Ex-pro cyclist Levi Leipheimer set for start of his 11th annual Gran Fondo cycling event

Excited by the cycling adventure awaiting them, exhorted by the upbeat voice of race announcer Dave Towle, they will roll out precisely at 8 a.m. Saturday from A Place To Play park in west Santa Rosa.

They are the 4,000 or so participants signed up to ride in Levi’s Granfondo, now in its 11th year and firmly established as one of the most popular cycling events in America.

Days before that raucous rollout, the founder of this Gran Fondo - Italian for big ride - chatted about the state of U.S. cycling.

“It’s not exactly a golden era for the sport,” said Levi Leipheimer, the North Bay’s best known, ex-pro cyclist. “We don’t have another Lance Armstrong or Greg Lemond right now.”

Indeed, we don’t even have another Leipheimer, who never won a grand cycling tour - the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France or Vuelta a Espana - but stood on the podiums of all three. A three-time victor of the Tour of California, Leipheimer won numerous races in his 15-year professional career that ended in 2012, not long after he admitted to U.S. Anti-Doping Agency investigators that he used performance-enhancing drugs to get many of those results.

Leipheimer, a longtime resident and avid cheerleader of Sonoma County, is now 45. Buttoned down and stingy with a smile during his racing days, he seems much happier since leaving the sport that brought him large measures of recognition and money.

That’s less of a paradox than it is a byproduct of setting down a burden, of “having that off my shoulders.” That’s how he described his decision to tell the truth about his doping, in the 2012 documentary “The Levi Effect.”

“The more we learn about what was going on” in the pro peloton, said Towle, referring to the widespread cheating exposed by that U.S. anti-doping probe, the clearer it becomes “why those guys were never at ease, never felt safe, why they were constantly looking over their shoulders.”

“Levi’s been able to have a pretty amazing second act,” said Towle, who’s known Leipheimer for at least 15 years. “He’s really found a sweet spot.”

He’s suffered to get there. Leipheimer and his ex-wife, the ex-pro rider and animal welfare advocate Odessa Gunn, lost their Santa Rosa home in the Tubbs fire in October 2017.

By the time of the blaze, the couple already had split up. Their divorce was final in 2016.

“It’s been for the best. We’re happy living our separate lives,” said Leipheimer, who’s now in a relationship with Revae Huyette, a structural engineer and avid cyclist. “I’m with a great person now, and I couldn’t be happier.”

His signature cycling event has spawned scores of imitators since its 2009 inception.

Popular in Europe, Gran Fondos are similar to century rides, but with a slightly more competitive flavor and prizes for the fastest riders.

“We were the first large-scale Gran Fondo on the continent,” said Carlos Perez, founder of Santa Rosa-based Bike Monkey, which promotes a dozen or so cycling events, the largest of which is Levi’s Granfondo.

There are now some 150 such Gran Fondos in North America, he said. Those additional options explain, in part, why Levi’s event has “stabilized” at about 4,000 riders, after peaking a few years back at over 7,000 participants.

That’s fine with Perez. “To make this experience the best it can be, we have to put some limits” on the number of people on the course, he said.

Riders on Saturday will have a choice of routes, including the Family (8.8 miles), Piccolo (30 miles), Medio (63 miles, 3,500 feet of climbing), the Gran (102 miles, 9,000 feet of climbing) and the Growler (117 miles, 10,564 feet of climbing).

Routes feature stunning scenery and ample rest stops - “basically little farmers markets at each aid station,” Perez said.

Having celebrated its 10th birthday a year ago with added pomp and circumstance, the theme of this year’s Gran Fondo was a renewed focus on “the ride.”

“For me,” Leipheimer said, “it’s always been about the ride, and how amazing the route is, and the fact that we’re all doing it together.

“This is not your typical, flat, 100-mile century loop,” he said of the Gran route. “This is something that professionals don’t do very often, because it’s so hard.”

Especially taxing is the six-mile grind up to sinuous King Ridge Road, and the shorter but still cruel ascent up the westernmost miles of Coleman Valley Road.

Those efforts bookend a spectacular stretch along coastline cliffs on the Pacific Coast Highway.

“And 90% of the time, there’s a tailwind down the coast,” said Leipheimer, an ex-ski racer from Butte, Montana, who was looking for a place to live and train in 1996 when a couple teammates recommended Sonoma County.

“After like two days of riding here,” he recalled, “I was like, ‘This is heaven. There’s no way I’m going anywhere else.’?”

Still taciturn and sphinxlike, he is never more animated than when extolling the bike riding available in his adopted county. There’s the 3,000-foot climb of deceptively named Pine Flat Road, just north and east of his home in Healdsburg, to the world-famous vineyards in the lowlands, to the twisting roads through groves of redwoods whose roots warp the asphalt and make the ride, to him, more interesting.

“You’re constantly picking your line and hopping your bike. It’s like single track on a road bike,” Leipheimer said. “I love it all.”