In many respects, the inaugural Tour of Missouri will go down as the Tour of Discovery, and not just because the Discovery Channel Cycling Team competed for the last time in the U.S. before disbanding at the end of the season.

No doubt George Hincapie’s triumph in Discovery’s last hurrah is an important story, but discovery also occurred at two important levels that portend well for the Tour of Missouri’s future.

1) The international field of cyclists and teams discovered a beautiful venue, a well-organized competition and a surprisingly challenging course. It’s one thing for state officials and race organizers to extol the virtues of the event, but it’s quite another when competitors are doing so while hanging out by the team cars.

It won’t take long for word to spread through the European pelotons about what a great event this was … and if Hincapie would win or place high in the world championships in a couple of weeks, the top European pros may want to skip the three-week Vuelta a Espana in the future and have their teams compete here to keep the legs fresh for the worlds. That was Big George’s approach here last week.

2) Fans who turned out throughout the race, from the big cities to the small towns, discovered a wonderfully accessible event that captured the imagination of rural, suburban and urban spectators of all ages.

The six-day, 563-mile international bicycling race was unlike any professional sporting event ever held in Missouri, unifying the state with a shared experience. Spectators in Kansas City and St. Louis participated in the same manner as fans in out-state Missouri. Not only in the other starting and finishing towns — Clinton, Springfield, Branson, Lebanon, Columbia, Jefferson City and St. Charles - but also in smaller towns along the route such as Platte City, Tracy, Fair Play, Walnut Grove, Montreal, Brumley, Hermann, Washington, Augusta and Defiance.

The pro cyclists, directors sportif and race organizers repeatedly, and without much prompting, talked about being “blown away” by the enthusiastic turnouts. State officials and race organizers are still crunching the numbers, but total attendance estimates may approach or surpass 200,000.

In Kansas City, an estimated crowd of 40,000 attended Stage 1 on a Tuesday - a Tuesday! In St. Louis, an estimated crowd of 55,000 lined the 10.6-mile circuit for the final stage despite competition downtown from St. Louis’ three major-league teams — Rams (65,295), Cardinals-Cubs (45,735) and Blues (8,578). The estimates for the Tour of Mo. are remarkable for a first-time event in a state that doesn’t have the international, or even domestic, cycling cache of Colorado, for instance. Outside of the local cycling community, who knew Missouri was a cycling hot bed?

Part of professional cycling’s appeal is the public’s access to the event, which is contested on public roads and is free for spectators. Imagine that, no seat licenses, no ticket-price increases, no “carrying” or “processing” or “buy back” charges, no ridiculous estimates that it costs a family of four $250 to attend a race. (Unless, of course, a family travels from out of town for a stage, and the figure would much more if the family follows the whole race. But out-of-town visitors support local economies at hotels, restaurants and gas stations rather than a franchise’s accounts-receivable and then the athletes’ bank accounts).

And the pro cyclists not only compete within arm’s length of spectators, they mingle with the fans in the teams parking lot just before and after each stage. For sportswriters, it’s like sharing 15 open locker rooms with fans and onlookers. Inside the team bus is about the only place you can’t go. Spectators can walk right up to a team car and chat up a rider, in addition to getting an autograph, taking a picture or just checking out the cool bikes. Discovery Channel drew by far the most attention, which appeared smothering at times because of the large numbers, but the folks were respectful of the athletes and well-behaved.

Navigators Insurance director sportif Ed Beamon called accessibility “a really special aspect of the sport.” He mentioned  the crowds for the  Rams game at the Edward Jones Dome, for the Cardinals game at Busch and the Blues game at Scottrade center, but noted that for  Stage 6 of the Tour of Missouri “all of St. Louis is the stadium. So were the little towns we came through. Whether there were a few, or a few hundred or a few thousand people, a spectator can reach out and touch you. Accessibility is one of the great things about cycling; that’s long gone in baseball.

“Plus, people can relate to bicycling. Bikes and bicycling are part of everyone’s life. Everyone’s had a bike or ridden one.”

To be sure, cycling’s well-publicized doping scandals have tarnished the sport in Europe. But in the U.S., the three big domestic tours - the Tour de Georgia, the Tour of California and now the Tour of Missouri - have escaped the scandals’ stigma and have spurred cycling’s continued growth here despite the retirement of American icon and seven-time Tour de France champ Lance Armstrong two years ago. Perhaps the novelty of a international pro cycling race, as well as the accessibility of the athletes, presents a necessary antidote to the state of pro sports in the United States.

It seems as if the U.S. major leagues, the media and even fans have sucked the fun out of sports, whether with doping scandals in baseball, criminal conduct by some NFL players, the labor wars in the NHL, player misconduct and a crooked ref in the NBA, cheating in NASCAR, and over-the-top coverage of not only these issues but of even the most mundane aspect of teams’ and players’ performances, win or lose. Fans complain not only after defeats but after victories as well. Everyone’s an expert, and even the most reasoned and civil discussion about sports can quickly degenerate into shouting and name-calling.

Oddly, European media and fans express similar sentiments about cycling, that the fun has been sucked out of the sport because of the doping scandals, over-the-top coverage and fan angst.

It’s not as if cycling gets a free pass in the U.S., but here it seems as if cycling is ahead of the curve in fixing that which is broken, by doing more to clean up its act than are the big five American sports leagues - MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, NASCAR. When the Dutch cycling team Rabobank fired Michael Rasmussen, with no positive doping test, while he was leading the Tour de France — and did so because Rasmussen had lied about his whereabouts in avoiding some doping tests - it sent a powerful message through the peloton that doping will no longer be tolerated in cycling, regardless of a rider’s standing in G.C. If competitors didn’t get it when the likes of Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso got sacked without positive tests, they get it now. (The lack of due process is a bit frightening, as Floyd Landis has said as he contests his positive doping tests after winning the 2006 Tour de France, but if that’s necessary to ensure the purity of the competition, so be it.)

While Rabobank, CSC and T-Mobile have sent messages by sacking riders, an American team, Slipstream-Chipotle, has set the standard for in-house doping tests. Slipsteam’s riders are tested by an independent agency once a week - once a week! — to establish baseline norms for their blood levels. The program costs $500,000 a year, is a logistical nightmare with athletes based all over the world and is often a major headache for the riders. But as Tour of Mo. Stage 5 winner Danny Pate said: “If that’s what we have to do to prove we’re clean, we’ll do it. Other teams should be doing this.” Pate and other Slipstream-Chipotle riders wear socks that read: Dopers Suck. With Discovery disbanding, Slipstream-Chipotle is now the face of American cycling.

Throughout  the Tour of Missouri, the focus was not on past or current scandals, but on the competition and on the future, a pleasant change for the riders who compete regularly in Europe. Whether it was the fans cheering along the road or expressing appreciation in conversations by the team cars, the pro cyclists and the teams felt the love.

U.S. champ Levi Leipheimer of Discovery talked early in the Tour about the many fans who simply thanked him and Discovery for coming to the race. And en route to the news conference after the postrace podium celebration Sunday, “Thank you, George” was the message most expressed to Hincapie, who signed autographs as he headed through the crowd in front of Union Station.

“That was really great,” Hincapie said later, adding that the week in Missouri was “really special” not only for him and Discovery but for the other teams and riders as well. “Going down the final hill (on Market Street), you could see straight down to the finish and all you could see was the people. It was really cool to be a part of that.”

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