THE EGO HAS PLANNED IT
We’d all love to have a bike race named after us. Personally, I’d go for Tour de Fothers. Mainly, in cycling, you give your name to a memorial race - my favourite is still the Jock Wadley Memorial, run off in East Anglia, England, in March to celebrate the pioneering Daily Telegraph writer, and now an early season British classic, with a lower-case ‘c’. But naming a race after someone when the eponymous individual is still alive is rarer: on the international calendar, there are the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race and GP Miguel Indurain, but these are rare exceptions. The best is the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn’s Cup Tour of Thailand.
Donald Trump was another exception to the rule, but given what we have seen in the last four years from the 45th President of the United States, we shouldn’t be surprised. In 1989 and 1990 the Donald lent his name to the Tour de Trump, a 10-day-long stage race down the US’s East Coast, with the finish in Atlantic City, outside – inevitably – the Trump Hotel and Casino. Equally inevitably, the race was billed as an event which would eventually outshine the Tour de France. Given what the world has seen of Trump’s ego over the years, it was hardly surprising that when the CBS baseball announcer Billy Packer suggested in late 1988 that he give his name to a bike race running from New York to
