1982 Tour | 1984 Tour | Tour de France Database | 1983 Tour Quick Facts | 1983 Tour de France Final GC | Stage results with running GC | Time bonuses earned | The Story of the 1983 Tour de France
Map of the 1983 Tour de France
Les Woodland's book Cycling Heroes: The Golden Years is available as an audiobook here.
1983 Tour de France quick facts:
3,862 kilometers divided into 22 stages plus a prologue individual time trial. Average speed was 35.915 km/hr
There were 140 starters and 88 classified finishers.
Tendinitis prevented 1982 winner Bernard Hinault from starting the 1983 Tour.
Peugeot rider Pascal Simon became the Yellow Jersey after stage 10, the only Pyrenean stage. The next day Simon crashed and broke his shoulder blade.
Simon continued riding, keeping the lead while suffering terrible pain.
23-year-old Laurent Fignon stalked him, but didn't attack, waiting for the inevitable collapse. The collapse came in stage 17 with its six Alpine ascents where Simon abandoned.
Fignon became the leader, holding the Yellow Jersey until the end.
Fignon's only stage victory was the final time trial.
Complete Final 1983 Tour de France General Classification
Climbers' Competition:
Points Competition:
White Jersey for rider in his first Tour de France
Most Aggressive Rider
Team Classification:
Time bonuses earned by the top ten riders:
1983 Tour de France stages, results and running General Classification
Prologue: Friday, July 1, Fontenay sous Bois 5.5 km Individual Time Trial
GC: same as prologue time.
Stage 1: Saturday, July 2, Nogent sur Marne - Créteil, 163 km
GC after Stage 1:
Stage 2: Sunday, July 3, Soissons - Fontaine au Pire 100 km Team Time Trial
The stage was for time bonuses. I believe real times did not apply to the GC. Zoetemelk was later found positive for dope in this stage and eventually penalized 10 minutes.
GC after Stage 2:
Stage 3: Monday, July 4, Valenciennes - Roubaix, 152 km
GC after Stage 3:
Stage 4: Tuesday, July 5, Roubaix - Le Havre, 300 km
GC after Stage 4:
Stage 5: Wednesday, July 6, Le Havre - Le Mans, 257 km
GC after Stage 5:
Stage 6: Thursday, July 7, Châteaubriant - Nantes 58.5 km Individual Time Trial
GC after stage 6:
Stage 7: Friday, July 8, Nantes - Ile d'Oléron, 216 km
GC after Stage 7
Stage 8: Saturday, July 9, La Rochelle - Bordeaux, 222 km.
GC after Stage 8
Stage 9: Sunday, July 9, Bordeaux - Pau, 207 km
GC after Stage 9:
Stage 10: Monday, July 11, Pau - Bagneres de Luchon, 201 km
Major climbs: Aubisque, Tourmalet, Aspin, Peyresourde
GC after Stage 10:
Stage 11: Tuesday, July 12, Bagneres de Luchon - Fleurance, 177 km
GC after Stage 11:
Stage 12: Wednesday, July 13, Fleurance - Roquefort sur Soulzon
GC after Stage 12:
Stage 13: Thursday, July 14, Roquefort sur Soulzon - Aurillac, 210 km
Major climbs: Monjaux, Montsalvy
GC after Stage 13:
Stage 14: Friday, July 15, Aurillac - Issoire, 149 km
Major climb: Puy Marie
GC after Stage 14:
Stage 15: Saturday, July 16, Clemont Ferrand - Puy de Dôme 15.6 km Individual Time Trial
Major climb: Puy de Dôme.
55. Pascal Simon @ 5min 10sec
GC after Stage 15:
Stage 16: Sunday, July 17, Issoire - St. Etienne, 144.5 km
Major climb: Côte de Lavet
GC after Stage 16:
Stage 17: Monday, July 18, La Tour de Pin - L'Alpe d'Huez, 223 km
Major climbs: Cucheron, Granier, Côte de la Table, Grand Cucheron, Glandon, L'Alpe d'Huez.
This is the stage Pascal Simon abandoned.
GC after Stage 17:
Stage 18: Wednesday, July 20, Bourg d'Oisons - Morzine, 247 km
Major climbs: Glandon, Madeleine, Aravis, Colombière, Joux-Plane
GC after Stage 18:
Stage 19: Thursday, July 21, Morzine - Avoriaz 15 km Individual Time Trial
Major climb: Avoriaz
GC after Stage 19:
Stage 20: Friday, July 22, Morzine - Dijon, 291 km
GC after Stage 20:
Stage 21: Saturday, July 21, Dijon 50 km Individual Time Trial
GC after Stage 20:
Stage 22: Sunday, July 24, Alfortville - Paris (Champs Elysées), 195 km
The Story of the 1983 Tour de France
This excerpt is from "The Story of the Tour de France", Volume 2. If you enjoy it we hope you will consider purchasing the book, either print eBook or audiobook. The Amazon link here will make the purchase easy.
Who could beat Hinault in the Tour? After his flawless victory in 1982 there seemed to be no one who could topple the mighty Breton. It wasn't who would stop Hinault. It was "what". That spring he won the Vuelta and the Flèche Wallonne. During the Vuelta his tendinitis flared up again. It was the same right knee that caused him to abandon the Tour in 1980. On the eve of the start of the Tour, Hinault announced that he could not start. He had to quit racing and let his body heal or risk irreparable damage. That left his Renault team without a captain. At first they thought they would go for stage wins and perhaps their Marc Madiot or Laurent Fignon could earn the Best Young Rider category. As events will show, they really didn't know what they had on their team.
The Tour was again wide open with a new crop of young riders looking to contest the race. Colombia's national team was invited, bringing in several superb climbers although only the most optimistic believed that any of them were real General Classification hopes. Merckx said that the individualistic racing style in Colombia with its solo breakaways in the mountains made them poor contenders for a high placing. The high-speed early stages over bad roads would sap their reserves and weaken them for the mountains.
Forcing the smaller climbers to drain themselves while trying to maintain a hot pace throughout the pre-climbing stages of a Tour had been a classic Merckx stage-racing tactic.
Peugeot's Phil Anderson would require watching, having come in tenth in the 1981 Tour, his first. In 1982 he was fifth, wore Yellow for 10 days and won the second stage. In the spring of 1983 he had already won Amstel Gold, the Tour de l'Aude and the Tour of America as well as a second place in the Tour of Romandie. He had 2 weaknesses. The first was his suspect climbing abilities. The second was the crucial problem of team support. While he was Peugeot's number 1 protected rider, being a man from the English-speaking world he couldn't count on the absolute commitment of his team to support him. Those were different days.
It is interesting to note that no one really had the slightest clue as to who would win the Tour. Pierre Martin gathered the prognostications of 8 of the Tour's leading experts including the great writers Philippe Brunel and Pierre Chany. The eventual winner was not on anyone's top-8 lists. The 1983 Tour was truly a cipher to all.
After the 1982 Tour had tired the riders with too many transfers, the organizers promised that the 1983 Tour would have no transfers. The promise was easy to make and difficult to keep. There were several including a long one by high-speed train before the final stage in Paris.
Eric Vanderaerden powers to victory in the Prologue. |
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Belgian tough-guy Eric Vanderaerden won the Prologue and kept the lead until the stage 2 team time trial, a 100-kilometer brute. The Coop-Mercier team won giving the Yellow Jersey to Jean-Louis Gauthier. When his teammate Kim Andersen got into a break the next day and beat the field by 2 minutes, the lead migrated to the Dane, the first man of his country to ever wear Yellow. Meanwhile, Joop Zoetemelk's constant losing battle with the mass spectrograph continued. He turned up positive for dope again and was penalized his usual 10 minutes.
This was to be a Tour in which misfortune played a large part, starting with Hinault's tendinitis. A new super climber, Scotsman Robert Millar, crashed in stage 3 and lost almost 17 minutes. Any hope of a high General Classification for him ended right there. A crash caused by Vanderaerden in the Roubaix velodrome took down Phil Anderson and French champion Marc Gomez. Gomez had to retire. Because it happened in the last kilometer, even though he had to walk his bike across the finish line, Anderson lost no time.
As the racers made their way across Northern France the riders had to endure stages long enough to remind one of the early days of the Tour. Stage 4 was 300 kilometers, stage 5 was 257 kilometers. Through all of this, Kim Andersen kept the Yellow Jersey. Meanwhile, Sean Kelly had been chasing intermediate sprint bonuses and moving up the leader board. On stage 9 he managed to get the lead, but only barely. Before the stage 10 trip into the Pyrenees, here was the General Classification:
The first day in the mountains and the only Pyrenean stage was 201 kilometers from Pau to Bagnères de Luchon. The riders would face the Aubisque, the Tourmalet, the Aspin and the Peyresourde. The first 2 were rated as hors category and the second 2 were first category climbs. Van Impe led over the Aubisque but it was Robert Millar who won the stage in front of Pedro Delgado. Pascal Simon was third at 1 minute, 13 seconds and became the new Yellow Jersey. Seventh in the stage was one of Hinault's young lieutenants Laurent Fignon, who had decided to go with Simon that day, 4 minutes, 23 seconds behind Millar.
Stage 10: Pascal Simon is third at Bagnères de Luchon. |
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And Phil Anderson? He crashed on the Aubisque and had his shoe come off. He had to undo the double knots (cycling shoes used laces back then) before he could get the shoe back on. Meantime, none of his teammates waited for him to pace him back up to the peloton. He did make contact with the leaders before the summit of the Tourmalet, the second climb, but the effort cost him dearly. Since Kim Andersen, who was the Yellow Jersey, had not been able to follow the leaders, Phil Anderson was the virtual Yellow Jersey. And here's where the suspect support of the Peugeot team comes in to play. Even though Anderson was the virtual Tour leader, his teammate Pascal Simon attacked him. As writer John Wilcockson noted, Simon could do this simply because he was French and Anderson wasn't. With the crash and tiring chase efforts, Anderson finished twenty-fifth, 12 minutes, 41 seconds after the stage winner Millar.
Phil Anderson was demoted to being a domestique for Simon.
In the General Classification Fignon had lifted himself up to second place, 4 minutes, 22 seconds behind Simon.
The General Classification after the big Pyrenean stage:
Earlier I wrote that misfortune would be writ large on the 1983 Tour. Early in stage 11 Joaquim Agostinho took off. Pascal Simon's Peugeot teammate Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle went with him. The Peugeot team, concerned that such an accomplished rider as Agostinho was away, started pulling him back. Agostinho's SEM teammate, Jonathan Boyer, went up front to be with the Peugeot chasers. Not wanting him there interfering with the pursuit, they tried to push him back, out of the way. In the resultant crash, 2 Peugeot riders went down, Bernard Bourreau and Pascal Simon. In his first day of riding in the Yellow Jersey, Simon had crashed and broken his shoulder blade. Simon remounted and with help from his team, finished the stage in sixty-first place, in the same group as Kelly, van Impe and Fignon.
The next 6 stages were an agony for Simon as he kept the Yellow Jersey as long as he could. He really did very well as the Tour went through the Massif Central, losing only a little time to Fignon. He was aided by a perception in the peloton that it would be gauche to attack the wounded man. There was a feeling that eventually he would be forced to abandon.
In the stage 15 time trial up Puy de Dôme, Simon's having only 1 working shoulder really began to tell. Fignon closed to within 52 seconds of Simon. Simon's performance was remarkable because he had to climb the extremely steep final kilometer of the dead volcano sitting down. Phil Anderson, despite his domestique duties, had so far managed to stay in the top 10 in the General Classification. That day on the steep slopes Anderson lost another 4 minutes, ruining his chances for a place on the podium in Paris.
The new General Classification:
The sense of entitlement that colors the professional peloton's attitude towards drugs was made very clear during stage 13. Patrick Clerc of the SEM team had been riding under a suspended sentence for refusing (along with Bernard Hinault) to give a urine sample after a criterium the previous year. It was announced that Clerc was the fourth rider of the 1983 Tour to fail a drug test. His suspended sentence should have been imposed automatically. To protest this potential penalty the riders did a go-slow ride and it's said that Duclos-Lasalle rode up to Colombian rider Patrocinio Jimenez, who was off on a breakaway, and got him to join the slowdown. After trying and failing to talk the riders out of their plans to ruin the stage and desperate to avoid a riders' strike, Tour boss Lévitan capitulated and announced that the suspended sentences had been abrogated and Clerc could continue to ride.
The Pascal Simon drama had to end, and on stage 17 it did. He had earned the love and respect of the fans, but his broken shoulder kept him from participating in the final ceremony of the day where the Tour leader puts on his Yellow Jersey. Facing 6 major climbs covering 223 kilometers and ending at the top of l'Alpe d'Huez, Simon's keeping the Yellow Jersey was out of the question. Simon abandoned after 95 kilometers and 2 climbs and Fignon, who took fifth in the stage, became the Yellow Jersey.
The General Classification now stood thus:
Because Fignon had already helped Hinault win the Vuelta, Renault boss Cyrille Guimard had originally planned not to bring his 22-year old rider to the Tour. Troubled that Fignon already had 1 Grand Tour under his belt this year, Guimard was hesitant to have him ride another 3-week competition. He didn't want to run the risk of over-racing his wonderful new young talent. With Hinault out of the Tour, Guimard decided that he needed Fignon's help. He put Fignon in the Renault roster but planned to pull him the minute he looked tired. In 1984 Guimard again had Fignon ride 2 Grand Tours, this time the Giro and the Tour. Fignon had a wonderful 1984 Tour, but could not ride the Tour in 1985, nor could he compete effectively again for years. Perhaps Guimard's original instincts were correct.
There were 2 more Alpine stages, one a time trial. Fignon did not cover himself with glory but he rode well enough to keep Peter Winnen in second place. Under Guimard's direction, Fignon was riding economically and carefully.
By stage 21, the penultimate day of the 1983 Tour, Fignon had a solid lead but had failed to win a stage. A win in the 50-kilometer individual time trial at Dijon let Fignon silence his critics and show that he was a deserving winner. Phil Anderson finished ninth, the best-placed rider on his team.
Stage 21: Fignon wins the Dijon time trial and clinches the Tour. |
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At 22, Fignon was one of the youngest winners of the Tour. He also joined another exclusive club, those who had won the Tour in their first attempt. The other freshman postwar winners were Coppi, Koblet, Anquetil, Merckx, Gimondi and Hinault.
The final 1983 Tour de France General Classification:
Climbers' Competition:
Points Competition:
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