Seven weeks after he held off some of world’s top sprinters to win the opening stage of the Paris-Nice bike race, Sebastopol native Luke Lamperti will take the start at a competition much closer to home.

Lamperti, who is off to a strong start in his first season riding for EF Education-Easy Post, one of the teams that makes up the WorldTour — the big leagues of international road bike racing — will be at the Windsor Town Green on the morning of Saturday, April 25 for Levi’s Granfondo, now in its 18th year.

The 23-year-old Cardinal Newman alum will be part of an elite field contesting the Growler, the rugged and remunerative professional road race that was integrated two years ago into the Granfondo, the group ride which on the same day offers a half-dozen routes of varying difficulties for amateurs, families and weekend warriors.

The Growler is a spectacular and sadistic 138-mile challenge packing 14,000 feet of climbing into a clockwise course featuring the narrow and vertiginous ascents of King Ridge, Skaggs Springs and Geyers roads, to name a few. Sponsored by the Alexander Valley winery Skipstone, it is also touted as the richest one-day bike race in the world, with the top men and women finishers dividing a $156,000 purse.

With its 2024 inception, the Growler immediately became “the toughest one-day road race in America,” according to former WorldTour racer and part-time Santa Rosa resident Peter Stetina.

Adding a major road race to an already popular mass-start event was done “not just because it’s cool, and because it brings in a potentially bigger sponsor,” said Carlos Perez, founder of Bike Monkey, the Santa Rosa-based company that produces the event.

The “ultimate goal,” he said, is to “reinvigorate” the sport of road racing, which has a rich, storied tradition in Sonoma County but has lost some of its luster over the past decade, as once-popular races such as the Tour of California, the Tour of Utah and USA Pro Challenge in Colorado have vanished from the calendar.

Levi’s Granfondo was founded in 2009 by three-time Tour of California winner and former Santa Rosan Levi Leipheimer, who describes the Growler as an attempt to “resurrect live professional road racing on American soil.”

The 2026 edition, he added in a message on the event’s website, features several other upgrades.

This year’s Granfondo will feature a Thursday, April 23 “shakeout” group ride, to stretch the legs, “get familiar with the area, and settle into the weekend.”

The Granfondo also welcomes Cervelo as its official bike partner.

The race will be livestreamed on YouTube, the attacks and counterattacks chronicled by veteran cycling commentator Hannah Walker. She will be joined in the booth by Leipheimer, who now lives in the Lake Tahoe area but has trained extensively on the remote, sinuous and occasionally bovine-lined byways making up the Growler.

Asked if he expects to contend for the $25,000 first-place check, Lamperti smiled and dialed down expectations.

“To be honest, I just want to enjoy it,” he said. A versatile, opportunistic and tactically astute rider with a fast finish and exceptional bike handling skills, he is not a climbing specialist.

“On paper,” he noted, the Growler course “doesn’t suit me at all. It’s actually a horrible course for me. Way too much climbing.”

The serrated course profile does favor a natural climber like Keegan Swenson, a gravel star and the reigning world champion in the “mountain bike marathon” discipline who has won each of the previous two Growlers.

The stacked women’s field features defending champion Lauren Stephens, the 2021 US Road National Champion who in 2024 won the Gravel World Championships, and Alia Shafi, who threw down a vicious sprint to snag the Growler’s $15,000 second-place prize a year ago.

Racing the Growler for the first time will be Kate Courtney, a Marin County native whose palmarès include multiple world titles in mountain biking.

Another rider to keep an eye on in the women’s field is Paige Onweller, a top American gravel rider who spent much of last year’s Growler in the front group of contenders. After attacking her fellow escapees early on the climb of the Geysers, she got away, but fell back after suffering a cramp, then clawed her way to eighth place.

This year, she said, she’ll be out for “redemption.”

Making the Growler unique and interesting, Onweller noted, is its status as road race that also attracts elite riders from the gravel and mountain biking worlds. While the Growler is contested on paved roads, mostly, some of those routes are cracked, crumbling and more suited to a gravel event, a field that has boomed in the past decade.

As at long-slog gravel races, the Growler features an ethos of self-support. With no team cars or mechanics hovering behind them, riders need to deal with their own mechanical issues. While there are several fixed aid stations along the course, they must also carry much of their food. Unlike in a pro road race, said Onweller, “where you’re fighting against people that have an entire team” riding in their service, “privateers” — solo riders — in the Growler find themselves on more even terms.

“If you’re a gravel athlete who doesn’t have a team to support you, you can still do pretty well,” she said.

Despite considering himself “an underdog for this race,” Lamperti is looking forward to it, “because it’s home,” he said, and because he has a remarkable history with the event.

After entering the “medio” — a mere half-century ride — at the age of eight, he tackled the “Gran” a year later: 103 miles with some 9,000 feet of climbing, including ascents of the iconic King Ridge Road and the daunting “wall” at the westernmost end Coleman Valley Road.

“That was my first century. It was super cool to be able to do it when I was so young,” he reminisced.

“It was always a big deal, and that’s why I have such good memories around it.”

Participation in the Granfondo — Italian for “big ride” — peaked around 7,500 riders a few years after it was founded in 2009. Canceled by COVID-19 in 2020 and ‘21, the event returned the following year — not to Santa Rosa, its original home, but to Windsor.

These days, ridership has levelled off around 2,000.

As U.S road cycling waned in the post-Lance Armstrong-era — “the attention” of cyclists has “shifted,” in Perez’s words — biking events in the North Bay and across the nation have seen their registration numbers decline.

“The demographic for those century rides is aging out,” he said. “There’s a dip in the incoming audience of people riding road bikes. The audience is smaller.

“And nobody’s doing anything about it except freaking out that they’re not advertising the right way.”

Adding a high profile pro race to Granfondo mix, he said, “is our effort to leverage what we’re already doing to rekindle and add health back to this sport, which is so meaningful and impactful in our area.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.