Payback time for Tom Danielson as he wins the 2013 Tour of Utah

Lachlan Morton and Tom Danielson celebrate after Danielson wins the 2013 Tour of Utah

[updated 8/12/2013]

Today in Park City Tom Danielson proved there’s still a chance for firsts for a 35 year-old pro-cyclist.

“I’ve never done something like I did today ever in my career,” the Garmin-Sharp rider said after clinching the overall in the Larry H. Miller Tour of Utah by smoking Chris Horner (RadioShack-Leopard) on the climb up Empire Pass before descending into the Park City finish.

Danielson has known he has the physical gifts to be a winner. But he’s had trouble feeling like one.

So he needed a shift in his head. It turned up as a result of this year’s disappointing Tour de France when, while he suffered on the roads of France, he asked himself why he makes cycling his career.

The answer came to him after he returned home to Boulder. “I’m doing it to try to win races. I don’t like to just be a guy in the peloton,” he said in Park City. “So I decided [Utah] would be a good race for me to try that.”

Danielson has won stage races before – Qinghai Lake in 2002, Langkawi in 2003, and Georgia in 2005. But the Utah victory stands in a league of its own with his mountaintop finish win and domination on today’s significant climb.

Exhilarated after the race, Danielson enjoyed what his Utah results meant for him: a payback for all the years of training in the cold and the wind, dealing with physical problems, and rebuilding form after crashes.

But in the end he dedicated his stage race win to the Garmin-Sharp team.

“It would have been really easy for me to just sit behind and try to hang on but I owed it to myself to try to be that person I want to be and just take the bull by the horns and do it…I dedicate the win to my teammates who have basically stuck with me the last years, tried to help me do that many times. I didn’t do it so I’m happy to finally do it.”

All he had to do today, aside from spinning his legs off on Empire, was believe.

“It was so cool for me to tell my team, ‘I want you to light it up at the bottom of the climb and then I’m going to ride away from everybody.’ And I did it. Holy shit, I just did it. I like that. I like that way better than getting dropped or riding in the grupetto.”