With his overall victory at the Tour of Missouri last weekend, Christian Vande Velde (Garmin-Chipotle) won the season-long USA Cycling Professional Tour with a total of 272 points over runner up and defending champion Levi Leipheimer (Astana), who finished the season with 244.

In the team standings, Vande Velde’s Garmin/Chipotle Professional Cycling Team earned the overall title with 711 points over Team Columbia (513).

For Vande Velde, his overall Tour title caps off arguably the best season of his career which also included a fifth-place overall finish at the Tour de France in July and a spot on the U.S. Olympic Team last month in Beijing.

In addition to his overall win in Missouri, Vande Velde won the stage 3 time trial in Branson, finished third overall at the Amgen Tour of California and third at the USA Cycling Professional Time Trial National Championships.

After 14 events in 2008, Vande Velde and Leipheimer were the most dominant, followed by third-place finisher Dominique Rollin (Toyota-United Pro), Eric Baumann (Team Sparkasse) and Kanstantin Sivtsov (Team Columbia) with 144, 141 and 140 points respectively. In the team classification, Astana followed in third place with 358 points ahead of Team CSC (342) and Rock Racing (343).  

Having just finished its second year, the USA Cycling Professional Tour consists of all the internationally-sanctioned events in the United States and USA Cycling’s three professional road championships in the disciplines of criterium, time trial and road racing.