Category: Johnny Bairos

Redlands Connection is a concoction of sports memories emanating from a city that once numbered less than 20,000 people. From the Super Bowl to the World Series, from the World Cup to golf’s U.S. Open, plus NCAA Final Four connections, Tour de France cycling, major tennis, NBA and a little NHL, aquatics and quite a bit more, the sparkling little city that sits between Los Angeles and Palm Springs on Interstate 10 has its share of sports connections. Redlands! There’s just been one Redlander to notch an organized race. Don’t get off the brilliant cyclists that have shown up including one future Tour de France champion, 1998 Redlands runner-up Cadel Evans, along with quite a few handfuls of brilliant riders from that worldwide spectacular event. – Obrey Brown

DOWNTOWN REDLANDS WAS FAILING, say, in the early 1980s. Maybe it didn’t see like its minimal downtown businesses were worth any way of drawing outsiders, or even its own citizens. How could anyone improve its State Street look? What could attract visitors? 

Try this: Something happened in Orange County during the summer of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Road race champion Alexi Grewal won that race held in Mission Viejo. A year later, cycling was showing up in Redlands.

Anyone remember that?

It needed saving. Business was down. Anxieties were up. The future of this glorious community seemed on the line. Would business owners be able to survive?

Turn to sporting events.

Mayor Carole Beswick, city councilman Dick Larsen, plus a contributing member of Redlands society, Denmark’s Peter Brandt, who had professional connections to bicycle racing, concocted a plan.

There were plenty of others, including Craig Kundig, a local business owner whose future commitment as Race Director led to some of the events’ greatest growth.

On the heels of that 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympic Games, at which U.S. cyclists like Steve Hegg (time trials), Ron Kiefel, Davis Phinney came away with gold medals, the feeling was simple:

Why not bring a professional cycling event to Redlands? Answer is simple: They did. It was a clean-air sport. Shutting down city streets, opening it up to pro cycling, seemed to be a cool answer. Would the city’s residents respond well?

When Phinney, a top USA cyclist from Team 7-Eleven, won the 1986 Redlands Classic, he was asked to reflect on his experiences in racing at the famed Tour de France.

He was amenable for a while. Phinney, though, recognized what his Redlands victory really meant.

“Let’s talk,” he said, taking full control of the post-event media interviews, “about the Tour of Redlands.”

Lurking behind the crowd in the media center – the basement of a local bank – Beswick & Co. cheered the moment. Phinney was, perhaps, the USA’s top cycling spokesman. Talking it up about Redlands helped the cause.

Team 7-Eleven shouldn’t have even been racing at Redlands. The team was racing in Europe when civil unrest was taking place. Said Kundig: “They just decided to get out of there and come out here.”

“Out here?” It was Redlands.

Thirty-four years later, not only has the Redlands Bicycle Classic survived, but it’s outlasted virtually every other U.S. cycling event. Throughout the preceding 33 years, the event has moved from its Memorial Day weekend, thrust itself into February, March and April offerings. One year, it was held back in May.

The reason was simple: In late May, the globe’s best teams were setting up for races back east or even in Europe. Those teams’ budgets weren’t big enough to withstand travel back to the west coast for Redlands.

Redlands wanted to build its race on the backs of cycling’s best. By shifting its calendar dates to the beginning of the season, teams that often train in California could easily schedule at Redlands.

There was even a 1999 street sprint in downtown Redlands on State Street, perhaps taking advantage of track specialist Johnny Bairos, who won that stage, incidentally, against the biggest names in U.S. racing.

Bairos, a Redlands product, went on to the 2000 Sydney Olympics. To this date, Bairos is the only local cyclist to ever win a Redlands Classic stage.

Plenty of other winners came from overseas – Russia and Great Britain, France and Germany, Canada, Poland, Switzerland and South America, to name a few.

Historically speaking, the Redlands Bicycle Classic may have no equal as an athletic event throughout San Bernardino County.

The white elephant in the room for cycling, of course, is its drug scandals, which have rocked the sport.

Consider this: The Redlands Classic has long since tested athletes for drugs. There have been no disqualifications.

Three-time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond comes to mind.

We’re wondering, out loud, that if cycling’s rampant doping regimen hadn’t taken place if he would’ve eventually stayed in Europe rather than cut down his cycling riding career?

Cycling could’ve been a clean sport. While the peleton of lesser-gifted cyclists passed an un-drugged LeMond, he might’ve even brought a team to Redlands.

Redlands was always beckoning to cycling’s top stars to come and race.

The guess here is that he’d have shown up in, say, 1994, 1995, who knows?

That’s the kind of reach the Redlands Bicycle Classic has.

LeMond, incidentally, did come to Redlands one year. He’d retired. Showed up here, courtesy of the organizers, to lead a Fun Ride. He spent time with a couple of us media types – Paul Oberjuerge of the San Bernardino Sun and me – in the boardroom of a downtown Redlands bank.

There was a hint – but nothing stated out loud – that something was wrong with cycling.

Then there was Lance Armstrong, yet to unload a series of victories in the Tour de France 

The redoubtable Kundig confided to me that Armstrong, suffering from the ravages of testicular cancer, might show up at Redlands at, of all places, to race in his comeback event.

Kundig gave me that impression more than a few times. I believe he was hoping. Armstrong had yet to win a single Tour de France, but he was about to launch a fabulous – later stripped from the history books – career in Europe.

“It was on their schedule to come here … with Lance,” said Kundig. “He made the decision on his own to go straight from here to Europe.”

The Postal team, at that time, was training in nearby Palm Springs. Kundig was riding, ironically, next to Armstrong during a training ride in the Coachella Valley. He asked Armstrong about the plans.

“He told me, ‘That was the plan (to race at Redlands), but I decided that I’m going to Europe.’ “

His U.S. Postal Service team had landed at Redlands with four straight champions – Tomas Brozyna, Dariusz Baranowski, Jonathan Vaughters and Christian Vande Velde. All were featured players on Armstrong’s Postals.

Imagine the publicity Armstrong received by racing at Redlands.

L.A. Times.

Sports Illustrated.

ESPN.

CNN.

The joint would’ve been rocking.

Too bad Armstrong picked his comeback race in Europe.

*****

It’s spread from Redlands to Yucaipa and Loma Linda, Highland and Route 66 in North San Bernardino, in the nearby mountains of Crestline, even to the Fontana-based Auto Club Speedway, plus Mt. Rubidoux over in Riverside, plus a road stage that wound its way past Lake Mathews.

The final two days have always been reserved for Redlands – finish line on Citrus Avenue, downtown – where the city can highlight its downtown image a la the original Beswick-Larsen dream. Talk about drawing large race watchers to improve that growing city area.

All they needed was a plan.

Cycling. It’s been long billed as an event “Where Legends Are Born.” That’s based on the fact that top-racing Redlands competitors often bolt for bigger races and become hugely successful overseas.

Original champion Thurlow Rogers, 1985, may have set the tone for that theme. And incidentally: That 1984 Olympic road racing champion, Grewal, showed up to win at Redlands five years later.

NEXT WEEK: The Tour de France connects with Redlands.