Fred Pfohl, owner of Fred’s General Mercantile, has been wearing his 1993 Tour DuPont jacket lately in anticipation of the inaugural Beech Mountain Metric, a grueling cycling event that begins in Banner Elk and ends atop Beech Mountain this coming Saturday. See, in the ‘90s the Tour DuPont was among the nation’s premiere cycling events, a domestic one modeled after the Tour de France, and one of the stages of the race took riders up the Beech Mountain Parkway from 1993 to 1996. It featured high-profile European teams and attracted elite cycling talent such as Lance Armstrong and Greg LeMond. “It was about the biggest thing that ever came to Beech Mountain,” Pfohl said. “We didn’t know exactly what to expect with the first one. It was like the circus came to town. They moved in over night, set up everything from grandstands to finish lines, to one of those big TV screens on a truck. Helicopters were in the air following the race and motorcycles – that was the first year the Highway Patrol used motorcycles – preceded the race to get people out of the way.”
Posted on: Thu, 15 May 2014 20:59:02 +0000
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