Click here for the Tour of Qatar startlist.

The race was started by a local business man Bruce Reid who owned a restaurant. He saw that people came up here to train and thought, let’s give them a race to enter. It was put on a weekend that was slow, and would hopefully bring some tourism to town. It began as a very small race with just 2 grades (A & B). One stage out to Buffalo River Dam & a criterium.

1994 was the first “official” running of the race when it began to take the shape it has now. That year Dean Woods (Olympian) won A grade. Cadel Evans raced in B grade as a junior. Richie Porte won A Grade in his second season of racing in 2007 by winning stage 1 and stage 2.

The race has tried many formats and times. It was originally held in May. This caused problems with the weather. As some races had hail & snow. Even Tawonga Gap had snow on it one year. It was then moved to Melbourne Cup weekend for 2 years. Since then it moved to the first weekend in December. The club was told it would never work as December is track season & no one would turn up.

For years it was a 4 stage race. Gaps Loop, TT, Mt Buffalo Ascent & a crit. The swapping of the Mt Buffalo stage for the Mt Hotham stage left no time for a crit, hence now only 3 stages. This has made the race even more popular as for the last 3 years the race has had to be capped at 550. It has reached that cap earlier & earlier each year. Now it’s a challenge just to get into the event.

Some famous names have raced in the Tour. Ana Wilson, and Kathy Watt raced in B grade as there were no woman’s grades. Now there are 3 woman’s grades. Katie Mactier is the only person to do a clean sweep. She won the GC, sprint king & KOM jersey’s. Ritchie Porte won in 2007. It’s great to see people in our race who then go on to much bigger things.

The format is obviously working. The TT is the reason there is a cap, as it takes all afternoon to get every rider though. We here many stories about people buying TT bikes especially for this race. The Alpine Cycling Club are working on some other ideas to make the weekend bigger & better for competitors and their support. So who knows what’s next!

To all you Americans reading, have a great Thanksgiving. To the rest of you, enjoy your weekend and ride safe.

Directed by Jorgen Leth, who also directed Sunday in Hell and a number of other documentaries.

Here’s what Kathryn had to say about her experience filming the guys on Genesys:

I was a bit worried about shooting my first piece on a race team. My past experience has mostly been with Motocross and Mountain Biking, both very familiar to me and something I am very comfortable shooting. I saw the Chasing Legends doco and that’s when I started thinking I could perhaps do something like that on an Australian team. I was supposed to meet the Genesys Team on the Tuesday night before the race but unfortunately we couldn’t get together and I had to show up to the race on Wednesday without having met any of the team. I spotted Steve Price and introduced myself. The riders were all getting ready to start the race so it wasn’t until back at the Motel in Ballarat that I first met Steele Von Hoff where he was on the massage table semi-naked trying to relax after the race and here I am standing there with my camera introducing myself and telling him I was there to take to photos of him! He didn’t care at all and made me feel very welcome. I met Nathan Haas next. I asked to interview him and without any prompting he just chatted away about his experience that day. I didn’t even have to ask any questions – he’s a natural in front of the camera!

I met the rest of the riders and crew before the race at Ballarat and got to spend some more time with them after the race in Geelong. Everyone made me feel very welcome and was really easy to get along with. I must admit I had visions of temperamental riders not wanting to cooperate and having to work hard to get the footage I was after. This was not the case however. They were not conscious of the camera even though I was in their face a lot of the time and really just went about their business as though I was not there, that is exactly what I was hoping for and I believe it made for a very honest doco on the team. I really cant speak highly enough of everyone involved, even though it was a pretty high stress environment they were all willing to help and made sure I was ok with everything. It was such a wonderful experience and just like the riders aspiring to make it over in Europe I too have the same dream, although I think I will run in to a few of those aforementioned temperamental riders there but I am sure I could deal with that!

Have a great weekend and ride safe!

Louis Malle shot most of the documentary as a 30 year old cycling fan and filmmaker with only 2 feature films to his name. The footage was likely shot in 16 mm.

Thank you to Daniel Strauss for sending in.

1962 Tour de France General Classification

1 Jacques Anquetil (FRA) ACCB-Saint Raphaël 114h 31′ 54″
2 Jozef Planckaert (BEL) Flandria-Faema +4′ 59″
3 Raymond Poulidor (FRA) Mercier +10′ 24″
4 Gilbert Desmet (BEL) Carpano +13′ 01″
5 Albertus Geldermans (NED) ACCB-Saint Raphaël +14′ 04″
6 Tom Simpson (GBR) VC XII +17′ 09″
7 Imerio Massignan (ITA) Legnano +17′ 50″
8 Ercole Baldini (ITA) Ignis +19′ 00″
9 Charly Gaul (LUX) G.S. Gazzola +19′ 11″
10 Eddy Pauwels (BEL) Wiels +23′ 04″

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1962_Tour_de_France

I won’t got on about what nice bikes they make – they can speak for themselves. What I like and respect about Baum is the fact that they haven’t lost touch with what they do and they’ll never try to BS you on how their bikes will make you ride faster. The only thing they’re bikes will do is make you ride more often.

And if you ever wondered about who does Cadel’s bike fit, look no further…

full sized photo mosaic download here – 3.6MB

Special thanks to Veeral Patel who raced tirelessly across France to capture hundreds of these special moments.

Music by Michael Montes “Anticyclones”. Buy on iTunes here

If you’re a new reader you can go back to my Tour of Friendship updates here, here, here, here and here if you’re interested.

Made by David Christenson. Keep in mind that Dave also raced the Tour of Friendship and hardly had any footage to scrape this together. Unfortunately the best of the race footage and beautiful terrain in Thailand wasn’t captured.

I cannot say enough about how much fun this race was. Quite often bike races are serious, tiring, monotonous and physically and mentally draining. The Tour of Friendship was definitely challenging, but unbelievable interesting, enjoyable and rewarding. There’s a category for everyone’s abilities and it was very affordable (approx. $400 AUD plus airfare), so I strongly encourage anyone interested to have a crack next May.

Looking back at this series of posts and the film I now remember how great racing can be. Despite what I said the other day (I must have needed a coffee), I still have a couple more years left in me! There’s a lot more to life than racing, but if you haven’t tried racing before, there’s a big part of cycling that you’re missing out on.

Enjoy your weekend, ride hard, and most of all, ride safe.

Wait, There’s More!

Not so fast. I just dug up the most coveted prize out of my Tickle Trunk of treasures. A Team Excellent Noodles jersey that I managed to score from the Tour of Friendship. Team Excellent Noodles is a powerhouse cycling team from the Philippines and was a major sponsor of the race. These guys absolutely love their racing and had some gun climbers who regularly tore my legs off once we hit the hills.

This jersey means everything to me, but I’m willing to give it away to someone who can tell me the time in the movie that Dave Christenson (the filmmaker) appears. There are a couple different answers and I’ll accept either. I’ll draw randomly from the correct answers in the comments.

Hi,
my name is Gianmarco Dodesini Valsecchi from Italy, i am a film maker and we work for some Cycling companies. Our name is 341Production and i am starting to make some contact with the bigger bloggers of cycling. I think you might be interested of our work. I’ll send you the link of our latest work for Vittoria.

I really hope that you enjoy it.

best regardes
Gianmarco

I then did some looking around at Gianmarco’s other work and found another one of his films from the 2011 Strade Bianche called “Servizio Corse Strade Bianche”:

I love this type of stuff. It’s always great to see high quality behind-the-scenes footage coming in. I don’t mind that it was commissioned by Vittoria and that it’s basically an advertisement. Pro cycling is a massive advertising platform anyway, and I personally find it much more interesting coming through like this. They definitely hit the mark and caught my attention. In fact, the stuff Vittoria has been coming out with this year has been fantastic. Take this “how tubulars are made” video as another example:

Keep up the good work guys. Keep creating content like this and you’ll never have to pay for online advertising again.