Description
1969 Tour de France
The 1969 Tour de France was the 56th edition of the Tour de France, one of cycling’s Grand Tours. It took place between 28 June and 20 July, with 22 stages covering a distance of 4,117 km (2,558 mi). The participant teams were no longer national teams but were once more commercially sponsored. The race was won by Eddy Merckx who absolutely dominated the rest of the field. As an example, in 1967, nine riders finished within 20:00 of the winner;, 1968nineteen riders were within 20:00, but in 1969, the 10th place rider was +52:56, the 20th place rider was +1:17:36 and only Roger Pingeon finished inside 20:00, of Merckx.
The 1969 race is the only time that a single cyclist has won the general classification, the points classification, and the mountains classification. Eddy Merckx rode on the winning team, Faema, and also won the combination classification and the combativity award.
Route and Stage
The 1969 Tour de France started on 28 June and had no rest days. The highest point of elevation in the race was 2,556 m (8,386 ft) at the summit tunnel of the Col du Galibier mountain pass on stage 10.
Race Overview
Rudi Altig won the prologue, and Merckx finished second. In the team time trial in the second part of the first stage, Merckx’s team won, giving Merckx the lead.
In the second stage, a group escaped, with Merckx’s teammate Julien Stevens as the highest-ranked cyclist. Since there were no dangerous competitors in the escape, Merckx did not chase them. The group stayed away, and Stevens took over the lead, with Merckx in second place.
In the fourth stage, Rik Van Looy escaped because he wanted to show that even at the age of 35, he should still be selected for the Belgian squad for the 1969 UCI Road World Championships. Van Looy quickly took several minutes and became the virtual leader of the race. With less than 40 km to go, Stevens tried to defend his lead by attacking. He was followed by a group of cyclists, including René Pijnen, one of Van Looy’s teammates. Pijnen was trying to stop the chase, and this angered the other cyclists in the group. The group, nonetheless, was able to reduce the margin to less than a minute, and Stevens conserved his lead.
In the fifth stage, Stevens was not able to stay in the first group. Désiré Letort, who had joined Stevens in the chase the previous stage, became the new leader, 9 seconds ahead of Merckx.
The first mountains showed up in the sixth stage, with a mountain finish on the Ballon d’Alsace. Merckx won convincingly: Joaquim Galera was second after 55 seconds, Altig after almost two minutes, and the next cyclist came after more than four minutes. Because Letort was more than seven minutes behind, Merckx was now the leader, with Altig in second place, more than two minutes behind. Notably, the 1965, 1967, and 1968 Tour de France winners Felice Gimondi, Roger Pingeon, and Jan Janssen were all distanced into the surviving peloton group, which finished some two and a half minutes behind Altig.
Merckx won the short time trial in stage 8 but only gained two seconds on Altig. Stage 8B was a half-stage in which Andrés Gandarias and Michele Dancelli got away from the bunch by almost two minutes, setting themselves up for a sprint. However, Dancelli pulled away near the end and won by four seconds.
In the ninth stage, Roger Pingeon and Merckx were away, with Pingeon winning the sprint. Altig lost almost eight minutes and was out of contention. The second place was now taken by Pingeon, more than five minutes behind. Stage 10 saw the previous year’s runner-up, Herman Van Springel, win the stage, which included the climbs of the Col du Télégraphe and the Col du Galibier. He finished about two minutes ahead of the Merckx group, with the GC only changing slightly.
Merckx added sometime in the eleventh stage, which he won, and the twelfth stage, where he finished in the first group. After the twelfth stage, Merckx was leading by more than seven minutes. After he won the time trial in stage fifteen, it was more than eight minutes.
By then, his victory was all but assured, he just had to make sure that he stayed with his competitors. In the seventeenth stage, however, Merckx did something historic. This stage would see the climbs of the Col de Peyresourde, Col d’Aspin, Col du Tourmalet, and Col d’Aubisque, and the Faema team controlled the pace of the bunch from the very start. Martin Van Den Bossche set a devastating pace while climbing the Tourmalet, causing the surviving main field to break apart. Nearing the summit, Merckx attacked to claim the points, but as he cleared the summit, he realized no one else was with him, and he attacked again as the descent began. At the bottom of the hill, several minutes later, he had built a lead of about a minute, and it only began to grow from there. Lomme Driessens, the Directeur Sportif for Faema, told Merckx to sit up and wait for the others while taking a few minutes to get some food in him as there were still 105 kilometers to go. Merckx didn’t always agree with Driessens on tactics and had second thoughts about sitting up and waiting for everyone else to catch up. When he got his next time check and realized he now had a gap of +3:00, he decided to attack even harder, and by the time he reached the summit of the Aubisque, he had a gap of about +7:00. He rode consistently with undeniable power as the surviving reduced peloton just could not bring him back, or even cut into the lead he was continuously building over them.
Michele Dancelli crossed the line in 2nd within a group of seven riders just shy of eight minutes behind Merckx. Everyone else, including the defending champ, was close to or well beyond fifteen minutes behind Merckx. This stage nearly doubled what was already almost certainly an insurmountable lead and was a defining moment in cycling history when a rider did something that seemed impossible and would likely never be seen again. By winning the final time trial, he increased his winning margin to almost eighteen minutes.
On July 20, the race ended with a split stage that arrived in Paris with a 37 km individual time trial. Merckx won the Points Classification, the Combination Classification, and the King of the Mountains competition. Merckx also won the Yellow Jersey for the first time. Merckx was also named the Most Combative Rider and won six stages. Before or since, no other rider has accomplished winning all of these competitions in the same tour.
Eric Leman narrowly won the Sprints Competition ahead of the French-speaking, Belgian-British rider Michael Wright.
During the 2019 Tour de France, Eddy Merckx and the 50th anniversary of this Tour were honored at the Grand Depart in Belgium.
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