Race Details
The Fourth Tour of California covered nine days and 780.44 miles (1,256.00 km), starting with a flat 2.4 miles (3.9 km) prologue near the California State Capitol in Sacramento on February 14, 2009. Drawing many of the top cyclists from around the world, the Tour of California generated an estimated revenue of $100 million for the state of California.
The Astana team included two-time returning champion Levi Leipheimer, and seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong. The 2006 champion, Floyd Landis returned, riding for OUCH-Maxxis.
Tour organizers have switched the route form year to year, hoping to reach out to fans in different parts of the state and maintain the challenge of the race. Santa Cruz, one of the cities added for the 2009 running, expected added costs of $100,000 to cover public services and accommodations for lodging and meals for the cycling teams, and was expecting 250,000 fans to attend the end of Stage 2. The sales and hotel taxes generated by drawing tourists at a traditionally slow time of the year were expected to help recover the costs of hosting the event. Stage 2 also took the peloton across the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time in the tour's history.
In another first, Stage 4 includes an excursion through the Central Valley and the Sierra Nevada foothills, starting in Merced, then passing through the foothill towns of Mariposa and Oakhurst, and finishing in Clovis (adjacent to Fresno).
The tour organizers tried to integrate climbing into nearly every day's stage; only the prologue, time trial and Stage 5 — the tour's longest at 134.3 miles (216.1 km) — had no climbs. The 2009 Tour features at least one King of the Mountain summit on each other stage, with the Tour's technical director proclaiming that the difficult climbs in the course they designed having the potential to have the leader change on a daily basis.
The eighth stage alone, the last of the tour, stretching nearly 100 miles (160 km) from Rancho Bernardo to Escondido featured four King of the Mountain summits including a climb of Palomar Mountain, home of the Palomar Observatory, which runs for 7 miles (11 km), climbing 4,200 feet (1,300 m) at an average grade of 7%, with 21 switchbacks on the mountain that reaches an elevation of 5,123 feet (1,561 m).
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