AT DINNER LAST NIGHT, the buzz was all about Danielson, who won the excruciatingly difficult Tour de Georgia in April 2005, prompting Lance to dub him "the Great White Hope." But the future of American cycling may depend less on Danielson than on an elite group of wealthy cycling enthusiasts who, for years now, have funded key development programs for USA Cycling, the sport's national governing body. Known as the Champions Club, the 27-member organization ranges from bike buff and sometime member Robin Williams to devout cyclist Robson Walton, who helps run his family business, Wal-Mart.

Four members of the Champions Club made Forbes's list of the 400 wealthiest Americans in 2005: the 61-year-old Walton; pioneering Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr, 54; shopping-mall magnate John Bucksbaum, 49; and Campbell

Once the $100,000 entry fee is taken care of, what really matters to Champions Club members is how hard you ride. "We check our success at the door," says Tiger Williams. "Nobody cares if you' re the eighth-richest man in the world."

Soup heir Bennett Dorrance, 60. The others are merely multimillionaires; they include Rich Silverstein, 56, whose San Francisco ad agency, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, came up with the "Got Milk?" campaign; Bob Stapleton, 48, who cofounded T-Mobile; Matt Barger, 49, a senior adviser at San Francisco private-equity investment firm Hellman & Friedman; George "Skip" Battle, 62, the retired executive chairman of Internet search engine Ask Jeeves; and 64-year-old Michael Patterson, who's probably the only Lycra-wearing vice chairman JPMorgan has ever had.

The most prominent member of the Champions Club—the alpha of alphas, as it were—couldn't make it to Ojai this weekend, but he had a good excuse: His company, Thomas Weisel Partners, is about to go public. Everybody in the club—and most people in cycling, for that matter—knows all about Weisel. Without the 64-year-old investment banker from San Francisco, Lance Armstrong might not have won a single Tour de France, let alone seven.

"Thom gave Lance a chance," Chris Carmichael says. "If it hadn't been for him, I don't think Lance would have raced a bike after cancer."

In the late eighties, Weisel founded the team that became U.S. Postal, the history-making squad that won six Tours in a row with Lance at the helm. The team changed sponsors in 2005, becoming the Discovery Channel Pro Cycling Team, but Weisel's Tailwind Sports marketing company still co-owns it, along with a handful of private investors.

In 2000, Weisel engineered a takeover of USA Cycling, which had been floundering with an annual budget deficit of $1.4 million. His bailout was complicated and messy, but it led to some meaningful upgrades in how the foundation performs its role—and its programs have begun to groom a whole new crop of American riders, who have their sights set on the Tour de France in 2010 and beyond.

Through the USA Cycling Development Foundation—for which Weisel serves as chairman—the Champions Club has poured at least $1 million per year (a substantial chunk of the USAC's $7.8 million annual budget) into training young American bike racers. A portion of their donations flow to the Under-23 U.S. National Team, an elite crew of up to 30 young riders who spend several weeks each season based out of a group house in Belgium while they race all over Europe. The team has already produced one star, 26-year-old Dave Zabriskie, who won the prologue of last year's Tour de France. Several other U23 products are just showing up on the radar, including 24-year-old Patrick McCarty, now in his first season riding for Phonak, and Taylor Tolleson, a 20-year-old former triathlete who's already being compared to another ex-triathlete named Lance.

The Champions Club member list rivals that of elite golf clubs like Augusta National. Full-ride members, who must be unanimously voted in, donate $100,000 in their first year and $25,000 annually after that. Some give more—in the case of David "Tiger" Williams, a hard-charging former Yale hockey player who now runs his own boutique financial-services company, quite a bit more. In 2005, when an excited cycling fan pledged $100,000 to the Lance Armstrong Foundation, the 44-year-old Williams—who lost his mother to cancer—matched it on the spot. He also funds a track-cycling program to the tune of $25,000 per year for underprivileged kids in New York City.

Once the entry fee is taken care of, what really matters to members is how hard you ride. "We check our success at the door," says Williams. "Nobody cares if you're the eighth-richest man in the world." Like rowing, cycling seems to attract a certain breed of high achiever for whom the work ethic—the harder you train, the better you ride—has obvious appeal. Member Mick Hellman, 45, even quit his 60-hour-per-week job at a private-equity firm in San Francisco in order to devote more time to his goal of breaking the national time-trial record in the 40K for his age group.

"Every day in business, you're challenged," says member John Bucksbaum, the 49-year-old CEO of General Growth Properties, one of the largest shopping-mall developers in the world. "You can't stop, you can't take a day off; you just keep putting forth that effort to keep producing good results. It's the same thing you find in athletes."

The Discovery Team co-sponsors USA Cycling, so Champions Club members get inside access to the riders, and more than one Champion let me know that he'd spent time in a chase car or had personally ridden with Lance. "I had to call in sick the next day," one guy bragged about his roll with the icon.

Among the first to get hooked was Ed McCall, a 38-year-old Los Angeles–based private-equity investor. Friends had dragged him to the 1999 Tour for the Stage 8 time trial, at Metz, which was the first bike race he'd ever seen. Lance won that day, shocking the field, himself, and the European press, who swarmed U.S. Postal's team camper van. The six-foot-five McCall was pressed into service as a bodyguard, escorting the stage winner to doping control and, as he puts it, "knocking these French photographers on their ass. It was a blast."

Another small perk is the Sponsor Ride, which was certainly an eye-opener for me. I expected overweight plutocrats twiddling $8,000 carbon bikes. Instead, I watched people like Tench Coxe—a 48-year-old Palo Alto venture capitalist—sprinting off the front on a scruffy Trek that he obviously rides more often than he cleans. I realized that when it comes to cycling, the rich really are different from you and me. They're faster.