A brief history of the Tour de France
If not for a French military scandal, the Tour de France may never have been born. The complex web of events that led to the formation of the world’s most famous sporting event can find its origins in the infamous Dreyfus Affair.
In 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested for selling French military secrets to the Germans and was sentenced to life imprisonment on a penal colony in French Guiana. Two years later new evidence emerged that the captain was an innocent victim of an anti-Semitic campaign. The case and its legal wrangling fiercely divided France for more than six years and it created two distinct groups: the Dreyfusards (his supporters) and the anti-Dreyfusards. The taking of sides touched all corners of French society, including publishing, and it was in the formation of a new sports newspaper amid this crisis that the Tour de France was conceived.
Le Vélo was the country’s most popular sporting publication and, for cycling fans, it was the bible for news and results around the country. It sold by the bucketload, helped by its editor, Pierre Giffard, who created such sporting events as the Paris–Brest–Paris cycle race and the Paris–Rouen car race and then monopolised the reporting of them. Internally, the paper’s management was at odds; one of its wealthy advertisers, the Comte de Dion, was a vociferous anti-Dreyfusard, while Giffard was pro-Dreyfus — and in 1900, Giffard wrote an article critical of de Dion in another paper he worked for. More than a little annoyed, de Dion promptly pulled out his backing of Le Vélo and started up his own paper, L’Auto-Vélo, headed editorially by a bike racer and former ad man, Henri Desgrange.
The papers went to war from the start, with Le Vélo winning the early rounds, including forcing L’Auto to drop the ‘vélo’ part of their name. Desgrange found it hard going against such an established rival — especially trying to cover cycling with a paper called ‘The Car’ — and with his publication haemorrhaging sales in its first two years, he realised he needed something big, a publicity stunt or promotion, to save it.
It was during a brainstorming session at L’Auto’s Paris office that young journalist Géo Lefèvre mentioned the idea of a grand bike race touching all corners of France’s ‘hexagone’, the biggest of its kind ever to be held. He only blurted the idea to avoid being the only employee not to contribute, but there was something about it that Desgrange liked and they took lunch at the local Taverne Zimmer to talk more. It was there that Desgrange uttered the immortal words: ‘What you are suggesting, my little Géo, is a Tour de France.’ He thought there was something in the idea, but didn’t want to commit, preferring to put the onus on the paper’s accountant, Victor Goddet. Usually moments of great vision and creativity take place as far away from accountants as possible, but Goddet broke the mould and enthusiastically greenlit the project.
On 19 January 1903, L’Auto announced the new race on its front page, under the header ‘Le Tour de France — Le Depart’.
‘We intend to run the greatest cycling trial in the entire world,’ wrote Desgrange. ‘A race more than a month long; from Paris to Lyon, then to Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes and back to Paris.’ And with that, the Tour de France was born.
1903—1909
The first editions of the Tour de France were almost unrecognisable compared to the ones we know today. The stages were much longer — with an average of more than 400 km — and they frequently began in the middle of the night in order to finish on time the next day. The prize money was phenomenal for those taking part, with the winner taking home 3000 francs and daily winners 1000. The 6000 francs Maurice Garin received for winning the first Tour equated to almost a decade’s wages for the average French worker. As for the equipment, the bikes were made of heavy steel (weighing up to 20 kg) and only had two gears, which could be changed by taking the back wheel off and flipping it round to another sprocket. The riders looked like they were heading off to desert warfare, with big goggles and heavy cotton clothes all the rage.
As one might expect, France dominated the early races, winning the first six before the big Luxembourger François Faber became the first foreign winner in 1909. Champions such as René Pottier and Lucien Petit-Breton epitomised the tough-as-nails character you needed to win the race; they had faces like robbers’ dogs, the physiques of dockyard workers and a capacity for suffering that would make most modern riders shrivel in their chamois padding. (For the uninitiated, ‘chamois padding’ is the pad sewn into cycle shorts to protect a rider’s basement furniture.)
Riding 4000 km through the French countryside wasn’t the only hardship the competitors faced. With hardly any infrastructure to support the riders, they were at the mercy of the population to provide them with food and shelter when needed. At times the spectators got a little carried away, beating up racers they didn’t like and sabotaging them by smacking them with clubs and strewing nails across the road (organisers would disperse rowdy fans with a few polite gunshots from the official car). After the second edition Desgrange thought his race was finished, destroyed by cheats and unruly fans, but its popularity endured what would be the first of many scandals over the years.
Public support of the Tour translated into increased newspaper sales, making Desgrange a very happy man. After all, getting more readers was the reason he started the race in the first place. After selling a reported 20,000 papers a day pre-Tour, L’Auto sold an average of 65,000 during the race, taking market leadership to such an extent as to put Le Vélo out of business in 1904.
1910s
The second decade of the twentieth century saw several key changes to the race, leading many to view the period as the birth of the modern Tour.
The most significant development was the introduction of the barely rideable mountain roads of the Pyrenees and the Alps, which left a trail of broken men behind and changed — physically and mentally — the type of rider who would be able to win the race. The 1913 Tour saw the winners decided on time rather than a points system, keeping the racers on their toes during every stage — and the decade also saw the introduction of properly organised teams and even gears on some of the bikes.
On the road, the Belgians emerged as a cycling powerhouse, winning four of the six races during the decade. Although spread out across several teams, the Belgians’ national identity couldn’t always be held in check; when Odile Defraye took an early lead in 1912, all team allegiances went out the window as the lowlanders joined forces to ensure their countryman would win the race.
The era also played out the career of one of the most unfortunate riders in the history of the Tour, Eugène Christophe, who, if he were a character in the Mr Men books, would surely have been called Mr Really, Really Unlucky. A set of broken forks, a trudge down a dark mountain and a time penalty for ‘accepting help’ put paid to his chances in 1913 (see chapter 8 for more details) and in 1919 a series of mechanical issues and punctures saw him lose a leading position with just a couple of stages left. (When his forks broke during a third Tour in 1922, he said he wasn’t too upset: ‘By then I was a bit of an expert.’)
On a more serious note, the winds of war swept through Europe in 1914 and cycling would not escape unscathed. The race was abandoned during the four years of war and by the time it returned in 1919, many riders, including three former winners — Octave Lapize, François Faber and Lucien Petit-Breton — had lost their lives.
1920s
With the race trying to re-establish itself after the war, one person the conflict hadn’t softened was race director Henri Desgrange, who set about creating harsher rules and more savage routes to test the riders. In 1924 there was ‘The Tour of Suffering’, a race where thirteen of the fifteen stages were more than 300 km long and five were over 400 km; two years later saw the longest Tour to date, clocking in at 5745 km. The high point of that Tour — or low point, if you were unfortunate enough to be cycling in it — was the stage 10 ride through ‘The Circle of Death’. It’s a stage that has entered Tour history as one of the most brutal ever, with winner Lucien Buysse spending seventeen hours in the saddle in terrible conditions and more than twenty men still unaccounted for as the clock struck midnight. It was at that point Desgrange thought it might be a good time to dial it back a bit.
If the distances weren’t enough to bring the riders to their knees, the new rules gave it a shot, too. Still forbidden to have mechanical help, riders now had to finish each stage with the same clothes they started with, a draconian measure considering the cold night-starts and blazingly hot finishes. Riders would complain and threaten to pull out, and Desgrange, with his often unrealistic views on the physical and mental strength of the athletes, would counter with accusations of riders being weaklings and crybabies.
In the middle of the decade, one of Desgrange’s biggest challenges was to retain interest in a race that had seen no French winner since 1911. But the descent continued for France, reaching a low point in 1926 when there were no French stage winners in the race (the only time in the first ninety-six years of the Tour this happened). The ’20s were bookended by domination from the usual suspects: Belgium and Luxembourg. The early races continued to be commanded by the Belgians; in 1920 they won twelve of fifteen stages and filled eight of the top ten places on GC in one of the least competitive Tours on record. At the end of the decade, two wins for Luxembourg’s Nicolas Frantz kept his country punching above its weight. Throw in two wins by an upstart Italian by the name of Ottavio Bottecchia and there seemed very little light at the end of the tunnel for the host nation.
1930s
Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Desgrange knew he had to do something drastic to reverse the fortunes of French cycling in order to save the Tour from extinction. Prompted by the emergence of French riders Antonin Magne, André Leducq and Roger Lapébie, his decision to change the competition from teams sponsored by manufacturers to national teams proved a masterstroke and ushered in a golden age of French dominance. France won the first five races of the ’30s and regained bragging rights as the most successful nation in what was now the most prestigious cycling race in the world. The last of the five wins proved the most dominant, with Antonin Magne taking out his second Tour and every rider in the French team winning at least one stage. (Not all the French riders were happy though, as René Vietto twice gave his wheel to Magne in the race, scuppering any chance he had of winning the Tour.)
Not everything Desgrange touched turned to gold, however. His constant tinkering with time bonuses for the stage winners skewed both the 1932 and 1933 results, and the bonus system was extremely short-lived when it emerged that the third-placed racer in 1933, Giuseppe Martano, was the winner by overall time; Frenchman Georges Speicher won by virtue of his time bonuses.
The Tour had a watershed moment in 1936. Jacques Goddet, son of Victor Goddet, the accountant who greenlit the funds for the first Tour, took over the running of the race from Henri Desgrange, who had fallen into ill health. (Desgrange died in August 1940.) The new director’s first decision was to allow derailleur gears for the team racers in 1937, and it didn’t take long for him to experience what running the Tour was all about when that year’s race exploded in controversy. The French and Belgian teams went to war, with alleged sabotage on both sides, and Frenchman Roger Lapébie was accused of having more pushers than Pablo Escobar on his way up the mountains to Tour victory. Tensions ran high, and who knows what might have happened the following year if Italian Gino Bartali hadn’t diffused the tension by winning the Tour crown and confirming his reputation as the ‘best rider in the world’.
As the ’30s drew to a close, war was again on the horizon in Europe; Italy, Spain and Germany did not send riders in 1939. The Tour would not return until 1947, and by then many riders — most notably Gino Bartali, Fausto Coppi and René Vietto — would have lost their best years to the war.
1940s
After suffering several years of declining sales and rumours of a cosy relationship with the occupying German forces during the war, L’Auto was closed down in the middle of 1944, but the same fate did not befall the Tour — Jacques Goddet wisely refused to run it during the war, so it wasn’t tainted by the Nazis. A new publication, L’Equipe, was established, which was L’Auto in everything but name.
When the continent finally stabilised enough to start the Tour again in 1947, Europe had been forever changed — but the race gave the French people a small amount of normalcy and pleasure amidst all the hardship. Some scars were too deep to have healed so quickly, though, and 1947 saw no German riders invited and the Italian duo of Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi preferring not to attend. Battle lines were drawn between France and Italy in that first race, as Frenchman Jean Robic ignored the unwritten rule of not attacking on the final stage into Paris and snatched the yellow jersey from Italian Pierre Brambilla. Brambilla was said to be so gutted about losing the race that he buried his bike in his garden.
The last two races of the decade were all about the Italians. In 1948, Gino Bartali came from nowhere to win three mountain stages in a row and overcome a twenty-one-minute deficit to win his second Tour. (The extra motivation was provided by a phone call from the Italian prime minister asking Bartali to win the Tour in order to distract a politically agitated populace back home.) The ten-year gap between Bartali’s first and second wins is still the largest on record, and serves to highlight how many other Grand Tours he might have won if not for the war. The following year, Fausto Coppi — already winner of three Giri and three Milan–San Remos — burst onto the Tour de France scene and won on his first attempt, finally asserting his supremacy over Bartali and becoming the first cyclist to complete the Giro d’Italia/Tour de France double.
With Europe rebuilding and its citizens still struggling to come to terms with the post-war climate, few could have predicted that cycling was about to enter its golden age.
1950s
The 1950s aren’t known as the ‘Golden Age of Cycling’ for nothing. The riders, the stages, the attacks, the personalities; they all seemed to be a little more iconic in the ’50s. From Hugo Koblet combing his hair on the finish line to Federico Bahamontes eating an ice-cream at the top of a mountain, there was a sense of style and theatre to the races during the period.
It says much about the quality of the riders during the 1950s that only one man won the Tour more than once — Louison Bobet took out a trio of wins between 1953 and 1955 — while the list of other victors reads like a cycling Hall of Fame ballot: Ferdi Kübler, Hugo Koblet, Fausto Coppi, Jacques Anquetil, Charly Gaul and Federico Bahamontes. Which makes the only other winner of the decade even more of a head-scratcher; no-one saw Frenchman Roger Walkowiak coming in 1956, especially as he didn’t win a single stage on the way to grabbing the yellow jersey. How his name is within such esteemed company is a mystery to this day (although it helped that no former winner competed that year).
There were some pretty iconic moments played out over the decade, too: Hugo Koblet’s jaw-dropping 140-km solo ride from Brive to Agen; Wim van Est being pulled out of a ravine with a bunch of tied-together inner tubes; Coppi accepting Bartali’s wheel after he punctured, to ensure his second Tour victory; and Bobet’s Tour-winning ride amidst the carnage of Mont Ventoux in ’55. The list goes on.
Myth-making aside, while he didn’t have the biggest name, Louison Bobet was undoubtedly the dominant Tour rider of the decade (albeit fortunate that his run came as some of the sport’s greats were fading). He was the pride of his nation and hailed as the greatest French rider ever — although it was an honour he didn’t hold on to for too long, thanks to a certain Jacques Anquetil.
1960s
After a decade of post-war success, due in no small part to the advent of live TV coverage and the unprecedented number of fans lining the routes, the Tour de France had firmly entrenched itself on the global sporting landscape by the 1960s. And as the rest of the world was dealing with the new phenomena of revolution, drugs and protests, so too was the Tour.
The revolution came from Jacques Anquetil, who made history by becoming the first man to win five Tours. The calculating, almost scientific way in which he won, measuring the field and racing to his strengths, wasn’t to everyone’s liking but it certainly proved effective; in full flow, there were few who could match Anquetil aesthetically or physically. His memorable victory over Raymond Poulidor in 1964, especially the stage on the Puy de Dôme, helped make that Tour one of the best ever. Upon his retirement he fully deserved to be recognised as the greatest Tour de France rider ever, despite two big blots on his copybook: his win in 1963 was helped by a shady bike swap after fake mechanical problems, and he insisted that the Tour couldn’t be won on ‘just water’ (as in, he doped).
Drugs and protests also came to the fore in ’60s cycling. The Tour introduced mandatory drug tests for the first time in 1966, with the riders — led by Anquetil — dismounting from their bikes on one stage in protest. The following year, the seriousness of the doping issue in the sport became apparent as English rider Tom Simpson collapsed and died on Mont Ventoux, a cocktail of amphetamines and alcohol later found to be a major contributor to his death. Unfortunately it was the first of many doping scandals to blight the Tour for the next forty years.
By 1969 there was a new kid on the block who delivered a knockout blow to his opponents that sent reverberations well into the next decade. Twenty-four-year-old Belgian Eddy Merckx not only won the Tour on his first attempt, but he took out all three classifications — general, mountains and points — for good measure. If Anquetil earned his nickname ‘Maitre’ — ‘master’ — for his utter dominance of the peloton in the early ’60s, then Merckx was about to show his rivals why he was known as ‘The Cannibal’.
1970s
The 1970s were bookended by two legendary riders, with a couple of well-deserved winners and a drug cheat in between.
Eddy Merckx continued where he left off in 1969 by taking four of the first five Tours of the decade. ‘The Cannibal’ devoured his rivals in a manner that wasn’t supposed to win Grand Tours — rather than conserve energy and push hard when necessary, he rode from the front, attacking at every opportunity to take big chunks of time out of any threat. The nearest anyone came to beating him was in 1974, when second place was 8:04 behind, and he might have easily won six in a row if he hadn’t pulled out in 1973 to concentrate on winning the only Grand Tour not on his palmarès, the Vuelta a España (which he won).
Merckx’s performances were part of a Belgian renaissance in the early ’70s, as the lowlanders dominated in a fashion not seen since the 1920s. Belgian riders won every points classification from 1969 to 1972, and eight of the ten green jerseys on offer, as well as the yellow jersey in 1976 (by Lucien Van Impe). In the decade’s first seven races only Spaniard Luis Ocaña — who came so close to beating Merckx in 1971 — and France’s Bernard Thévenet could break the Belgian dominance by winning the GC.
Thévenet’s two wins in 1975 and 1977 finally gave French fans something to cheer about, but after the latter he admitted to taking cortisone and the French public never forgave him. In fact, it was a dark period for doping on the Tour, with top riders such as Joop Zoetemelk and Luis Ocaña testing positive for banned substances in 1977 and Belgian Michel Pollentier caught quite literally taking the piss at a drug test when a contraption filled with urine was found strapped to his chest at the end of stage 16 in 1978.
Out of the darkness came a star in the form of Bernard Hinault. ‘Le Blaireau’ — ‘The Badger’ — was a leader and a winner from the off: on his debut Tour in 1978, he found time to lead a protest by riders as well as win the yellow jersey. In 1979, he won again, with nearest rival Joop Zoetemelk — second to Hinault in both races — saying, ‘No regrets. Hinault is stronger than me … If he carries on improving like this, he could match Merckx.’ How prophetic that proved to be.
1980s
The age of day-glo, Rubik’s cubes and synth pop saw French riders dominate the early going before the Anglophones announced their arrival at the end of the decade, winning three of the last four ’80s Tours.
Joop Zoetemelk won one for the sentimentalists in 1980 — he had come second four times since 1970 — before Bernard Hinault and Laurent Fignon battled it out to see who had the biggest, erm … saddle. Hinault struck first with wins in 1981 and 1982 — the latter seeing him match Coppi, Anquetil and Merckx as the only riders to win the Giro/Tour double — before the young pretender Fignon won the following two. ‘The Professor’ looked to have assumed Hinault’s mantle as the next dominant French rider, but injury and loss of form put paid to those notions, and ‘Le Blaireau’ secured his place in history with a fifth Tour in 1985. Hinault retired after the 1986 Tour, second in popularity to only Jacques Anquetil amongst his compatriots; little did they know that Hinault’s 1985 win would be the last French Tour win to date.
It was then the sea change took place. The Anglophones had been showing signs of steady improvement since the early ’80s; Aussie rider Phil Anderson had pushed Bernard Hinault hard in 1981 and Sean Kelly had won a couple of green jerseys, but no English speaker had ever won the yellow jersey. That all changed in 1986 when, despite the best efforts of Hinault, Greg LeMond won the Tour de France. Then, suddenly unburdened by the weight of history, other Anglophones got in on the act: Ireland’s Stephen Roche won in 1987 and LeMond again in 1989. Both were feted as heroes in their home countries, helping to raise the profile of cycling to new heights around the globe.
The last two years of the decade witnessed the highs and lows of the modern Tour. In 1988, Spain’s Pedro Delgado won the GC in hugely controversial fashion after the diuretic probenecid was found in his system mid-race. Although the steroid-masking agent was banned in Olympic competition, cycling had not yet gotten around to putting it on their blacklist. Refusing to pull out on the request of the organisers, Delgado rode into Paris as perhaps the most tainted winner in the history of the race (up to that point).
As low as ’88 proved to be, 1989 took the Tour to new heights: two rejuvenated riders — Laurent Fignon returning from injury and Greg LeMond returning from being shot in the back while hunting — went back and forth all the way to the French capital in an exhilarating battle for yellow. Eight seconds was all that separated them at the finish (the smallest margin of victory in history), with LeMond taking his second Tour in a hugely dramatic time trial finale.
1990s
Despite crowning another five-time winner and seeing its first champions from Scandinavia and Germany, the Tour de France ended the 1990s on life support as doping scandals threatened to drag cycling’s flagship race into oblivion.
The death of the Tour was inconceivable in 1990 as Greg LeMond triumphed for a third time. A 2:16 win over Claudio Chiappucci saw the American reach new heights of popularity, both at home and, more surprisingly considering his previous victory over Laurent Fignon, in France. The ‘Comeback Kid’ was back and he looked odds-on to take number four before cracking on the ride up the Tourmalet in 1991. Instead, the Tour witnessed the first of five consecutive victories by Spaniard Miguel Indurain, a monster of a physical specimen who was virtually untouchable during his reign as champion. Criticised in some quarters for being boring and uninspiring, his ‘win the time trials, defend in the mountains’ game plan proved devastatingly effective; riders knew what was going to happen when they rode against Indurain, but they could do nothing about it.
After a record-setting run of wins, Indurain’s stranglehold on the Tour was finally loosened in 1996, only for it to fall into the clutches of something far more sinister: doping. That year’s Tour gave fans a taste of things to come for the next decade, as the top four riders were subsequently linked to drugs: winner Bjarne Riis later admitted taking EPO, second-place Jan Ullrich (also the 1997 winner) was suspended in 2006 after being caught in Operación Puerto (the blood-doping sting that centred around Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes and a group of riders who were indentified by codenames on blood bags and other documentation), and the third- and fourth-place riders — Richard Virenque and Laurent Dufaux — were both involved in the 1998 Festina scandal (more on that in a second). In fact, it would be another twelve years before the Tour de France winner was untainted by a positive test, a drug-taking admission or a sanction for doping.
In 1998, a doping problem that had mainly been kept in-house suddenly gained global notoriety with what was dubbed the Festina scandal. Willy Voet, a soigneur for the number 1–ranked Festina team, was stopped by customs officials on the French–Belgian border and found with a smorgasbord of performance-enhancing drugs in his boot. The discovery of Voet’s stash sparked a scandal that saw midnight police raids, riders taken into custody and only ninety-six of the original 189-man field making it to Paris. The entire Festina team was booted off the Tour, and other teams fled the competition as they began to feel the heat. Dubbed the ‘Tour De Dopage’, at one point there were real concerns that the 1998 race would not reach the finish. Continue it did though, with Italian Marco Pantani taking the yellow jersey to muted celebration. Cycling had well and truly entered the EPO era, where now every solo break or rider coming from nowhere to win a stage raised an eyebrow of suspicion.
The ’90s ended with a victory by a Texan who had fought his way back from a cancer diagnosis that had given him a 50 per cent chance of living. But even as heartwarming as his story was, the new climate of cycling raised questions as to where and how Lance Armstrong found the strength and endurance to win the Tour de France. It took a long time to answer those questions.
2000s
There’s no other way to refer to the decade of the 2000s than as the lost years of the Tour de France. With the benefit of hindsight it’s possible to see how doping affected every year’s results in some shape or form, and it’s difficult to champion the achievements of those who cheated their way to the top, at least in the early years.
The decade’s roll of shame is a lengthy one, including:
– The first five Tours of the decade, which were won by Lance Armstrong, who later admitted to taking performance-enhancing drugs during each of his victories.
– The top four riders of 2005, who were all implicated in doping: Armstrong by USADA’s investigation, and Ivan Basso, Jan Ullrich and Francisco Mancebo by association with the Operación Puerto investigation.
– 2006 winner Floyd Landis, who was disqualified after illegal amounts of testosterone were found in a drug test.
– 2007 Danish competitor Michael Rasmussen who, while leading the race, was sacked by Rabobank for lying about why he missed a drug test; the Astana and Cofidis teams, which withdrew from the race after riders tested positive.
This all makes depressing reading now, so you can only imagine the turmoil it caused at the time. The Tour was on life support at the end of the decade, and the prognosis did not look good.
That’s not to say there weren’t moments of great racing and drama during the decade, despite many of the participants’ tainted records: Armstrong’s famous cross-country detour into a field in 2003 to avoid a fallen Joseba Beloki; Tyler Hamilton riding the entire race in 2003 with a broken collarbone; Frenchman Thomas Voeckler’s ten days in yellow during 2004, raising the hopes of his nation; twenty-four-year-old sprinter Mark Cavendish winning six stages in 2009; and Aussies Robbie McEwen and Baden Cooke, who took out four green jerseys in five years.
Alberto Contador continued the great Spanish tradition in the race by winning the 2007 and 2009 editions, while two future champions also made an impact in the final years of the decade: Cadel Evans came second twice (2007 and 2008) and Bradley Wiggins finished fourth in 2009, matching the best-ever finish for a British rider. If the Tour de France was going to survive the early years of its second century, maybe they were the riders who could lead the way?
2010s
In our current decade’s short history, it’s been more of the same for the Tour: high drama, controversy, historical firsts and drug scandals. The Tours’ first three winners of the decade were on different ends of the spectrum: one has already had their result vacated, while the other two sit firmly on the other side of the doping fence, riding clean and inspiring a new generation of riders in their homelands.
The 2010 winner, Alberto Contador, was already the best stage racer of his generation, having won the complete set of Grand Tours by age twenty-six. But at the end of that year’s race, he tested positive for clenbuterol, and after a lengthy legal battle was stripped of the Tour win. Second place Andy Schleck was handed the title, although he was less than ecstatic about winning it retrospectively.
Australian Cadel Evans, after coming second in consecutive years, looked as though his place in Tour history might be next to Eugène Christophe and Raymond Poulidor as one of the best riders never to win. Evans may have won only one stage in 2011, but with true Aussie grit and determination, he stayed in touch with the leaders throughout the race and took over yellow on the penultimate day with a strong time trial. At thirty-four, he became the oldest winner in the post-war era.
With Contador banned and Andy Schleck missing through injury, the 2012 Tour was up for grabs. Cadel Evans, Bradley Wiggins and Vincenzo Nibali were all considered favourites, with the Brit in great form after winning several of the pre-Tour stage races. After a few nervous moments in the early stages, Team Sky took control of the race, guiding Wiggins into yellow by stage nine and keeping him in it all the way to Paris. Riding to pre-assigned power outputs and unwaveringly sticking to their plan, Wiggins’s win was the epitome of a team victory. Purists may have decried the lack of romance in the Sky tactics, but it’s hard to fault a team that so dominated the rest of the field on almost every stage. A master in the time trial and a lively press-conference participant, ‘Wiggo’ became an overnight sensation in England, further adding to his legend by winning the time-trial gold at the London Olympics a little more than a week later.