, as well as recently crowned Canadian Road Race champion Will Routley (Jelly Belly Pro Cycling) as important parts of the BC Superweek legacy. And he's happy all are returning to race this year.
"It's important for our next generation of guys coming up to race at that level, and for people to come out see it," said Tuft. "This has been our trade for the last 10 years, so it's nice to share that. Maybe it's not nice if we're riding real hard and it makes it harder for them, but it helps bring up the level and if you are looking to develop and go to the next level, you need to race against guys that are at that level and get a taste of what it is. It's hard to know what that is if you don't."
Meier, who used to live in a trailer adjacent to Tuft's on a Langley property owned by the Symmetrics team manager -- they were nicknamed the Trailer Park Boys – echoed those sentiments after finishing third behind Pinfold in Yaletown.
"It's always our hometown race, even if we spend the year in Europe," he said. "To come home and race in front of friends and family, there's no better feeling."
Meier fondly remembers cheering wildly for another cycling legend – former Olympian and eight-time Canadian time trial champion Eric Wohlberg – from the sidelines as a junior, and then getting to race with him at BC Superweek.
"When I started out cycling I used to watch Eric come out and just dominate the field in the crits and I remember one year in particular at Nationals as a junior just sitting on the corner yelling and screaming for him," Meier said. "Eric was a real idol to me and a couple years later I was racing with him here [at BC Superweek and on Symmetrics] and for me it was a little dream come true to race with a guy I admired that much. I don't consider myself a star, but if some younger kids get a little motivation to get out there and get on the bike because of something Svein or I do here at home, for us that's a huge accomplishment."
If Tuft's comments about still getting better are any indication, those that do come out to watch him at the Tour de Delta and Tour de White Rock are in for a show.
Tuft set a record that still stands at the inaugural Tour de Delta Prologue in 2008, blazing around the leg-shaking 3.2-kilometer course in just three minutes and 44.16 seconds while wearing the Team Canada colors as the National Time Trial champion. In a year that already included four gold medals at the Pan-Am Road and Track Championships, he would go on to finish a Canadian-record seventh in the Beijing Olympic Time Trial, and win silver at the World Championships Time Trial – despite suffering a flat tire six kilometres from the finish.
It was enough to earn him a spot on Garmin's loaded Pro-Tour team, and a big story in the New York Times detailing his unique – and very late – rise in a sport where most top European riders are identified by, and begin elite training in, their early teens and need to show serious progress by the time they're 18.
When Tuft was 18, he bought a $40 bike from a thrift store, built his own trailer to carry camping gear, his 80-pound dog and a sack of potatoes, and rode 1,000 kilometers to the Bella Coola valley. It's all part of a personal history of outdoors survival that reads like Into the Wild, complete with mountain climbing, train hopping across Canada, and living (sometimes barely) off the land. Other bike trips included one to Alaska and back that covered almost 6,000 kilometers.
Tuft once rode to a pro team training camp in California, but, disillusioned over the use of performance-enhancing drugs in cycling had quit and was cutting lawns between outdoor odysseys when Symmetrics came calling in 2004.
Six years later, Tuft is back in BC having just won his third straight Canadian Time Trial Championship (and his sixth in seven years) in Edmonton last weekend. And he says he's riding better than ever after joining a very short list of Canadians to ride two Grand Tours: The 21-stage, 3,337.9-kilometer Vuelta a Espana last fall, and the gruelling 21-stage, 3,485-kilometer Giro d'Italia in May.
The latter race included more than 4,200 meters (14,000 feet) of climbs on the second-to-last stage -- or 20th day of racing – amid avalanche-risk conditions.
Get through that, said Tuft, and you can face pretty much anything. All of which bodes well for later this summer, when Tuft, who won the 2007 US Open in front of 8 million viewers on NBC and was the 2007 UCI Americas Champion, will compete in the Commonwealth Games, World Championships, and at a pair of UCI Pro-Tour events scheduled for September in Quebec City and Montreal.
"Every time I race (in Europe) I'm learning something new," he said. "You get more depth and you can dig a but deeper. Because the races are that much harder and all the distances are that much longer, it just changes your ability as a rider and at the end of the day you can just push that much harder."
Considering how hard and far Tuft has already pushed, that also bodes well for Canada at the 2012 Olympics – and his chances of a prestigious Tour de France start in the future. But Tuft isn't thinking about things in those terms at all.
"We'll see," he said with a shrug. "I didn't grow up with cycling so I'm happy to have done what I have done so far. If I stopped racing all together after 2008, man, that would have been fine by me because I never grew up with it as my driving force and going to the Tour de France isn't the end all, be all for me.
"I've accomplished more than I ever thought I would in cycling and to have gotten to where I've gotten, I feel fortunate enough. But as long as you are still learning and developing as a rider, then hey, you might as well keep going and see where it takes you. That's been my theory all along and it's been a good ride." One BC cycling enthusiasts will have a chance to witness first hand.
The Tour de Delta kicks off with the MK Delta Prologue on July 9, with riders on special time trial bikes blasting down a large steel ramp and onto a quick three-km course, with top speeds expected to reach 60 km/hour. It continues with the Canadian titles on the line at the Brenco Criterium, a multi-lap race through the streets and tight corners of Ladner's fishing village on Saturday, July 10, and wraps up with the gruelling White Spot Road Race on Sunday, July 11. BC Superweek then continues with three more races from July 16-18 at the 31st Tour de White Rock, a challenging three-event weekend (HomelIfe Hillclimb, Bosa Properties Criterium and Peace Arch News Road Race) with a history of top riders that includes serving as Canada's pre-Olympic camp in 1992. For more BC Superweek information visit www.bcsuperweek.ca, or arrange for photos of, and interviews with cyclists, please contact Kevin Woodley, Media Relations Coordinator, at 604-828-5842 or woodyz@telus.net.
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