Sunday, July 02, 2006

place in France

The Tour is nowadays contested by professional teams backed by commercial sponsors, but the event began as a race for individuals; slipstreaming and other team tactics were initially savagely he Tour was contested by national teams for take nd in 1974 and 1994, and will start the 2007 tour) and the Netherlands. The three weeks usually includes two rest days, which are sometimes used to transpon 2006. The traditional finish is in Paris on the Champs-Élysées. During the Tour, various stages occur, including a number of mountain stages, individual time trials and a team time trial. The remaining stages are held over relatively flat terra the variety of stages, sprinters may win stages, but the overall winner is almost always a master of the mountain stages and time trials.
The itinerary of the race changes each year and alternates between clockwise and anti-clockwise direction around France. (For rst and then the Pyrenees. Next year's race can be expected to visit those two mountain ranges in the reverse order.) Some of the visited places, especially mountains and passes, recur almost annuamous on their own. The most famous mountains are those in the hors-categorie (peaks where the difficulty in climbing is beyond categorization), including the Col du Tourmalet, Mont Ventoux, Col du Galibier, the Hautacam and Alpe d'Huez. Although the tour is often won in the mountain stages, the length and variety of terrain en only an all-round rider can win the race. (A notable exception in recent years being the late Marco Pantani, the winner in 1998, who was a mountain climbing specialist.)
From 1984 to 2003 there was a race called La Grande Boucle Féminine Internationale, which was unofficially consih not as hard as the famous Paris-Roubaix. The race takes multiple turns over the avenue, which is lined with enormous spectator crowds. This stage is not usually competitive in terms of the overall lead since it is a flat sprinters'eader is likely to have a s1987, with Stephen Roche leading Pedro Delgado by only 40 seconds amps-Elysées, threatening to story at the last minute. (In fact he was caught, he and Roche en as the penultimate, stage. Most famously, the final stage of the 1989 Tour saw Greg LeMond overtake Laurent Fignon's overall lead by just 8 the closest winning margin in the Tour's history. It is unlikely that this woviding a stage finish in most Tours. In 2004, in another experiment, the mountain time trial ended at Alpe d'Huez. This seems less likely to be repeated, following complaints of abus stage is the climb of the Mont Ventoux, often claimed to be the hardest climb in the Tour due to the harsh conditions there. The Tour usually features only one of these two climbs in a year.

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