Bike Race in My Old Home Town

The leaders fly into the River Quay. In about one second they will pass where Dinkeldorf's Deli was located.

It’s no secret that I have a kind of love-hate relationship with my hometown, Kansas City, Mo. It was a wonderful place to grow up, but as I got older, it became a more foreign place. After Billie and I moved to Boulder in 1983, we have never looked back.

But I have to admit to feeling a huge sense of civic pride in my old hometown on Sunday afternoon as I watched the final stage of the Tour of Missouri wind through the hills, parks and boulevards of downtown Kansas City on my computer.

Part of this is just utter fascination with the sport of bicycle racing. I stopped watching all televised sports several years ago, but about the same time we began watching the Tour de France, a ritual that Billie and I have enjoyed since 2002. This year, thanks to cable coverage of the Vuelta a Espana (the three-week-long Spanish version of le Tour), and online videos of the seven-day Tour of Missouri, which ended in Kansas City, I have been able to indulge my bike-racing obsession much as I used to do with football, golf, baseball and tennis.

It was just mesmerizing to watch many of the same cyclists I watched bike their way through more than 2,000 miles of France in July fly down streets that I remember intimately from the first half of my life. The aerial footage was astonishing, and I got a much better sense for distance. In their 10-mile circuit, the riders passed three buildings where I worked, including the place where Billie and I met, and the Star/Times complex, where I spent the first four years of my journalism career.

The riders head up into Penn Valley Park past the Liberty Memorial.

The race began on Grand Avenue at Crown Center heading south and wound around past Union Station and through Penn Valley Park to 31st Street before turning north down Broadway to Southwest Boulevard and up Summit Street to the downtown area.

After passing the Folly Theater at 12th and Central streets, where I worked from 1977-79 during its reconstruction, the riders turned north on Main Street at 12th Street and took off for the River Quay. They passed the building at 512 Delaware Street where Dinkeldorf’s Deli was located, the place where Billie and I both worked and where we met. The camera took us past where Nick’s restaurant  and Yesterday’s Girl were located, the parking lot that used to house Sam Aron’s warehouse and the parking lot where Poor Freddie’s stood before the riders passed the City Market and took off east for the river bottoms past the ASB bridge.

They came back up into the northeastern part of downtown, finally cresting on Eighth Street before turning south on Grand, where they had a wide two-kilometer boulevard straight to the finish. By the time they passed the building that houses the Kansas City Star and Times at 17th Street, where I worked in the late 70s and early 80s, they were literally flying.

One thing that’s hard to appreciate about bicycle racing is how fast these guys ride. Knowing the distances involved, I was able for the first time to realize just how fast they really are, especially as they wound through Penn Valley Park, for instance, or how fast they went up that hill on Summit from Southwest Trafficway into downtown. These guys are good.

There was a nice hill to climb after coming down Grand Avenue to the Crown Center finish.

Crowds were enthusiastic, especially on Summit Street, cowbells were ringing, guys with paint were running alongside offering encouragement, and Kansas City looked gorgeous from the air. For the first time in years, I felt a kind of civic pride about the city I grew up in. Now if they would have just gone past Winstead’s …