With three mountain climbs beckoning in the Puerto Rico hinterland, this promised to be the most exciting day of the 1990 Tour of the Americas. It was—but not in the way we journalists expected.
The 195-kilometer stage from Carolina in the north to Ponce on the south coast was due to start at 9 a.m.—although we’d already discovered that Latin time was running 30 minutes late. So, it looked like a reasonable schedule for our minibus to pick us up at our San Juan hotel at 7:30, take us to The Sands hotel for breakfast and then drive another 20 minutes to the stage start in the suburbs.
At 7:45, we were still sitting in the Normandie Radisson Hotel, admiring the lobby’s art-deco flourishes. A phone call to The Sands revealed that our minibus had broken down. “Another one is on its way” was the confident reply. This second bus eventually arrived at 8:30, one hour late. At The Sands, 15 minutes later, the breakfast tables had already been cleared and the race personnel had left. It still seemed there’d be enough time for us to make the start, so we piled back into the van for the 15-kilometer trip to Carolina. But then, while passing through a green light onto the six-lane airport highway, the van spluttered to an embarrassing halt—it had run out of gas! The driver radioed the hotel for help, which eventually arrived and enabled us to reach the nearest filling station.
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The European journalists were complaining about missing their essential morning coffee; but the setbacks were taken in good humor. As if to mimic the hotel personnel, the longhaired French sportswriter Philippe Brunel stood back-to-back with shorthaired Spanish reporter Javier De Dalmases, both talking urgently in French into imaginary walkie-talkies. Their entertaining banter received an enthusiastic round of applause from the press gallery!
There was still an outside chance of reaching the start in time, but our refueled van then got jammed in traffic—stopped because of the race! After the road cleared, we pulled in behind the press vehicle in which we were now to follow the stage: an old American school bus painted white, blue and red with huge Pepsi logos down both sides! Once installed, along with the Puerto Rico and Venezuela journalists, we set off in pursuit of the race behind an escort of three, siren-wailing, red-light-flashing police motorcyclists.
Our aged bus had problems keeping up with the escort as it weaved between three lanes of traffic, horn-blasting a way through red lights, before we eventually spied the distant peloton from the rear end of an enormously long race convoy. We could enjoy seeing and hearing the uniformed schoolchildren lining the streets of every town and village, but that was about as much of the race we’d see.
After 70 kilometers on the island’s Highway 3, skirting the northeast comer of Puerto Rico, the race headed inland toward the mist-shrouded peaks. Our bus couldn’t follow because of its incapability of making the hairpin turns and steep grades of the mountain roads—the race program warned that the “descent from Las Tetas de Cayey is narrow, with very tight turns; and the roadway is subject to erosion and rockslides. Be careful!”
So we stayed on Highway 3, planning to reach the finish in Ponce well ahead of the race—or so we were told. The bus passengers were hopeful, especially when the bus pulled into the parking lot of a Burger King. “Finally, we can have a coffee!” exclaimed Guido Roelants, the rotund cycling correspondent of Belgium’s Gazette van Antwerpen. Sharing his anticipation, we ran through a tropical downpour into the fast-food restaurant, only to be told that the water supply had been cut off. We couldn’t even use the restrooms, let alone drink a coffee! Then, as we lined up for bottled sodas and French fries, the elevator music stopped and the lights went out. An outage was the final straw—or was it?
Our brunch stop over, the Pepsi bus continued its journey between the tobacco and sugar-cane plantations along the main coast road toward Ponce. Everything seemed to be going well…until the driver realized that he was heading up an insanely steep road. He made a laborious three-point turn, headed back down the hill, and turned on to an alternative route that would head around the coast before rejoining Highway 3.
It was a beautiful back road, providing great views of palm-fringed beaches and distant Caribbean islands. But on leaving one of the many, small, tin-roofed villages, our bus began to struggle on a stiff grade. We continued climbing, the road got narrower and narrower, the engine laboring until the driver ran out of gears to use. The former school bus ground to a halt about 300 meters from the summit of the long, steep hill, causing a traffic jam as trucks suddenly appeared from opposite directions. While the driver allowed the engine to cool off, we got out to lessen the load and walk to the top, waiting for the bus to continue upward and wondering if any more mishaps lay ahead.
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Once back on the main highway, the bus lumbered along for another hour through congested towns and villages before reaching Salinas, where we finally intercepted the race route. Unfortunately, the peloton had already passed through town, so we joined a parallel toll road to travel the final 40 kilometers to Ponce.
Moving at 100 kph, the bus shook and rattled its way along the expressway. Well, we thought, at least we’ll see the stage finish. There was almost a mood of celebration in the bus—until we spotted the ominous sign of red brake lights flashing ahead of us through the rain. Yes, another traffic jam. The exit into Ponce had been blocked off by the police preparing for the arrival of the Tour of the Americas!
So, as heavy rain thumped down on the thin roof of our trusty vehicle, we listened to a small transistor radio broadcasting a distorted Spanish commentary on the race finish. With his ear to the radio, the bilingual Belgian Jef Van Looy of Meta 2000, a Spanish cycling news magazine, uncertainly said, “I think Malcolm Elliott won.”
That should have been the end of the race’s longest and most exciting stage, but for we journalists in the Pepsi bus, our working day had yet to start. After the Ponce gridlock was unplugged, we continued toward the finish area adjacent to a basketball arena. As we struggled through the traffic without an escort, police sirens heralded the arrival behind us of the tailenders: three members of the Puerto Rico team who’d been blown out on the climbs. As the riders passed by, a big cheer rang out from the reporters. They’d finally seen some action!
At the arena, we interviewed as many riders and team managers as possible in search of the race story. Working on tight deadlines in a chaotically noisy press office, the European reporters wrote hurried stories about Elliott’s second stage win and the new race leader, Selle Italia’s Swiss allrounder Daniel Wyder, and then frantically phoned and faxed them to their daily newspapers.
Within an hour, we were in the grandly named EI Señorial Steakhouse, which was no more than one barn-sized room, eating a light snack and listening to the exuberant Lion Steel Band. As bellies slowly filled, the troubles of the day gradually receded—but still there was no coffee for the media! That mandatory caffeine fix eventually came an hour or so later, after checking in to the luxurious Mayagüez Hilton, a modem hotel terraced into a thickly wooded hillside high above the Caribbean. And those troubles sank into insignificance as we dined alfresco beneath towering rubber trees beside the floodlit pool….
Over a journalism career that has spanned six decades, former VeloNews editor John Wilcockson has reported on hundreds of events in more than 25 countries. This February tale recounts a Keystone Kops-like bus chase across Puerto Rico on stage 3 of the 1990 Tour of the Americas.
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