As we prepared to launch our new site we struggled trying to figure out how to promote the Inaugural Colorado Stage International Cycle Classic without relevant event photos and videos.
Being a first-year event, obviously we have nothing. With our other events like the Honda Session and Birds of Prey Race Week the solution is typically pretty easy. Find photos and videos from previous years and use them anywhere we can. But with the Stage, it has not been that simple in year one.
Initially we decided we would just upload a bunch of beautiful mountain imagery from along the race routes. Our thinking was that relevant scenic imagery would convey the natural beauty of Colorado and the Vail Valley. This sounded great on paper until we saw what it started to look like. We had a site that looked like any other mountain destination site full of dramatic mountain images that failed miserably to promote the excitement and action of professional cycling.
We finally purchased stock cycling and peloton images to create a sense of action, instead of just beauty. We combined the cycling imagery with the scenics to convey what we envision this race looking like in person. Exciting cycling in a beautiful (and grueling) setting. As soon as we have relevant event photos we will obviously switch those out, however, for the time being it is the best we could do. Check out the Coors Classic and World Mountain Bike Championships pages to see some photos we dug up from past cycling events we've either hosted in Vail or worked on at the Vail Valley Foundation.
What about video? That one was a bit harder as stock videos are not really compelling and/or relevant in our case (trust us... we looked). As we looked at websites for similar events like the Tour of California and Tour of Georgia we were immediately drawn to the video. Their video libraries were fantastic for conveying the excitement of professional cycling in both states.
Enter the Coors Classic. Since Vail is no stranger to professional cycling considering our history with that event we reached out to Michael Aisner to attain rights to Vail Coors Classic footage. We were able to track down some footage from Vail and were granted permission to use it on our website to promote the Colorado Stage. We are fortunate to have this footage and thank everyone that helped to attain or grant that permission.
The footage from the Coors Classic is great and for anyone that was not around during those days it does a great job of conveying the excitement and spectator base a race of this designation can bring to our Valley. Check out a couple of those short clips below. You can also visit the video/photo gallery on the new website to view more videos.
1987 Coors Classic: Vail Time Trial:
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