Tour de France: The five most dramatic Alpe d'Huez stages

In the beginning, there was Fausto Coppi. In 1952, Alpe d’Huez was the site of the first summit finish in Tour de France history, and it had a winner worthy of the occasion when Coppi delivered a solo exhibition on the 21 hairpins, with Jean Robic the last man to follow him.

But despite Coppi’s exploit, the day was not deemed a success. Hoteliers at the nascent ski resort paid out the equivalent of €400,000 to host the stage but grumbled that the crowds had been sparser than anticipated, while many observers complained that this new-fangled notion of finishing at altitude had only served to temper the racing until the final climb.

Almost quarter of a century passed before the Tour returned in 1976, by which point the race was ready for the concept. Live television coverage was by now a staple, and the Alpe d’Huez finale offered a most compelling addition to the viewing experience. Those tightly stacked hairpins rose up like steep terracing, and that brought an atmosphere that increasingly resembled a football ground. 

The spate of Dutch winners in the 1970s and 1980s – Joop Zoetemelk, Hennie Kuiper, Peter Winnen, Steven Rooks and Gert-Jan Theunisse – saw legions of fans flock from the Netherlands each summer, with Alpe d’Huez establishing itself as a fixture on the Tour route.

There are higher and steeper mountains on the Tour, but none have captured the popular imagination quite like Alpe d’Huez, with every visit engraved in the race’s collective memory.

Laurent Fignon entered the Tour as defending champion, but his victory in 1983 had come in the absence of four-time winner Bernard Hinault, and their duel would be the centrepiece of this race. The younger man quickly established himself as the stronger of the two, but he knew that Hinault was never going to lay down arms quietly. Stage 17, the first day in the Alps, looked set to be decisive, and so it proved.

Fignon and Colombian debutant Luis Herrera – in the news for sadly less salubrious reasons recently – had briefly forged clear on the preceding Côte de Laffrey. Hinault caught them on the descent and, his pride piqued, he attacked alone in the valley before the Alpe, beginning the climb with a lead of 20 seconds over the chasers. 

Fignon, probably the most stylish bike rider since Jacques Anquetil, would later reveal that he had laughed to himself when Hinault attacked, and he showed remarkable calm on the Alpe, resisting the temptation to follow Herrera when he danced clear of the chasers on the lower slopes.

Herrera bounded past Hinault en route to an historic stage victory atop the Alpe, the first by an amateur and the first by a rider from the Americas, but that was only part of the day’s story.

Fignon, resplendent in his tricolour jersey, settled into his rhythm as the climb drew on, bridging inexorably up to Hinault and then blasting past him as the Breton changed down a gear in resignation. It felt like the passing of the torch. No one was to know then just how much injury and ill fortune would hamper Fignon in the years that followed. 

“In the crucial moments, physically and psychologically, the French champion was in control of affairs and of himself,” Pierre Chany wrote admiringly of Fignon, who moved into yellow that afternoon ahead of his second successive overall victory in Paris.

Alpe d’Huez had already become a fixture on the Tour route in the late 1970s, but it was forever woven into the very fabric of the race by the events and the atmosphere of this sun-bleached afternoon. From Herrera navigating a path through a forest of fans to Fignon’s glasses and headband combo, from the riot of colours on the roadside to Hinault’s show of defiance, this was a day of the most indelible images. Pure ciclismo, as the kids say these days.

Hinault’s defeat on the Alpe two years earlier proved to be but a flesh wound. In 1985, the Badger had willed his way back to the top, winning the second Giro-Tour double of his career. His Tour victory, however, was not as smooth as he would have liked, and had Greg LeMond not been a La Vie Claire teammate bound by team orders, the American might very well have taken the yellow jersey from him in the final days.

Afterwards, Hinault had indicated that he would ride in support of LeMond’s ambitions the following year, but old habits die hard. Hinault had never been a domestique and he certainly wasn’t ready to start in this, his final Tour. “I wanted to enjoy my last season… I could afford to spare no effort,” Hinault later admitted in his autobiography, Memories of the Peloton.

Those efforts included a long-range attack on the road to Pau that put Hinault in yellow by five minutes over LeMond, but his lead was slashed to 40 seconds when he tried to repeat the feat the following day and faded dramatically. 

When LeMond eventually moved into yellow on the Col d’Izoard, the Tour seemed all but won, but Hinault would still have the final word in this story. The next day’s stage brought the race to Alpe d’Huez, and Hinault and LeMond reached the foot of the climb together in front, but only after the Frenchman had attacked on the descent of the Galibier, forcing his teammate into a frantic chase on the Télégraphe.

That manoeuvre was already enough to put Hinault back into second overall ahead of Urs Zimmermann, but the story of the day was the psychodrama between the Frenchman and LeMond. With a truce seemingly now called, Hinault would ostentatiously shepherd LeMond up the 21 hairpins, playing the dutiful teammate for the cameras. 

In return, LeMond ceded stage victory at the summit, but the general bonhomie curdled when a microphone was proffered to Hinault after the finish. “The Tour is not over, I’m still racing to win it,” he insisted, much to LeMond’s surprise.

Undeterred, LeMond would carry yellow to Paris, but the defining image of his race would be that fragile alliance with Hinault on the slopes of Alpe d’Huez.

Marco Pantani raced up Alpe d’Huez on three occasions and, by most estimates, those are the three quickest times ever recorded on the climb, though accounts vary as to whether the record time came in 1995 or 1997. But whatever way you stack it up, no rider is more synonymous with the Tour’s most telegenic ascent than the late Italian, and nobody, not even the litany of Dutch winners nor Thibaut Pinot in 2015, seemed to inspire the same level of adoration from the roadside.

On Pantani’s first ride up Alpe d’Huez in 1994, he had to settle for eighth, as Roberto Conti scooped stage victory from the break, but he showcased his talent by putting more than two minutes into Miguel Induráin.

Twelve months later, Pantani would return to the Alpe and win his first Tour stage by dancing clear near the foot of the climb. The result was never in doubt, not even when he almost took a wrong turn in the final kilometre.

His most emblematic triumph on the Alpe would come in 1997, however, with the victory that marked his comeback from the horrific injuries he suffered in a crash at Milano-Torino at the end of 1995. We weren’t to know then that Pantani had a more precipitous fall still ahead of him.

By the time the Tour reached the Alpe on stage 13, Jan Ullrich had all but secured overall victory, but even Der Kaiser, then at his youthful zenith, was no match for Pantani’s spontaneous overflow of attacking on the ascent.

Unusually, the stage was flat all day ahead of the Alpe, which made for a frenetic, high-speed run-in to the Alpe. It took a kilometre or so of the climb for the strongmen to come to the fore, but Pantani soon signalled his intentions by tossing away his cap and hitting the front of the race.

Only Ullrich, Richard Virenque, Francesco Casagrande and Bjarne Riis could track his first acceleration, and Pantani simply kept on going until they were distanced one by one. Ullrich, who had looked impregnable to that point, was the last to relent, but even he was soundly dispatched.

From there, Pantani’s only company was from the thousands upon thousands of fans spilling onto the road in front of him and parting just enough to allow him to cruise past. The 1997 Tour would belong to Ullrich, but the Alpe is forever Pantani’s mountain. 

The result doesn’t stand in the record books, but the memory lingers all the same. How could it not? Lance Armstrong’s cheating was on such a grand scale that it couldn’t be swept under the carpet, but his impact on the Tour history means that he could not simply be erased either. The decision to strip him of his seven Tour wins but not assign them elsewhere was a tacit acknowledgement that the Texan’s excesses had embodied an entire era. For once, it seemed cycling’s intent was to learn from history rather than rewrite it – though it’s hard to say how seriously the lessons have been applied in the years since.

In 2001, Armstrong was then – as now – the most divisive figure in cycling. He was also a man under pressure. On the eve of the Tour, the Sunday Times broke the news that Armstrong was being coached by Michele Ferrari, while his chief rival Jan Ullrich had, for once, reached July in something resembling his best shape.

When the race entered the Alps on stage 10, Ullrich’s T-Mobile squad took up the reins on the Col du Glandon, while a grimacing Armstrong drifted towards the back of the peloton. Spurred on by his apparent weakness, T-Mobile forced the pace still further, seemingly unaware that this was all a grand bluff from Armstrong and US Postal.

In his peerless biography, Jan Ullrich: The Best There Never Was, Daniel Friebe outlines in considerable detail the game of bluff and counterbluff between US Postal and T-Mobile, whose respective skullduggery seemingly extending to listening in on one another’s radio channels. It’s not entirely clear if all the witnesses’ accounts are totally reliable, but it makes for a compelling read. 

And it certainly made for a compelling stage. T-Mobile continued to lead into the foot of Alpe d’Huez, but once the gradient began to bite, José Luis Rubiera scorched to the front with Armstrong on his wheel. 

The pace was already supersonic when Rubiera swung off, but before launching his inevitable attack, Armstrong turned back and stared at Ullrich, a moment that would immediately be dubbed ‘The Look.’ Even before Armstrong's downfall, there were shades of Ben Johnson staring down Carl Lewis at the Seoul Olympics about the incident. 

Seconds later, Armstrong rocketed clear alone, never to be seen again. Ullrich never flagged, but that was nowhere near enough. He reached the summit in second place, but some 1:59 down on Armstrong. 

Speaking to Daniel Friebe, Ullrich’s teammate Giuseppe Guerini, himself a winner on the Alpe in 1999, summed up the day neatly. “What Armstrong did was a clown show,” he said. “He took the piss out of us, out of the spectators and out of the whole of cycling.”

There had been whispers about the Tour de France one day holding its final stage on Alpe d’Huez. It was a persistent rumour in the years leading up to the 100th edition in 2013, and the idea was floated again when it became clear that the Olympic Games would take Paris out of commission in 2024. 

The men’s race finished in Nice on that occasion, but the idea was eventually rolled out at that year’s Tour de France Femmes, where the mountain provided the tensest finale to a Grand Tour since LeMond pipped Fignon back by eight seconds in 1989.

Demi Vollering was the defending champion, and she underscored her status as pre-race favourite by winning early Rotterdam time trial to move into the yellow jersey. Two days later, however, Vollering lost the lead when she crashed in the finale of stage 5, amid polemics over her SD Worx teammates’ failure to wait and aid her pursuit.

Kasia Niewiadoma moved into yellow, and she began the final weekend in the Alps with a buffer of 1:19 over Vollering, who was now in 10th place. The Dutchwoman could only claw back four seconds in time bonuses on the penultimate stage to Le Grand-Bornand, but Niewiadoma was braced for the inevitable offensive on the Alpe. “Tomorrow, with the real climbs, it should be enough for me,” Vollering said, warming to the idea of winning the Tour on the Dutch Mountain.

Vollering launched her offensive on the Col du Glandon, with 55km still remaining, bringing compatriot Pauliena Rooijakkers with her. Rooijakkers began the day two seconds ahead of Vollering in the overall standings, and so she became the virtual race leader when their advantage stretched out in the valley before the Alpe.

Rooijakkers was reluctant to work with a frustrated Vollering, however, while a previously isolated Niewiadoma found allies of circumstance in Gaia Realini and Évita Muzic on the run-in to the Alpe, cutting the deficit to 44 seconds at the foot of the climb. Game on.

As the 21 hairpins ticked down, Vollering began to edge away from Niewiadoma all over again, and when her lead hit a minute midway up the climb, it looked as though the pendulum had swung definitively in her favour. 

But Alpe d’Huez is rarely straightforward, and Vollering began to flag in the final 3km. Although she had the strength to see off Rooijakkers for stage victory, she fell agonisingly short of snatching the Tour itself. 

Niewiadoma conjured up one last effort to save her maillot jaune by four meagre seconds, the smallest-ever winning margin in any Tour de France, male or female. “Four seconds seem to be magical now,” she said. 

Alpe d’Huez had seen plenty over the years, but nothing quite like this.