Tour of Alberta 2014: Prologue preview and start list

An Olympic effort

The 2014 edition of the Tour of Alberta starts where the 2013 event finished: Calgary. This stage is a short, but wicked, 4-km time trial. Each rider will start near Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame, and then ride along Canada Olympic Drive SW. The first 2.5 km have a relatively flat grade by the Olympic Park. Then it gets nasty. Remember in 1988, when you watched Eddie “The Eagle” Edwards in the ski jump competitions of the Winter Olympics? Or caught the bobsleigh and luge events? Well, each rider of the Tour will go up the service road that allowed bobsleds to get to the top of the hill. The last 2 km of switchbacked road have an average grade of 7.3 per cent, with the steepest part hitting almost 13 per cent.

“We’re looking at a shorter prologue than last year but a more challenging one,” says Jeff Corbett, the race’s technical director from Medalist Sports. “A rouleur/sprinter, someone like Peter Sagan, is going to use brute force to get over it and he’s going to do fine. The climbers are going to be able to finesses it a little bit more and they’re going to do fine. Certainly there are people in there who it’s going to hurt. Even though it’s short, because of the hill, we’re going to come out of here with some time gaps. You don’t want to put a monster climb in a prologue, you’re just trying to set the tone.”

Cue David Foster’s Winter Olympics theme song.

2014 Tour of Alberta prologue start list