Tour de France2003: Armstrong off-road
This Tour is remembered as one of the most bizarre. On many occasions, fate spared the four-time winner Lance Armstrong. One of the most spectacular moments occurred in the last kilometers of the stage to Gap, when Spaniard Joseba Beloki spectacularly fell right in front of Armstrong at the entrance of the turn. To avoid the fall, Armstrong steered the bike across the field. He had fractions of a second to react, and he rode through the dirt and back onto the highway into the lead group on the other side of the turn. This moment will go down in history as one of the most memorable instances of bicycle maneuvering.
Tour de France 1983: Pascal Simon is eliminated in Yellow
The Tour de France is nothing without faith and heroism. In 1983, Frenchman Pascal Simon demonstrated both. Competing for the strong Peugeot team, Simon captured the yellow jersey in the Pyrenees, and his lead was more than four and a half minutes. But when he fell on the stage to Fleurance and broke his scapula, his chances of winning were lost. But nevertheless, with a yellow jersey on his shoulders, he refused to get off the race, struggling to continue the distance no matter what. For the next five days, the race looked more like a funeral procession, as the challengers refused to attack the injured leader and Simon struggled just to stay in the peloton. Finally, on the climb up to Chapelle Blanche in the Alps, Simon gave up and got off. But before that, he had won in the hearts of his fans.
Tour de France 1990: Claudio Chiappucci almost stole the victory
The event has been described as the robbery of the Tour de France: four riders achieved a 10-minute advantage on the first stage of the 1990 Tour de France. But the least known of the riders in that breakaway, Claudio Chiappucci, nearly stole the entire race. With the yellow jersey on his shoulders, he held a seven-minute lead over Greg Le Monde at the exit of the Alps. And he kept the yellow jersey until the last split at Lac de Vassiviere, when Le Monde finally beat the upstart who surprised everyone and won the Tour de France. But during his time in the leader’s jersey, Chiappucci became one of the most popular riders of his generation.
Tour de France 1919: first yellow jersey
What would the Tour de France be without the yellow jersey? Until 1919, there was no yellow jersey given to the winner. Only in the middle of the 1919 race did the organizers give in to the pressure of the press, which demanded that the leader of the race be singled out and made more visible. Yellow was chosen as the appropriate color, which was a bow to the newspaper L’Auto.” The first yellow jersey went to Eugène Christophe, one of the leading riders of his generation.
Christophe almost won the 1913 Tour de France, but lost everything when his front fork broke in the Pyrenees. In 1919, after a six-year hiatus associated with the First World War, he was finally ready for his long-awaited victory. But fate decided otherwise. On the penultimate stage on the cobblestone roads of Northern France, a broken fork cost him his Tour de France victory once again. He dragged his bike to a bike store in Valenciennes, where he spent more than two hours getting it fixed. He ended up falling back to 11th place and never won the Tour de France.