Tour de Palm Springs comes full circle to stay in Palm Springs
PALM SPRINGS, Calif.- Since 1999 Tour de Palm Springs has snapped up, jumped on, and wheeled across the valley. For years the event grew, reaching ten thousand riders across the world.
“If you total up all the miles that were cycled be these cyclists, if you were to take one cyclist he would have enough miles to go to the moon, and part of the way back.” said Tim Esser, the founder of Tour de Palm Springs.
These numbers were from when it was on President’s Day in February. In 2016 it was moved to January back in November due to overcrowding of the previous date, and the total ridership dropped into the five thousands.
“Some other events were happening in Palm Springs that cluttered up the scenery you may say, what we had to do is move the event to another date. That was not well received by our riders. They started dropping off, coming from 44-different states so we had to do something about it.”
Suddenly for the first time in 19-previous years Tour de Palm Springs was set for a different starting line.
“Move it into Palm Desert, everything was ready to go but could not come in to agreement with the name. We wanted to have it Tour de Palm Springs in Palm Desert, and because the name change was not acceptable to Palm Desert, we decided to move it back into Palm Springs.” Esser said.
Palm Desert City Council has a different view of how it went down, and it goes without saying the impact it could have had on the cities and hotels.
“After a series of discussions, we worked out the details, came to an agreement and the matter came to a vote before the Palm Desert City Council and the request was approved actually with all the details, funding from the city, location to be on El Paseo and the name of the event to be transitions eventually.
In the end the tour got what they wanted, it may have took a strong move against the city but the second Saturday of February was again back as the Home of Tour de Palm Springs, in a city they never left.
