Hello and welcome back. Welcome back to another episode of King of the Ride podcast. I am Ted King.

As always, very excited to have you here today. So we just wrapped up three weeks of racing,

kicking off with Sea Otter in, what, early mid-April, Then on to Levi's Grandfondo and in particular the Growler bike race there.

That's a subject matter of today's conversation.

Then we were on to Arkansas on a UCI qualifying race there.

So our very busy spring is in full flight.

We're thrilled to be home for this hot second, this hot two and a half week period to get ready for the next round of racing. We've got gravel locos and Unbound

coming up and back-to-back weekends. I certainly hope to see a lot of you there. So,

on to the show. Levi Leipheimer is of course a name we all know from American bike racing,

from international bike racing over the years.

He's someone I raced against, although he was usually minutes ahead of me by the time we got

the finish line.

We lived in Gerona at the same time together.

We raced tours of California together a whole bunch of times. All the way back in 2009,

he hatched the idea to start Levi's Grand Fondo. So now here we are nearly two decades later.

That event, the original event Levi's Grand Fondo, has morphed into a bike race, a Fondo, a festival,

and what he and the organization thinks is the template for the future of American bike racing.

Featuring the highest one-day payout of any bike race in the world,

let me repeat that, if you have not yet heard that bit of trivia,

the highest one-day payout

for a bike race anywhere in the world. They've drawn quite a bit of attention to their race, the

growler, and here just their second year. So Levi and I are going to talk today about the state

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