Читать книгу Etape. The untold stories of the Tour de France’s defining stages онлайн

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The 1993 Tour was set for a battle royal between the three supreme sprinters of this golden generation. The opening stages confirmed it. Cipollini won stage one, Nelissen won stage two, Abdoujaparov won stage three. But it was Nelissen who wore the yellow jersey for two days after his stage win, then reclaimed it for one more day after stage five. Cipollini fled when the race reached the mountains to spend the rest of July on the beach – as he always did. (The Giro represented the main dish to Cipollini; the Tour was dessert. But then he wasn’t a dessert man – he never finished the Tour.) That year, there were no more bunch sprints until two days from Paris, where Abdoujaparov won the classic sprinters’ finish into Bordeaux and then laid to rest the ghost of 1991 by winning on the Champs-Élysées.

It was all set for 1994, though Cipollini didn’t make it to Lille for the Grand Départ; he was recovering from a horrific crash at the Vuelta a España, when he was taken across the road and into the barriers by a team-mate, landing heavily on his head (he wasn’t wearing a helmet). There were fears his career could be over. It wasn’t. Like Abdoujaparov, and all the rest, he would be back.