Photo by Eric Keith / St. Joseph News-Press / Purchase this photo

Shawn Force peddles a bike to customer Roger Golden Thursday at Forces of Nature. The bike shop is receiving increased traffic with the Tour of Missouri coming up next week.

Whether St. Joseph will be absolutely overridden or merely busy with bike enthusiasts next weekend, it’s not in a bad position as the start of the Tour of Missouri.

Local hotels give mixed outlooks thus far, but other signs show that St. Joseph could be in for a big three days. Although St. Joseph shares the Monday race day and tourism dollars with Kansas City, St. Joseph will host two more days of races, a free blues festival and other events to take full advantage as the “grand depart.”

“In talking to other towns that did this last year, it was to varying degrees of success, but a lot of other people didn’t do what we’re doing,” said Dick Sipe, chairman of the Tour’s local organizing committee. “We’re the starting point, and we’ve got a whole weekend of events. We’re breaking new ground.”

St. Joseph can expect several thousand visitors and hundreds of thousands of dollars directly from the Tour, based on a study of last year’s event by the University of Missouri’s Tourism Economics Research Initiative.

However, the Holiday Inn and the Ramada Inn have yet to see the type of bookings they expect.

The Holiday Inn is the host hotel for Tour staff, which booked 27 rooms, said Janice Keith, the hotel’s director of sales.

“At the moment, I would say we see a little uptick, but not that much,” Ms. Keith said.

The Ramada Inn still anticipates a sellout for the Tour.

“The pickup has been a little slow, but that’s to be expected with sport events,” said Ramada director of sales Chris Booher. “With sport events, it’s typically pretty slow until the last minute.”

At least one local industry has not had to wait for the tourists to see a bump in business.

The Forces of Nature bike shop has had a mad rush for information about the Tour and people wanting to buy and repair bikes, said employee Greg Goat.

“We’re getting a lot of calls about it and a lot of bikes coming out of woodworks and basements,” Mr. Goat said. “Whether it’s a gas thing, an economy thing or people are excited about the race, we don’t know, but it’s crazy.”

Joe Blumberg can be reached at

joeblumberg@npgco.com.