If there’s one thing I want you to take away from the Tour de France, it’s that it is a wildly eccentric thing full of weird moments. There’s the Tour caravan, of course, but that’s just the tip of a very strange iceberg. In the Tour village there’s a ‘mayor’ (not democratically elected; more of a benevolent dictatorship) dressed up in a top hat who does dance routines. There are acrobats. There are stuffed lions handed to the yellow jersey wearer. But what if I told you that it used to be even stranger? What then?
Today’s tangent takes us back to the dying days of the last millennium: the 1999 Tour, stage 3. This was an era of sprint stages and riders with considerable sprinting horsepower – names like Erik Zabel, Mario Cipollini, Robbie McEwen and Stuart O’Grady. But perhaps the sprinter of that year’s Tour was the Belgian Tom Steels, riding for Mapei-Quick Step. That year, he’d win three stages and come second on another two, and the first win was in Laval, on the third stage.
That’s not the weird thing. The weird thing is that as part of his winnings, the city of Laval gave him a horse.
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