July 18th in the Tour
- In 1938 Gino Bartali won the Tour. He only won two stages
though, and one of them was on this date in Marseille.
- But ten years later in the 1948 Tour he was much more
impressive. Facing three stages in the Alps he won them all,
the final one in Lausanne on the 18th. At 34 he remains the
oldest post-war winner of the Tour.
- Louison Bobet was the first rider to win three Tours in a
row, and he helped seal the third in 1955 with a victory in
Avignon.
- He was smooth when riding against the clock, and Jacques
Anquetil confirmed his first win of five by taking the only
individual time trial of the 1957 Tour.
- Merckx! In 1971 he won the final stage in Paris while in
yellow, a 54km TT. Pretty cool! And in 1974 he won in
Bordeaux.
- Zoetemelk wrapped up his lone Tour victory with a TT win
in Saint-Etienne in 1980.
- The first rider to take advantage of the fall of the iron
curtain to win a stage was Dmitri Konychev, who won in Pau
in 1990.
- Chiappucci left early in 1992 on a grand escape. He led solo
over four major climbs before winning in Sestriere.
- Eros Poli spent his career leading other people out. But
in 1994 his captain Cipollini crashed hard in the Vuelta,
leaving Eros to ride his own race in the Tour. He took two
cracks at long breakaways, the second on a day that took the
high BMI rider over Mont Ventoux. He had 20 minutes at the
bottom and 5 at the top, which he held to the stage win in
Carpentras.
- In 1997 Jan Ullrich crushed the field in the TT at Saint-
Etienne. He would become one of the youngest Tour winners
that year. He won two other TTs on this date, the 1998 stage
in Correze where he took the yellow jersey he would later
lose to Pantani on that awful day to Les Deux Alpes, and the
2003 test in the extreme heat of Cap Decouverte.
Bob Schwartz
[email hidden]