It is almost 25 years since I stood in the French town of Pau on a July afternoon in 1995 and watched the six members of the Motorola team, including a young Lance Armstrong, ride into the Tour de France stage finish a few hundred metres in front of the peloton. It remains the single most impressive and affecting memory I can summon up in over 30 years of following cycling.
The men of the Tour had taken eight hours to ride that day’s mountain stage over some of the race’s greatest ascents at the pace of a funeral cortege, in honour of the Italian Olympic champion Fabio Casartelli, who had died the previous afternoon after falling off at high speed on the descent of the Col du Portet d’Aspet; on Tuesday the field of the Tour de Pologne paid an identical tribute to the young Belgian Bjorg Lambrecht.
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