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The 2009 Tour de France was the 96th edition of the Tour de France, one of cycling's Grand Tours. It started on 4 July in the principality of Monaco with a 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) individual time trial which included a section of the Circuit de Monaco .
Andy Schleck leading the yellow jersey winner Alberto Contador, Lance Armstrong and his brother Fränk Schleck, up Mont Ventoux on stage 20. The two chasers seen behind the four-man group are Vincenzo Nibali and Roman Kreuziger. The 2009 Tour de France was the 96th edition of Tour de France, one of cycling's Grand Tours.
The Tour de France is an annual road bicycle race held over 23 days in July. Established in 1903 by newspaper L'Auto, the Tour is the best-known and most prestigious of cycling's three "Grand Tours"; the others are the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a España. [1]
The Tour has been won four times by a racer who led the general classification on the first stage and held the lead all the way to Paris. Maurice Garin did it during the Tour's first edition, 1903; he repeated the feat the next year, but the results were nullified in response to widespread cheating. Ottavio Bottecchia completed a GC start-to ...
On July 23, 2009, LeMond wrote an opinion article [190] in the French newspaper Le Monde where he questioned the validity of Alberto Contador's climb up Verbier in the 2009 Tour de France. In the piece, LeMond pointed out that Contador's calculated VO2 max of 99.5 mL/(kg·min) had never been achieved by any athlete.
Usually the winner of the Tour de France also wins at least one stage, but that is not necessary. It is possible to win the Tour de France without winning a single stage, because the overall winner of the Tour de France is decided solely by the total race time. This has happened eight times so far: [16] Firmin Lambot (BEL) 1922
8 July 2009 — Le Cap d'Agde to Perpignan, 197 km. The Tour visited Cap d'Agde for only the second time ever, as the early Tour flat stages continued. Perpignan, on the other hand, is a traditional city for the Tour to visit, thought to symbolically indicate the Tour's entrance to (or exit from, in "counter-clockwise" years) the Pyrenees.
Hushovd (in yellow) at the 2011 Tour de France.Hushovd held the overall lead of the race from the second to the ninth stage of the race. Hushovd at the 2006 Tour de France; his win in the prologue was one of two stage wins during the race.