When Slowman told me 2004 was the last year for the older Nice Triathlon, the original event with the weird distance (2.4 mile swim, 80 mile bike, 18 mile run I think) two weeks before the event I immediately booked a ticket and went to the race.
It was freakin’ killer. The swim was super cool, one huge loop out in the Mediteranean. The bike was even better- the climb up the Col d’ Vence was awesome. I recall I was on that climb for an hour. A buddy of mine who *won *the Tour de France told me the descent off the Col de Vence was the hardest descent he ever did. There was one section with 16 switchbacks in 5 kms. Hair raising.
The run was incredible. That coastline is awesome. And don’t even get me started on the restauarants and cafe’s around there. It is very expensive- and totally worth it. One of the best trips I ever went on.
I wrote this about the race:
"I don’t know the name of the road, I can’t speak French and I passed the sign at over 35 M.P.H. so I couldn’t read it anyway. Unloading off the final climb in the 2004 Isostar Nice Triathlon in Nice, France I traced a ballistic trajectory through the alpine corners from apex to apex. They are narrow and dangerous. I am a poor descender. Complete concentration. Around one bend the road was littered with victims of a mishap. A European ambulance horn beeped and wailed up the canyon in the distance. They flashed by in a blur; one man’s face, streaked in blood.
Toward the bottom I glanced down on a river, hurtled into the valley and shot across the flats to a widening road. The course dumped me down a freeway on-ramp. I was on an empty freeway headed back to the Riviera. They had closed an entire freeway for us to race on. Only in France. I was with three men, none spoke English. Racing down into the yawning maw of a two-story high underground freeway tunnel, the longest in France, we would complete the final miles underground on a bike course that already crossed over the tops of two mountain passes. We were swallowed by darkness. Once inside the tunnel we became projectiles. The coastal wind fed the tunnel like exploding gunpowder pushing human bullets along a three mile rifle barrel. Like cannon shells accelerating along their rifling grooves our velocity accumulated; 28 M.P.H., 30 M.P.H., 35 M.P.H. It was effortless. And it was oddly isolated; just three other racers and I in the closing miles of the bike headed back toward T2 to begin the idyllic run along the most beautiful coastline in Europe, the Cote d’ Azur, on the French Riviera. The strange acoustics in the dark tunnel amplified every mechanical whir and whiz. Between my sunglasses and the dark tunnel I was a human bullet traveling toward the blinding gold light at the muzzle.
And then we surfaced.
The underground freeway tunnel canted abruptly upward and we rocketed into blinding sunshine on the spectacular coastline. The noise hit us like running into a white marble wall. There must have been 100,000 of them, and they were all screaming for us. The roar was deafening. Women in bikinis, people with white dogs. Men in dashing, light colored suits and rakish sunglasses, spectators dressed in sports clothes and bathing costumes. And there were the cameras. When we burst from the dark tunnel up into the burning French sunlight a hundred cameras hit us. In under a second I had my photo taken more times than in the entire previous year. After the oddly quiet tunnel the eruption into sunlight and exaltation was so powerful it startled me. I felt an adrenaline infusion like never in my life. They screamed at us, “Allez, ALLEZ!” The coast opened up to a brilliant, crystalline Mediterranean. The road along the Promenade Des Anglais was flanked by crowd barriers and behind them the spectators were three deep for miles. Welcome, My Friend, back to Nice. It is time to run."
And this:
http://www.bikesportmichigan.com/editorials/0000068.shtml
