Lance rode He had some support. The fastest road stage was the Rohan Dennis holds the fastest time trial crown, with his stage one performance at He did only have to ride On the other end of the scale, in , Firmin Lambot won the race with the slowest ever winning average speed of In , the route was kilometres long - that's miles.
That year, there were only 17 stages, but the longest of them was km from Metz to Dunkerque. At least it was flat. The Lance Armstrong era is of course renowned for its cheating history, with the seven time winner being stripped of all his titles gained from and following his admission of doping.
However, cheating at the Tour de France far pre-dates the late 90s. In fact, the race's first winner, Maurice Garin was stripped off his second title in along with eight other riders. The cheating was arguably more creative then - including but not limited to , the use of public transport trains , being motor paced by a vehicle attached to the rider via a cork and wire mechanism, held in the mouth , sabotaging the competition with itching powder and having on-side fans throw tacks onto the road in front of rivals.
So - who should win the competition? Hard to say, but Garin and his contemporaries certainly win for inventiveness.
The French cyclist started 18 editions of the Tour de France, between and He didn't finish in or , but still holds the award for most finishes, jointly with Dutch rider Joop Zoetemelk. The two had been ousted by George Hincapie, but his doping disqualifications put pay to his place in the chart.
Mercx famously has 34 stage wins to his name. It's no secret that surpassing this target is a goal for Bahrain McLaren's Mark Cavendish - however the year-olds non-selection for the Tour de France has put his pursuit of the goal on hold.
But we want more of an answer than that, so we're here to try to quantify exactly how hard and work out roughly how it compares to what the rest of us mere mortals do. To answer the question, we've been digging. We dug through the roadbook of the race, through the power files of various riders to quantify their effort, as well as through the recovery files to see just how much strain it puts on their bodies.
We also pulled in data from the general public to try and provide a sense of comparison. At its close, the riders in the Tour de France will have covered 3, kilometres 2, miles — not including the riding they do on the two rest days. Put plainly, if you were to get in a car in New York and head west, that'd get you as far as Salt Lake City. If you were to get onto a plane in London, you could get to Paris and back again five times and if you were in Australia you'd make it from Melbourne right over to Perth on the coast of Western Australia.
Throughout this distance, riders face a whole host of climbs, from small hills to enormous mountain passes. This year, a double ascent of Mont Ventoux faced riders on stage 11 on a day that saw riders tackle over 4, metres of vertical ascent in kilometres of riding. In addition, while it's easy and obvious to focus on the difficulty of going uphill, there's a level of difficulty involved in coming down the other side too.
For us average Janes and Joes, coming downhill might seem like the easy part — you can often stop pedalling and simply let gravity do the work — but let's not forget these riders are in a race so will be sprinting out of corners and pushing the limits of physics to go as quickly as possible, which in itself takes an enormous amount of mental energy and focus.
It is hard to begin to imagine the amount of focus this needs and the cognitive load it creates. The Tour de France is ridden by the world's best road cyclists, all of whom are full-time professionals that ride for around 30 to 40 hours per week. But wait, before you quit your nine to five job and start cycling all day, know that these riders aren't just riding their bike for fun, they are completing highly tailored structured training programs designed by some of the best physiologists and coaches in the world.
Sadly, even with that knowledge at our disposal, most of us still couldn't quit the day job, because professional cyclists are also blessed with the right mix of genetic potential that enables them to respond to such a high training stimulus and recover quickly enough to go again the next day. To try and quantify this, we reached out to TrainerRoad — a popular training-based indoor cycling app turned all-around training platform that boasts a dataset of over a million users — to get a sense of the amount of structured training that the 'average' cyclist tackles.
According to TrainerRoad's data, an average 'beginner cyclist' performs 3. While 'experienced cyclists' perform 6. What this means is that your average beginner is performing just 10 per cent of the training hours of a Tour de France cyclist. To complete the Tour de France, you cannot simply commit to finishing the route, you'll need to do so within the constraints of a time cut on each stage. According to rule 2. So in layman's terms, the organisers will decide the time cut based on the difficulty of the stage.
We won't go into the details of how they then calculate it, but depending on the difficulty of the stage and the pace of the fastest rider, it will usually be the winner's time plus anything between four and 18 per cent. It has been a hotly discussed topic this year, with sprinter Mark Cavendish fighting on every mountain stage, and Nic Dlamini famously continuing to the finish on stage 9 after a crash despite missing the time cut by an hour and a half.
This essentially means that to complete the Tour de France, you need to not only finish the route, you need to be able to do so within a percentage of the winner's time, which leads us nicely onto speed. In trying to work out how hard the Tour de France actually is, you will need to know what speed you'll need to be able to ride at in order to keep up. Combining every edition of the Tour since , the average pace of the winner has been Anyone who has ridden a local time trial will know that it's difficult to maintain this pace for 10 miles, let alone the plus miles covered in the Tour.
However, of course, anyone who's ridden in a group will also know that there's an enormous benefit from being in the draft. That is until the road points up and gravity does its best to slow you down. This climb took O'Connor 1 hour and 12 minutes, during which he rode at an average speed of 26kph But even if you're not vying for a win, and you're simply trying to make it to the finish line within the time cut, you'll still need to maintain a very high pace.
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