Mountain bikers and Mountain Village hurtled through last week in a fever of plans and meetings, desperate to salvage a summer bike race that brings hundreds of athletes and their families and their tourist dollars to Telluride.

“I think it’s still spinning,” Village council member Jonathan Greenspan said on Thursday afternoon. “I think it’s still in play.”

Well, game over.

Last-minute negotiations failed to produce any solution that would reinstate the Full Tilt Telluride race, which was tentatively canceled two weeks ago. Race organizers have already wiped the event from their schedule and shuffled state-championship races from Telluride to SolVista Basin, near Granby.

On Sunday, Greenspan sounded deflated after losing the Village’s biggest summer sporting event. Merchants, sporting-goods stores, restaurants, realtors and tax rolls will all suffer without the weekend-long Full Tilt race, he said.

“We keep talking about having all these events and activities and amenities, and we do everything not to provide them. And I’m getting very sick of it,” Greenspan said. “Every time we try to go forward, we move that much farther from our competition.”

Chalk up the failure to irreconcilable differences over downhill biking.

On one side were the ski resort and Forest Service, who don’t want to build downhill trails on their land. On the other were race organizers with the Mountain States Cup, who say they have to offer downhill events to run a successful race.

Downhill bikers — those mud-spattered, body-armored green knights of the mountain-bike world — make up half of the racers in an event like Full Tilt Telluride, said race organizer Mike McCormack. And their numbers are growing, especially among young riders.

“We’re a pretty small business, and we operate on the thinnest of margins, and we’ve got to maintain fiscal responsibility,” McCormack said. “Without those margins, we’re not going to be able to come to Telluride.”

But the Forest Service and Telluride Ski Resort see downhill riding as a sport that doesn’t have a place on their land. Downhill riders blaze illegal, destructive trails on public land, and downhill races only draw more riders to ride those rogue trails, they say.

The Forest Service will not let bikers or local governments build a legal, planned downhill trail on federal land, and they raised concerns about Telski constructing a downhill trail.

Telski said it would allow lung-wringing hill climbs and cross-country races across its land this year. But it wouldn’t sanction a downhill course like last year’s, which was built and unbuilt specifically for the Full Tilt riders.

“The whole thing has gotten misconstrued,” said Telski CEO Dave Riley. “It appears that (Telluride Ski and Golf) and the Forest Service are all against mountain biking. That’s just not true. We’re just against illegal trails.”

Forest Service offices were closed yesterday, and rangers there couldn’t be reached for comment.

The popular annual race was thrown into limbo two weeks ago when Telski officials said they wouldn’t allow a downhill track like last year’s, which they said had chewed up their land. But the ski resort said it would entertain alternative proposals, and mountain bikers went to work to resuscitate the competition.

The Mountain Village Homeowners Association wrote letters supporting the race and pledged to sponsor it and help fund the costs of organization, trail-building and running a chair lift to shunt downhillers up the mountain.

The Village proposed building a downhill course that would be sustainable and environmentally sensitive, Greenspan said. But he said their proposals were ignored.
“It was never looked at,” Greenspan said. “We could not even get it to the table… A stand was taken, and no matter what possibilities we presented, it was not going to be listened to. A line was drawn in the sand.”

Even with this year’s Full Tilt lying cold in the ground, McCormack said the Mountain States Cup might set up a smaller-scale event this summer in Telluride. And he said that even with a growing supply of mountain-bike stages in Colorado, the race series wanted to find a way to return next year.

“We really are serious about coming back,” he said.