Cycling begins image-rebuilding at Tour of California

Swiss rider Fabian Cancellara, of Team CSC, won the Tour of California's prologue event. Christian Petersen/Getty Images

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PALO ALTO, Calif. -- What price, clean sport?

Ask Fabian Cancellara, the reigning world time-trial champion who destroyed the field in Sunday's Tour of California prologue -- a 3.3 km. appetizer for the seven stages to follow.

Rocketing from this city's tony downtown onto the Stanford campus, the Swiss rider finished in 3:51, more than four seconds ahead of the runner-up. On such an abbreviated course, that qualified as a Secretariat-caliber blowout. .

Cancellara's dominance came despite a rude interruption the night before. Ten minutes into his massage at the team hotel, there was a knock on the door. Some drug testers had a plastic cup with his name on it. "That means my massage is over," recalled Cancellara. "But that's the rules. For me, I don't care. I do my job, I do my best."

Cancellara is but a single star in a constellation at this race. Sponsored by pharmaceutical colossus Amgen, the third edition of the Tour of Cali boasts the most formidable collection of cycling talent ever to compete on American soil.

The seven world champions making their way south to the finish in Pasadena will include Italian strongman Paolo Bettini and Belgian uber-stud Tom Boonen, both of Quickstep. Further ratcheting up the star power was Rock Racing, which, for reasons soon to be made clear, lured Italian sprinter Mario Cipollini out of retirement to don its skull-emblazoned jersey. For a man a month shy of his 41st birthday, a guy who hadn't raced for three years, the Lion King looked pretty good, finishing a respectable 44th.

The prologue could not begin quickly enough for race officials, chiefly because it deflected the focus from the riveting sideshow by Michael Ball. He's the mercurial owner of Rock Racing, a continental squad -- that is, a cut below the ProTour teams also racing here -- in its second year of existence. He's also a scrappy, combative ex-bike rider whose Las Vegas roots tend to show.

A half-hour before the prologue began, Ball was strutting like a generalissimo outside the team's enormous black coach, which was bracketed by Rock Racing's distinctive, if not exactly practical, or fuel-efficient, team cars: a small fleet of Escalades. With a quartet of models behind them, three Rock riders sat at a table signing team posters, chatting easily with fans who lined up five-deep to talk to them.

If those riders seemed especially relaxed for guys on the cusp of a week-long ordeal, that was because they'd been chucked out of the race a day earlier.

Some background: For this year's race, the Tour of California adopted, in its words, "the most comprehensive anti-doping protocol in cycling history." One of the strictures placed on the 17 teams: Each was required to guarantee that none of its members were the targets of any ongoing doping investigations.

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