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Papillon: The Joe Papp Diary 2004
Joe Papp is a UCI Elite rider with the UPMC cycling team. He was a double stage winner at the 2003 Vuelta a Cuba (UCI 2.5) and in 2002 won the GS Mengoni Grand Prix, the BMC NYC Cycling Classic for elite amateur men and a stage at Superweek, among other events. Joe's writing is good enough to make boring races intriguing and intriguing races captivating.
Green Mountain Stage Race, Vermont, USA, September 3-6, 2004
Memories - Thursday, September 2, 2004
The one and only time I visited Vermont was in the fall of 1993. I was a freshman in college at the University of Pittsburgh, studying subjects like calculus, physics and biology, when all I wanted to do was ride my bike. That summer, I'd missed what turned out to be one of my best chances to win a national championship by getting sick with food poisoning after eating in a dodgy dinner in Newburgh, NY along with my friend Tim O'Toole before the Junior National RR in Bear Mountain (a circuit on which I finally won a race this May). Then in August, my girlfriend Portia broke up with me, yet it was she who was inviting me to visit her at UVM, plane ticket included. Against the counsel of older, wiser friends (like O'Toole), I went to see her, and the experience was worse than I could have imagined. The Green Mountain State was thereafter indelibly linked with a heartbreaking experience, and I took pains to give Vermont a wide berth in all my travels. I even avoided "genuine maple syrup," preferring Aunt Jemima to any reminder of the place where my heart was broken for the second time by the same young woman.
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In the 11 years since that trip, I graduated from Pitt with a degree in History, raced my bike in Australia, Chile, Cuba, France, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Panama, Trinidad & Tobago, Uruguay, and Venezuela, went to grad school for a bit and even found the woman I plan to marry. But I never went back to Vermont. I missed the Killington Stage Race when it played host to the best domestic professionals in the USA and when my first hero Matt Eaton won the Rutland Criterium. I never saw the beautiful fall foliage and I always went south during the flight of the phoenix that rose from Killington's ashes, the Green Mountain Stage Race (GMSR).
This year would be different. I'm climbing better than ever; thanks to the work I've been doing with my new coach Hunter Allen, so I couldn't blame my absence on the mountains. I'm more motivated at this time of year than I have been since 2001, when I was in full swing for the Univest GP, only to see it cancelled by the horror of 9-11. I took a three-week break this summer after the Pan Am Championships in late-June, and I'm mentally and physically ready to keep racing through October.
Thanks to closely analysing the power data I've accumulated over the past four seasons, I've realized that my body needs a workload like what I'll experience in Vermont in order to peak for this year's edition of the Univest GP. The only thing that would have held me back from the 2004 GMSR is money, since I'm so far in debt that my eyeballs are red and ACT-UPMC is counting pennies in order to survive the extra month of the season that my teammate Eneas Freyre and I face in order to prepare for our second trip to Asia this year, when we'll jet to Taiwan with two other Fuji-sponsored riders and Giana Roberge for the Tour of Taiwan in November.
Eneas had already committed to riding Vermont, since he and his fiancé Nancy have made it a kind of bike race cum weekend bed and breakfast getaway, and with a guaranteed pro-level support person (Nancy) to take care of us in the feed zones, I really wanted to ride. So I did something that I've never done before in my career - I sent an email to the race promoter and asked if he could help me with lodgings. Please understand something: if you're on a US pro team and you're even halfway decent as a rider and your PR flak (who could be the same person who trues wheels and drives the team car) is even somewhat efficient, you can get comp'd hotel rooms from many, many promoters for domestic races. That's because these events need "pro" participation in order to legitimise the race in the eyes of the media and the sponsors, and while Team Snow Valley or FiordiFrutta or ACT-UPMC might kick pro ass on a regular basis, we're not UCI T3 teams… So for me, it was a really big thing when Gary, the promoter, emailed me back and said he was on it, that he would definitely find me a room. Wow. I appreciated his efforts because I wouldn't have to spend money on a B&B, but more importantly, I appreciated the fact that this part-time promoter, who is a full-time lawyer and who I've never met, respected me enough as a rider and (and a cyclingnews.com diarist?) to go out on a limb and basically invest a little of his budget in my participation.
I'll bet that a lot of you a reading this and thinking, "Why the heck is Papp getting so emotional about getting a free room in the USA for a four-day race in Vermont when he's raced two-week UCI tours on promoters' dimes all around the world?" Well, it's the little things - like a bit of appreciation in your own country from someone with whom you have no personal or business relationship - that cancel out a lot of the negative things that make full-time biking equal parts pure pleasure and exasperation.
With my online registration receipt in-hand, and "White Horse Inn, German Flats Road, Waitsfield" scribbled on a piece of paper, I loaded-up the Ford Focus and began my triumphant return to Vermont. One-and-a-half-thumbs up to mapblast.com, which gave me detailed, navigable directions to get to the Inn, up until the point where it failed to state that I had to look left for the street sign that would indicate my last right hand turn. I twice missed the marker and drove by German Flats Road, but, as they say, third times a charm and I was soon pulling into a very full parking lot in front of what was not your typical bed-and-breakfast.
In fact, it wasn't a B&B at all, but rather a spacious yet cozy inn owned by Dave and his wife, who were thrilled to see the bike race back in town for the shot in the local economy it gives during the off-season from skiing. Despite it being almost midnight, I wasn't the last to arrive, so I bid Dave good night while he waited for some racers from Pennsylvania and settled in for a long sleep before tomorrow's uphill, mass start, prologue time trial.
Part One - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four - Part Five
Email Joe at joe@cyclingnews.com
