VISALIA -- The Amgen Tour of California made the expected official Thursday: Visalia is back and Clovis has been replaced as a destination city for the nation's premier professional cycling race in 2010.
Tour officials unveiled the dates and routing for the 2010 race, scheduled for May 16-23, with Visalia scheduled to host the start of Stage 5 on May 20. The stage concludes in Bakersfield, a new stop for the fifth-year event.
"A lot of people work real hard to get a stage," Visalia Mayor Jesus Gamboa said. "It speaks well to our city and our part of the Valley. We're going to try real hard to make it work. We are excited."
In all, the tour will visit 16 cities and feature eight stages, down from nine stages in 2009. The tour has also been pushed back to May -- after being staged in February the first four years -- in hopes of better weather conditions and drawing more top cycling stars.
Visalia was the start for Stage 6 last year, when nearly 20,000 people turned out downtown to cheer on cyclists such as seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong, three-time Tour of California winner Levi Leipheimer, Dave Zabriskie and George Hincapie as they began their journey to Paso Robles.
All four of those cyclists declared their intentions to race in the 2010 tour via a Twitter exchange Thursday morning that also included Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The exact route from Visalia to Bakersfield has not been determined, but Mike Camarena, a member of the Visalia organizing committee, said it is expected to run along the edge of the foothills, hopefully through the towns of Exeter, Lindsay and Porterville before crossing into Kern County. The stage is expected to end near Bakersfield College in a section of town called the Bluffs.
Visalia officials said their proximity to the foothills, not Clovis' failed effort to land a stage, was the reason for the tour's return to the Tulare County city.
"We think the partnership was Visalia and Bakersfield all along," said Glenn Morris, president and CEO of the Visalia Chamber of Commerce. "Bakersfield was very aggressive in getting a stage, as were we. The thought to get the foothills in made for a natural stage."
A second straight stop in Clovis was scrapped, as reported by The Bee on Wednesday, because a deal could not be reached by tour officials and the federal government to run a portion of a stage in Yosemite National Park.
Last year, tour officials hailed Clovis as the best first-time stopover they have had as an estimated 25,000 people packed the streets of Old Town Clovis on Feb. 18 to watch Mark Cavendish sprint to a stage victory.
But several factors -- including potential inconvenience to park visitors, potential harm to the park and potential harm to the Park Service's mission -- kept the tour out of Yosemite, which in turn kept it from stopping in Clovis.
"Once we concluded it wasn't going to happen, it had implications with respect to the rest of the race," said Andrew Messick, president of race organizer AEG Sports. "It's important to note that in designing a route, very seldom is something that happens in one stage unrelated to what happens in other stages.
"That has to do with how we manage things. Everything is interconnected. If something doesn't work, we have to reboot the whole thing and re-layout the route. I wish it was as easy as saying, 'Yosemite didn't work, we'll start somewhere else,' but it doesn't work that way."
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