In the fall of 2008, I wrote a post about the arrival of BMW Oracle Racing for six weeks of training on San Diego Bay.  BMW Oracle is the contender for the 2010 America’s Cup. Their boats were docked behind the Convention Center and could be seen gliding effortlessly past pleasure boats and aircraft carriers through the San Diego Harbor and out to the Pacific Ocean.

Those six weeks of initial training in San Diego turned into six months and then much longer. Their experience in San Diego was summed up in a ‘Thank You San Diego’ advertisement in this past Sunday’s Union Tribune. To quote, “We came for 6 weeks and stayed for 16 months. The sailing conditions were perfect and your hospitality was even better.”

Another satisfied visitor to San Diego. For those who have not been to San Diego, come find why San Diego is a place where people come to vacation and fall in love for a lifetime.

The last American team to win the America’s Cup was the San Diego Yacht Club’s America³ team in 1992. Plan on the San Diego spirit of that  team to be carried forward by today’s BMW Oracle Racing team to victory in February when they take on the Swiss.

Good Luck BMW Oracle! San Diego will be cheering for you!

Auto racetracks no longer hold prominence in San Diego. The track at Lakeside has been replaced by a community park surrounding Lindo Lake while the streets of Point Loma have developed a daily hum of traffic serving a community that has grown severalfold since the days of serving as a race course.

San Diego still has its fair share of unique auto racing events from the classic cars speeding around the Naval Air Station each September in the Coronado Speed Festival to fancy sports car road races for those who own a Lamborghini, Ferrari, or Porsche.

However, San Diego continues to be in the national spotlight when it comes to auto racing. We are no longer known for race tracks but we are certainly becoming known for our auto racing drivers. (And, I’m not talking about the kind you see everday on our local freeways.)

This weekend San Diego-raised drivers won several major auto awards. The most notable was won by El Cajon’s Jimmie Johnson. He became the first driver in NASCAR history to win four consecutive NASCAR Series Championships. That’s quite impressive considering NASCAR is generally seen as being dominated by drivers from the Deep South, where most of the races take place. (Congratulations Jimmie!)

San Diego drivers, led by the McMillan’s who won the top prize, also brought home several trophies from the Baja 1000 races in Mexico this weekend.  For those not familiar with the Baja 1000 (I had not heard of it until I moved out West), it’s the most grueling auto race in the world that makes its way through about 1,000 miles of the Mexican desert. The race is best captured in a documentary called ‘Dust to Glory’, which is shown on VERSUS once in a great while. You can also find it at Amazon.

Although San Diego is no longer a major auto racing venue, our area has certainly groomed some amazing auto racing drivers.  The famous auto racing venues in Indianapolis and Daytona may have their speedways but San Diego is producing the top drivers. I think this gives us a legitimate right to consider ourselves the 2009 Auto Racing Capital of America. What do you think?

Fifteen pilots will be competing through an obstacle course at up to 250 mph over the San Diego Bay, between the Embarcadero (south of Seaport Village) and Coronado.

The three pilots from the U.S.A. are Mike Mangold, Kirby Chambliss, and Michael Goulian. Mangold was the  2007 Red Bull World Series Champion, while Chambliss was the 2006 Champion. However, both got off to a rocky start at the first race of this season in Abu Dhabi.

The planes arrived in San Diego last week on a 747. I got a nice up-close view of them being off-loaded from the 747 when I took a tour of Lindbergh Field on Friday. It won’t be long before we see them being put through their maneuvers in the skies over San Diego as the pilots prepare for the races.

Two qualifying rounds take place on Saturday May 9th with the top qualifier earning a point towards the World Series Standings. The Wild Card round, Top 12, Super 8, and Final Round take place on Sunday, May 10th. You will get to see planes navigate the course about 30 times each day.

San Diego Red Bull Air Race Tickets can be purchased online. Ticket prices start at $20 ($10 for children and military) for spectator viewing and range up to $1,360 for VIP treatment at a High Flyers Lounge. This year, both spectator and special seating areas will be set up on the Embarcadero side of San Diego Bay. You can also buy a parking pass for Brown Field to see the planes up close on Saturday night.

This is the 5th year for the Red Bull Air Races and the 3rd for San Diego. Take advantage of our unique opportunity to see these flying aces with our own eyes. This will be the only stop in the United States this year.

If you can’t make it down to Red Bull’s San Diego Air Race, which will be broadcast around the world, you can catch a tape of it on Fox Sports Network sometime in September.

On a side note, you might be inclined to use the word ‘acrobatic’ when describing the amazing air maneuvers being performed by the pilots. However, the precision and skills of these great pilots are known as ‘aerobatic’ stunts.

On Saturday, the IRONMAN season gets its start in Oceanside and on Camp Pendleton as the world’s top triathletes compete for 20 qualifying spots to the 2009 Ford Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii. Ironman California is sold out but you can cheer on the athletes and spend time exploring attractions in Oceanside.

One of the most internationally recognized regattas, the San Diego Crew Classic, takes place on Saturday and Sunday. Teams from the Ivy League to the Pac-10 and everywhere in-between will be in town to compete on Mission Bay.  This is one of the few collegiate Olympic Sports that gets coverage overseas through the likes of the International Herald Tribune.  It’s a festive atmosphere as alumni and fans rent party tents and cheer on their teams.  You to can be a spectator and then check out some Mission Bay attractions before the summer crowds arrive.

The World’s Fastest Road Race, the Carlsbad 5000 takes place on Sunday. Sixteen world records have been set on this ocean view race course. After cheering on thousands of local runners and before watching the elites attempt to set another world record, fans can take part in a Health & Fitness Expo and a Beer Garden.

Finally, the Women’s Professional Billiard Association will be kicking off their season at Viejas Casino. Watch the women’s top billiard players you’ve seen on TV and then take advantage of the discount shopping in the Viejas Outlets.

It’s going to be a busy weekend for ESPN in San Diego. Rather than being a TV spectator, get out and enjoy these world-class events taking place in our own backyard.  Have a good weekend San Diego!

Whenever I watched the Tour de France, I always got a good chuckle from crazy costumes some spectators wore as they ran alongside of the racing cyclists. (I’d also be petrified that one of the loonies would knock over the cyclists.) It turns out San Diego has its fair share of loonies looking to be seen on TV around the world.  The costumes ranged from sumo wrestlers to birthday suits but the one that stood out most for me was the guy wearing four-foot tall antlers on his head. He did a pretty good job sprinting alongside the cyclists as they reached the highest peak ever for the Tour of California. It was very cool to see a few inches of snow along the side of the road on Palomar despite temperatures being in the low 70’s at the bottom of the mountain.

Speaking of Palomar, in a post last week, I mentioned Lance Armstrong compared the climb of Palomar to the venerable Mont Ventoux stage of the Tour de France. Tonight, the editor-in-chief of Bicycling Magazine who wrote Positively False: The Real Story of How I Won the Tour de France with Floyd Landis, spoke with Jim Lasovic from NBC 7/39, and noted that Landis calls Palomar Mountain the best mountain for cycling in the world. (So, there you have it, two of the cycling world’s best riders praising our own Palomar Mountain.)

Not only is Palomar Mountain one of the best mountains for cycling in the world, but Bicycling Magazine rates San Diego as the #1 City for Cycling.

San Diego received great worldwide publicity from today’s final stage of the Tour of California. The TV coverage on Versus provided an overhead view of San Diego’s Wild Animal Park and continually made remarks about the big crowds that stayed well after the race had finished. Even one of the Versus analysts noted he is heading to the San Diego Zoo tomorrow.

I am so glad San Diegans made this event a huge success for our community. Let’s hope this  encourages the Amgen Tour of California officials to include San Diego once again in next year’s race!

(By the way, for those who saw the race on TV, if you were curious to know why the guy wearing the antlers had a Montana jersey, it was to cheer on the eventual Tour of California Winner, Levi Leipheimer, who is from Montana.)

If you have photos from today’s stage you want to share with others, let me know using the comments below and I’ll add them to this post!

Three friends, Bobby Bailey, Laren Poole, and Jason Russell set out to find a story to tell the rest of us about atrocities in Sudan. What they came back with is the attached video called “Invisible Children”. It’s an hour long but I implore you to make the time to watch it with family, friends, and coworkers.

The children you will meet in the movie ask the filmmakers not to forget them. They hold hope that the ‘tape’ being made of them can be used to tell their story to the world.  That story is the brutal torture and kidnapping of children ages 5 – 12 for service in the Lord’s Resistance Army. You will see and hear the stories of children who gather together at night to sleep in the middle of town with the hope they do not become the next victim. You will also meet those who have escaped their captors but must exorcise the demons now stuck in their heads.

I was impressed with the maturity and communication skills of the elementary school age children interviewed for the film. This is one heck of a documentary created by college aged kids in 2003.

Starting with one showing at a San Diego community center, the work of these filmmakers, which includes some follow-up documentaries, is finally starting to receive some mainstream attention. Up until now, their films have been shown in schools and churches around the country.

As ‘Invisible Children’ gained momentum, donations from viewers wanting to help the children started pouring in. ‘Invisible Children’ is now a San Diego based non-profit that provides help to the Sudanese refugee camps in Uganada, provides educational materials, instructors, and scholarships for the children of northern Uganda and sells products made by former child captives. Their amazing grass roots story is told in the February issue of Success Magazine.

This week, ‘Invisible Children’ began their international tour to promote their cause to an even wider audience. I hope you will take the time to learn more about Invisible Children and consider following their blog.

America has made many attempts over the years to create a bike race on our soil that would be respected among the cycling elites around the world. There have been many fits and starts. I got to see some of the attempts first-hand growing up in Wilmington, DE during the 1980s. Wilmington was frequently both the start and end points for the Tour de Trump, sponsored by The Donald, and then the Tour du Pont.

If any readers remember those races, I’ll never forget sitting at the bottom of Monkey Hill during time trials. The cyclists would head down the street that changed from blacktop to cobblestone and then made a 90 degree right turn.  Making the 90 degree turn while heading downhill on cobblestone was as nerve wracking for the spectator to watch as it was for the cyclist who had to navigate the corner. It was even worse during a couple of the years when there was a light drizzle making it nearly impossible to make a clean turn going any faster than a snail’s pace. We, the spectators, could always tell when a spectacular crash was impending just by judging the speed of the cyclist heading down the hill. (We tried to warn them to no avail. One even took out a street sign well after his body had left the bike.)

Unfortunately, sponsorship eventually waned and the race disappeared.

Anyways, back to the point of this post. The 2009 edition of the Amgen Tour of California is the fourth year of the newest attempt at creating an internationally respectable race in the States.

This is the first year San Diego is being added to the route. For a first time site, it is impressive the San Diego route will serve as the final stage of the nine-day race.

What makes it more impressive is the amount of attention the San Diego route is getting from the international press and foreign cycling teams who will be competing in the race.  The Norwegian cycling web site Syklingens Verden quotes one of the team managers saying “This year’s California is kind of like a mini-Tour de France 2009″ as a result of adding the San Diego stage. The team manager went on to compare the climb up to Palomar Mountain to the venerable Mont Ventoux stage of the Tour de France, the king of all cycling races.

Palomar Mountain is the centerpiece of the final stage in San Diego. At a summit of 5,123 feet, Palomar Mountain will be the highest peak ever included in the Tour of California.

The Tour of California will get an extra boost of attention with Lance Armstrong’s return to racing. In an interview with Velo News, which is posted on the fan web site for his Astana Team, Armstrong noted, “The first time I ever rode Palomar Mountain was in 1987. It’s been 22 years since I did it for the first time. I’ve done it many times since then. It’s an epic climb, I should say it’s a real climb.”  Armstrong is one of the most respected climbers in cycling and to have him call the Palomar climb ‘epic’ has the whole world watching this final Stage 8 in San Diego.

The cycling world’s largest contingent of fans are in Europe. For the first time, those fans will be able to watch American’s premier race during Prime Time in Europe. The Tour of California will be carried live by Eurosport.

So, get out there and cheer San Diego. The bike race in San Diego will be the most anticipated stage of the most prominent race in America and it will be seen live around the world.  This is San Diego’s big opportunity to make a lasting impression and encourage the world to come and visit one of the world’s best cities!

Visit the San Diego stage map for the Tour of California for more details.

The  Theatre Review in Today’s Wall Street Journal praises the Old Globe’s most recent production, Six Degrees of Separation.  The famous American playwright John Guare first made this production a crowd favorite on Broadway nearly 20 years ago.

The Old Globe is now bringing the play back to life. It is drawing visitors from around the country. The Journal’s drama critic states, “Broadway is due for a revival of ‘Six Degrees of Separation.’ When it comes, I hope it’s this good.”

Kudos go out to The Old Globe for another wonderful production. Few people outside of New York get to experience Broadway-quality productions on such a consistent basis.

San Diegans, this is a great opportunity to take advantage of what is in our own backyard. Head over to the Tony Award Winning Theatre to see “Six Degrees of Separation”. For more information on The Old Globe, the nationally recognized La Jolla Playhouse and other peforming arts venues in San Diego, visit the San Diego Performing Arts page on my web site of San Diego attractions.

San Diegans will have a unique opportunity to celebrate these accomplishments in astronomy with the astronauts and scientists who spark our imaginations with the pictures and stories they bring to us from outer space. The 2nd annual Spacefest, The Ultimate Space Show will take place February 19-22 right here in San Diego.

Seventeen astronauts, including Dr. Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins from the first lunar landing, are scheduled to be on hand for the event. There will be an opportunity to get their autographs as well as those of other test pilots who made space travel possible.

Leaders in astronomical research, including Carolyn Porco, Imaging Team Leader for the Cassini-Huygens mission, Carolyn Shoemaker, record holder for the most comets identified by an individual, and Peter Smith, the Principal Investigator for the Phoenix Mars Lander, will give presentations during the conference.

You can spend quality time with the astronauts and other celebrities by golfing with them in a fundraiser for the San Diego Air & Space Museum.

Spacefest is open to the public and will be held at the Town & Country Resort and Convention Center in Mission Valley, just off of highway I-8. Admission costs $35 for a day or $75 for the full conference ($25 / $50 for kids ages 6 – 17). The banquet, luncheon, VIP reception, and most autographs are extra. For a full list of conference activities view the Spacefest Schedule.

Take advantage of this great opportunity to meet the people who first captured the world’s imagination 40 years ago and continue to inspire our exploration of outer space. And, in this International Year for Astronomy, make time to explore San Diego’s astronomy attractions, including great places to view the stars.