Elijah Buffalo took one last long glance over his shoulder before crossing the finish line victorious Sunday.

The attack never came.

The 32-year-old bested Ian Parker in yesterday’s 84-kilometre road race that finished on the Miles Canyon loop, earning him the title of Tour de Whitehorse champion.

“When I turned back and looked, I was like ‘Oh, OK. I might as well put in a sprint and see what happens,’” said Buffalo, who races for Gastown Cycling. He finished in 2:11:11.

“It feels pretty good to win, especially since it’s also the Yukon championships.”

The VeloNorth Cycling Club hosted the 15th edition of the Yukon’s original stage race over the weekend.

The event also featured a 1.8-km hill climb prologue Friday and a 20-km time trial Saturday.

The Tour de Whitehorse doubled as the territory’s time trial and road race championships.

Other category winners were Trena Irving (expert women), Ian Hansen (sport men) and Sara Burke-Forsyth (sport women).

Twenty-one cyclists took part in the tour’s final event Sunday.

“We are trying to revitalize road cycling in the territory,” said organizer Mike McCann. “The turnout was as expected in a rebuilding year.”

In the future, McCann said he hopes to link the Tour de Whitehorse with sister Alaskan tours in the future, including events in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau.

Approximately $2,000 in prize money was handed out at a post-race awards ceremony.

While several expert male riders turned out for Sunday’s road race, Buffalo knew the win was his as he had competed in all three tour events.

Hansen, 18, and Burke-Forsyth, 19, used the event as a warm-up for next month’s Western Canada Summer Games.

The duo, who are both dating and newcomers to the road cycling scene, will be joined by Shea Hoffman in Fort McMurray, Alta.

“It’s never happened to me before,” said Hansen of the category win. “It’s pretty cool.”

Burke-Forsyth said participating in Saturday’s time trial was a unique experience for both of them.

“It was weird,” she chuckled. “There’s the helmet, the aerobars, the skin suit and some weird boot covers. ... I felt that I was going faster?”

Irving said the revival of Yukon cycling has drawn a large group of very young cyclists, which bodes well for the future.

“These kids will have trained with me for five years before the next Westerns,” said Irving, the 41-year-old coach of the territory’s new U Kon Echelon cycling club. “Who knows? They might be medallists there. I have high hopes.”

Meanwhile, for Parker, the runner-up finish was hugely significant.

The race marked the first for the 42-year-old since he fractured his neck in a fat-biking incident at Mount McIntyre last March.

“It’s funny how it takes something like that to make you feel lucky,” he said.

“Second place in a bike race is always first loser, but today I realized I was just lucky to put away the voices in my head that said 42-year-olds don’t come back from serious injuries to be competitive again.”