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Video Cycling Road – Fignon & LeMond – 1989 Tour de France Final Time Trial into Paris for the win
Video Cycling Road – Fignon & LeMond – 1989 Tour de France Final Time Trial for the win
Archive for the ‘Cycling’ Category
Since the first American cyclist made his way to the European pro circuit in the mid-’70s, enough gaffes, misunderstandings and flashpoints have taken place to keep a U.N. peacekeeping force busy — from Greg LeMond’s spending the Tour de France rest day playing golf, to the conversion of La Taverne Zimmer, the Montmartre bar in which the Tour was hatched at the turn of the century, into a TGI Friday’s. Among the lowlights:
1981
Sizing up the first American ever to ride the Tour de France, legendary French racing director Cyrille Guimard calls Jonathan Boyer un marginal, or weirdo — a reference to Boyer being, among other things, a Seventh-Day Adventist, a vegetarian, and a believer in acupuncture.
1984
After the World Championship road race in Barcelona, Greg LeMond publicly gripes that during the race Italy’s Moreno Argentin had offered to help him win for $10,000.
1985Â …Â Details
With Queen’s rock anthem “Bicycle Race†blaring from loudspeakers, the Tour de France sets off for another day, the riders a blaze of color in their lurid shirts. This, undoubtedly, is one of sport’s most spectacular sights.
But is it believable?
A decade ago, when Lance Armstrong won the first of his record seven Tour titles, the answer to that question was largely “no.â€
Doping had rotted cycling to the core. At least 80 percent of riders in the grand tours of France, Spain and Italy were doping, anti-doping scientists in Switzerland now calculate using blood tests from that time. Back then, researchers in Paris who were working on a method to catch one of the most common forms of cheating struggled to find clean samples to try out their new test…Â Details
Lance Armstrong is among several riders who will have a homecoming of sorts during the sixth stage of the Tour de France, which heads south of the border Thursday from Gerona to Barcelona in Spain.
Many cyclists use Gerona as a base for training, near the Pyrenees Mountains. Armstrong lived there for five years, and said Wednesday it was a “second home.â€
Among other Astana riders, American Levi Leipheimer splits his time between Gerona and Santa Rosa, Calif., and Alberto Contador gets to return to Spain— though he’s a native of Madrid.
“Always it is agreeable to return to your country and to (see) your relatives, because there will be many people coming to see me,†Contador said in a statement Wednesday… Details