10 stages that shook the Tour de France

Chiappucci and Indurain battle at the 1991 Tour (Image credit: Getty Images Sport)

With the 2020 Tour de France seemingly ready to run during the new coronavirus-affected dates of August 29 to September 20, we've looked back through the archives to find some of the most exciting stages of the race from the last half century.

Plenty of the biggest names in tour history are here, from Merckx to Hinault and Lemond, as well as a few more recent entries. Scroll down to check out ten stages that shook the Tour de France.

It wasn’t yet the post-Eddy Merckx era when the peloton rolled out of sea-level Nice and embarked on a steadily rising parcours which would top out at 2,250 metres at the Col d’Allos and finish at the ski station of Pra-Loup, two weeks into the 1975 Tour. In fact, the stage looked just like so many others since 1969, during which time Merckx had been unbeatable at the Tour: the Belgian, in yellow, and, by the way, attacking off the front. Merckx was never one to sit on a lead.

Laurent Fignon, the defending champion, had spent the first two weeks of the Tour provocatively taking small chunks of time out of Bernard Hinault, the returning four-time winner. Fignon had won in 1983 in Hinault’s absence, and the older rider had a point to prove: that without the debilitating knee injury which kept him from the race the previous year, there was no way he’d have allowed Fignon to win the yellow jersey. But Fignon’s lead over Hinault was already two minutes by the time the 1984 Tour reached the Alps.

The Alpe d’Huez stage avoided the huge climbs to the north and east of the Alpe – the Croix de Fer and Galibier – and instead looped into the narrow, steep, shorter climbs of the Chartreuse, to the west. Hinault attacked on the Laffrey, pulling Fignon and a small group clear. Fignon counterattacked over the top, forcing Hinault to chase. When he caught Fignon, in the valley road to the Alpe, he counterattacked himself, right into a scouring headwind.

With one mountain stage down in the 1986 Tour, Hinault had his boot on the throat of the race. He’d promised to help his team-mate Greg LeMond win the yellow jersey, but his actions on the first Pyrenean stage, to Pau, were those of a rider intent on winning himself. He’d attacked with a strong companion, Pedro Delgado. Nobody behind wanted to lead LeMond up to the front, so Hinault and Delgado gained over four and a half minutes.

He gained another two minutes by the top of the Aspin, but this time, the pursuit from his rivals was committed and he was caught in Luchon, with Superbagnères still to come. Hinault cracked, and LeMond forged ahead to take back every second of the deficit he’d conceded the day before, moving from 5:25 down to within 40 seconds of his teammate. Hinault had effectively delivered a knockout blow – to himself.

For the French public and media, a new national hero had been anointed, barely six months into the post-Bernard Hinault era. The succession had been seamless – Bernard was dead; long live Bernard. However, there’s a telling line in the eventual 1987 winner Stephen Roche’s autobiography The Agony and the Ecstasy on the younger of the two Frenchmen: “I knew I was going to have a bloody hard job to get Bernard out of the yellow jersey. It was not impossible. He was not Hinault.” Try telling that to the French public.

Bernard might or might not have gone on to win the yellow jersey if he hadn’t punctured at an extremely inopportune moment the day after Ventoux, a grippy middle-mountain stage through the Vercors. His team had sent three riders up the road, leaving him dangerously isolated, and he flatted just as Roche, along with a few others – pretty much everybody else in the final top 10 – attacked through the feed zone.

If the 18th stage of the 1989 Tour was anything to go by, they should have embraced the concept as a regular occurrence much sooner. In a race where the lead swung between Greg LeMond and Laurent Fignon, the 91.5km Villard-de-Lans stage was a defining one. LeMond won the long early time trial; Fignon gained at Superbagnères; LeMond took the lead back in the Orcières-Merlette TT and squeezed a little more time out of Fignon in Briançon; the Frenchman struck back on Alpe d’Huez. It seemed that whenever one was strong, the other weakened in turn.

Fignon’s lead after the Alpe was 26 seconds. Not enough against such a strong time triallist as LeMond, with a final day TT in Paris. So he attacked, alone, on the fast, short stage to Villard-de-Lans. LeMond, and the other contenders, were stunned into non-cooperation, before PDM riders Steven Rooks and Gert-Jan Theunisse, who didn’t have a good reason to work, decided to at least regulate Fignon’s lead.

Getting a rider into a break, the wisdom goes, means that your team doesn’t have to chase. So when Z rider Ronan Pensec slipped into the first break of the 1990 Tour, along with Claudio Chiappucci, Frans Maassen and Steve Bauer, Pensec’s leader Greg LeMond could sit back and let his rivals work out how to reduce their eventual 10-minute deficit. Pensec, after all, had the best climbing pedigree of the four, and if that deficit wasn’t reduced, he would win.

LeMond was the hot favourite for the 1991 Tour, just as Merckx had been in 1975, and as Hinault had been on the morning of the Superbagnères stage in 1986. He had already led the race, gaining time with audacious attacks on an early flat stage, and in the long time trial. He’d ceded the yellow jersey to long-range escapee Luc Leblanc the day before Val Louron, but he still looked like the eventual winner.

However, it was only when Miguel Indurain did something that rarely happened before or after and attacked on a mountain stage that LeMond started to look shaky. Indurain tore away on the descent of the Tourmalet, hooked up with Claudio Chiappucci, and the pair simply rode away from the race over the final two climbs. LeMond blew, losing a lot of time, and, more fatally, the aura of invincibility he’d built up in winning the last two Tours.

Carlos Sastre, the winner of the 2008 Tour, never captured the imagination of fans or other cyclists in the way that other Tour winners did. The rumour went that Lance Armstrong, lounging shirtlessly in retirement on his couch watching the Spaniard win the race, was thus emboldened to make his comeback the following year. (He duly beat Sastre at the 2009 Tour, but it’s uncertain whether it was worth it for the ensuing disgrace.)

After almost three weeks of conservative racing, the favourites had attacked inside the first 15 kilometres. Schleck and Contador were chased down on the long descent of the Col du Lautaret, before an all-against-all bar brawl broke out on Alpe d'Huez between Contador, Samuel Sánchez and Pierre Rolland with Rolland taking the honours. Schleck and Evans fought each other to a standstill, while Voeckler battled all the way to fourth place overall. The race had saved the best until last.

Edward Pickering is Procycling magazine's editor. He graduated in French and Art History from Leeds University and spent three years teaching English in Japan before returning to do a postgraduate diploma in magazine journalism at Harlow College, Essex. He did a two-week internship at Cycling Weekly in late 2001 and didn't leave until 11 years later, by which time he was Cycle Sport magazine's deputy editor. After two years as a freelance writer, he joined Procycling as editor in 2015. He is the author of The Race Against Time, The Yellow Jersey Club and Ronde, and he spends his spare time running, playing the piano and playing taiko drums.