<table> </table> Did you get a chance to see the Tour of Missouri bike race blow through town this week?</p><p>No?</p><p>Well, I spent a couple of hours Monday on the Country Club Plaza, waiting for the exciting finish of Stage One of this year&#8217;s second annual event. And let me tell you, it&#8217;s not exactly like watching the Tour De France on television.</p><p>On-screen, it&#8217;s buzz, buzz, buzz. The cyclists, with their little insect bodies, always in action.</p><p>Now picture yourself standing in the drizzle, shoulder to shoulder with a lot of others folks, waiting for something, anything, to happen.</p><p>Nothing does for hours. So you visit the booths one street over where businesses and nonprofit groups are handing out free stuff.</p><p>The swag I picked up, wow. I got an atlas, a water bottle, a bell for my bike, a ballpoint pen advertising Viagra that I&#8217;m afraid to use for fear I won&#8217;t be able to let go of it after four hours.</p><p>Lots more. It was like being at the state fair, only there wasn&#8217;t one of those massage chairs. All the while, two announcer guys bantered over the loudspeaker as Euro-pop pounded in the background like we were at some disco in Berlin. Dieter! I kept looking around for some guy named Dieter.</p><p>Then, suddenly, the peloton appeared off in the mist of Ward Parkway. Advance cars and motorcycles roared past.</p><p>Spectators several rows deep cheered and rang cowbells as 100 skinny guys on bikes zoomed past at something like 30 mph.</p><p>If you turned your head for a second, you missed them.</p><p>Then we put away our cowbells (another freebie) and waited 10 minutes for it to happen once or twice more.</p><p><em>Fin.</em></p><p>Still, I wouldn&#8217;t have missed this year&#8217;s race, if only to show my support for Kansas City continuing to be host of an event that brings us international attention.</p><p>Likely, some around town were unhappy to find some streets closed. Likewise, a few critics denounce the Tour of Missouri as a boondoggle.</p><p>But I happen to think it&#8217;s one of the few things Gov. Matt Blunt&#8217;s administration actually got right in the past four years.</p><p>&#8220;Kansas City, do you love the Tour of Missouri or what?&#8221; Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder bellowed from a stage near Monday&#8217;s finish line.</p><p>The cheers that rang out echo favorable reports from spectators and tourism officials alike for Blunt&#8217;s idea to put on a &#8220;French-style bike race&#8221; in Missouri.</p><p>&#8220;French-style bike race.&#8221; That&#8217;s the smart-alecky way to which the tour is referred on the Democratic Web site Fired Up! Missouri.</p><p>It&#8217;s a dig at Blunt&#8217;s fellow Republicans for turning into Francophobes when France refused to back the Iraq war.</p><p>And it skewers the Boy Governor for subsidizing what some see as something totally frivolous.</p><p>Or, as Fired Up! Missouri&#8217;s opposites at the conservative Show Me Institute once put it: &#8220;&#8230; every dollar taken from taxpayers to spend on a bicycle race is a dollar that can&#8217;t go toward filling up a gas tank, buying groceries, taking a child to piano lessons or, say, buying a bicycle.&#8221;</p><p>Forgive me, but isn&#8217;t one job of state government to promote tourism? And isn&#8217;t that what Blunt and Kinder have done for two years (a third year is under contract) by sponsoring a weeklong bike race featuring some of the world&#8217;s best cyclists?</p><p>It sure beats some lame ad campaign. Twelve cities and towns get international exposure by playing host to either a start or a finish line during the week.</p><p>Whether that was worth the $1.7 million it cost taxpayers last year (and whatever this year&#8217;s bill turns out to be) is clearly debatable.</p><p>On Monday in KC, Kinder cited a University of Missouri study showing that last year&#8217;s Tour of Missouri returned $26.2 million on the state&#8217;s investment.</p><p>Still, you can&#8217;t put too much stock in economic-impact studies.</p><p>Ultimately, continuation is going to depend more on corporate sponsorships than government handouts &#8212; and soon. Blunt&#8217;s leaving office and won&#8217;t be around next year to back the race.</p><p>Meaning that if there isn&#8217;t enough free-market support of the Tour of Missouri by the end of next year&#8217;s race, I wouldn&#8217;t count on a fourth staging.</p><p>That&#8217;d be too bad. But either way, Blunt and Kinder deserve credit for giving it a shot.