The Bulletin, Bend / Central Oregon News
NOVEMBER 21, 2009 01:06 PM
bendbulletin.com/Cascade Cycling Classic
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With the 30th edition of the race being staged this year, the Cascade Cycling Classic has a long history in Central Oregon
By Mark Morical / The Bulletin
Published: July 19. 2009 4:00AM PST
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Gary Bonacker, left, and Don Leet hold a framed poster that was used to promote the inaugural Cascade Cycling Classic (then called the High Desert Museum Classic). The annual CCC will be held this week in Central Oregon for the 30th time. Behind them hanging on the wall at Sunnyside Sports, is the 1984 leader’s jersey. Leet noted that the photo used in the poster was from a Northern California bike race, as the Central Oregon event had not yet been held.
Rob Kerr / The Bulletin
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Don Leet was at the Tour de France four years ago, watching Lance Armstrong win his seventh Tour championship.
Leet was sitting on a side street after the completion of the final stage when Alex Stieda, the first North American ever to lead in the Tour de France, in 1986, came walking by. Stieda had also happened to win the criterium in the first-ever Cascade Cycling Classic, staged in Central Oregon in 1980.
Leet, a Bend resident and co-founder of the CCC, introduced himself to Stieda.
“He said, ‘You have no idea how important that race (the Cascade Classic) was to my career,’ ” Leet recalls. “And he went on and on — and this was 25 years after he raced it.”
Stieda was the first of a long list of cyclists who have raced the CCC and continued on to cycling prominence in Europe, among them Lance Armstrong, Chris Horner, Bobby Julich, Christian Vande Velde, Levi Leipheimer, Tom Danielson, Tyler Hamilton and Jonathan Vaughters.
Leet, who founded the Cascade Cycling Classic with fellow Central Oregon cycling enthusiasts Gary Bonacker and Mike Hollern, knew from the start that the race — which will make its 30th running starting Tuesday — would be big. The CCC is now the longest consecutively run elite stage race in the country.
“Our race became important pretty much immediately,” says Leet, co-owner with Bonacker of the Sunnyside Sports bike shop in Bend. “From Day 1, it’s attracted the top pros.”
The idea for the race came from Hollern, who as CEO of Brooks Resources Corp., a prominent Central Oregon real estate development company, had considerable pull in the region. Hollern had seen the Tour de Gastown criterium in Vancouver, British Columbia, and wondered if a similar event could be staged in the Bend area.
Leet and Bonacker, who were then minority owners of Sunnyside Sports (they are now majority owners), were thrilled when Hollern mentioned to them his idea for a high-profile cycling race in Central Oregon.
“We’ve got a fantastic biking community,” Hollern says, remembering his conversation with Leet and Bonacker. “Sunnyside really took the ball and ran with it.”
What would become the Cascade Cycling Classic was in its first year actually called the High Desert Museum Classic and was used as publicity for the museum, which would open in 1982. (Hollern was on the board of directors for the museum.) And the first race was staged in September, in an effort to boost the Central Oregon economy during the tourism “shoulder” season.
Bonacker designed the courses and Leet, who would serve as the race director from 1981 to 1990, took care of other logistics.
Now a six-day, six-stage race with a major corporate title sponsor (Bend Memorial Clinic), the Classic started in 1980 as a modest two-day, three-stage event. That first race included a 5-mile time trial up Lava Butte south of Bend, the Downtown Criterium in Bend, and the 76-mile Deschutes Road Race. Though the courses have been modified over the years, the Downtown Criterium and the Deschutes Road Race (now the Cascade Lakes Road Race) remain staples of the CCC.
The inaugural event, which included about 100 men’s riders, had a distinct Canadian flavor. Ron Hayman, a seven-time Canadian national champion on the road and track who would go on to race for the vaunted 7-Eleven Cycling Team, won the 1980 Classic’s overall title.
Stieda, also a Canadian who would race for 7-Eleven, won the Classic’s first criterium.
Cyclists encountered rain and snow near Mount Bachelor — which was then still known as Bachelor Butte — during the Deschutes Road Race, and the next day some 1,000 spectators showed up to watch the criterium in downtown Bend, according to The Bulletin from Sept. 22, 1980.
In that edition, Bulletin staff writer Bob Welch wrote: “Suddenly, three dozen bicyclists materialized from around a corner, rushed down Wall Street in a blur of color and speed, and were gone.
“Bicycle racing had arrived in Central Oregon.”
Before the 1981 Cascade Cycling Classic, Leet traveled to Colorado to watch the Coors International Bicycle Classic, then the biggest stage race in the country.
“I wanted to get an idea of what they did,” Leet recalls. “You realize how steep a hill has to be to break up the pack. My goal was to make it more meaningful, so it wasn’t just a pack finish with sprints … kind of like a mini Tour de France.”
With Leet as race director and Bonacker as head mechanic and technical support, the CCC continued over the years to add stages and moved to August, then to July.
“We realized, for Sunnyside Sports, we wanted to get cycling in people’s heads earlier in the season,” Leet reflects. “Also, it was a better time to be an important race.”
Leet and Bonacker added stages on the Santiam and McKenzie passes, continuing to make the race more challenging for North America’s top cyclists.
Even in the early years of the race, Leet remembers, spectators flocked to downtown Bend to watch the criterium.
“The (criterium) crowds back then were actually bigger than they ever were until about two or three years ago,” Leet says. “I’d walk the course, I’d see thousands of people, and they’d all say, ‘Hi, Don.’ That was the moment I realized we did something important for the town.”
In 1982, the Cascade Cycling Classic was won by Alexi Grewal, who would go on to win an Olympic gold medal for the United States in 1984 and race for 7-Eleven. Dale Stetina, winner of the Coors Classic in 1979 and 1983, won the CCC in ’83 and ’84.
In 1993, Bart Bowen, who now lives in Bend and owns Rebound Sports Performance Lab, won the overall Classic title. Vaughters, now the team manager for Garmin-Slipstream (which is racing in the Tour de France), won the CCC in 1997.
The next year, Armstrong made the Cascade Cycling Classic his first race in his comeback from cancer. He won the overall title and would go on to finish fourth at the Tour of Spain before winning the first of his seven Tour de France titles in 1999.
Last year, Leipheimer won the CCC, and he was in fourth place overall in this year’s Tour de France before breaking a wrist Thursday in a crash and withdrawing from the race.
In 1986, the women’s race was added to the Cascade Cycling Classic, though it was put on hiatus from 1991 to 1998 due to a lack of both competitors and funding.
Bonacker remembers some years when he and Leet wondered if even the men’s race would take place.
“It’s not a way to make money,” Bonacker says of the Classic. “But we as a shop, and Bend as a community, we saw a need for it. I can’t imagine it not continuing. A lot of races have had to stop.”
Nine races on USA Cycling’s National Racing Calendar were canceled this year because of the slumping economy. But the CCC seems to be going strong.
After Leet stepped down as race director in 1990, the CCC was run by its own board of directors. The Mount Bachelor Sports Education Foundation took over organization of the race six years ago.
“It just seems to be getting bigger and bigger,” says MBSEF director Chuck Kenlan. “And there’s more people in Bend now that get excited about bike racing.”
Leet is not surprised to see the Cascade reach its 30th edition.
“I thought we’d be successful, and that’s why I put all the energy into it back then,” he says. “That was my vision. Bend was the perfect place for a bike race.
“I’m proud of it.”
Mark Morical can be reached at 541-383-0318 or at mmorical@bendbulletin.com.
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