The Fastest Grand Tours Time Trial in History
After Chris Boardman broke the hour record for the first time, Luc Leblanc remarked that if Boardman could break it, half of the pro peloton could. In his first TdF, Boardman caught his minute-man, Leblanc, over a 7.1 km course and set the fastest ever Tour stage in the process.
Rik Verbrugghe holds the record for the fasest ever stage in a grand tour. 58.874 km/h over the 7.6 km prologue course from the 2001 Giro d'Italia. Mario Cipollini holds the fastest road stage (48.521 km/h) from the 1997 edition and Alex Zülle holds the fastest time trial stage (53.771 km/h stage 15) from the 1998 edition.
The fastest ever Vuelta a España stage is held by Rubén Plaza. Plaza won the 39 km stage 20 time trial in 2005 at a speed of 56.22 km/h. This makes it the fastest ever non-prologue stage of a Grand Tour. Igor González de Galdeano holds the record for the fastest road stage. 2001 Vuelta stage 9, 179 km @ 55.176 km/h.
- Fastest Stage
Mario Cipollini 50,355 km/h Laval - Blois (194,5 km) 1999
Pablo Lastras 49,938 km/h Bordeaux - Saint-Maixent l’Ecole (203,5 km) 2003
Johan Bruyneel 49,417 km/h Evreux - Amiens (158 km) 1993
- Fastest Time Trial longer than 20 km
Greg LeMond 54,545 km/h Versailles - Paris (24,5 km) 1989
David Millar 54,361 km/h Pornic - Nantes (49 km) 2003
- Fastest Prologue
Chris Boardman 55,152 km/h Lille - Euralille (7,2 km) 1994
Chris Boardman 54,193 km/h Dublin (5,6 km) 1998
Fabian Cancellara 53,660 km/h Londres (7,9 km) 2007
- Fastest Team Time Trial
Discovery Channel Team 57,320 km/h Tours - Blois (67,5 km) 2005
Gewiss - Ballan 54,930 km/h Mayenne - Alençon (67 km) 1995
Carrera 54,610 km/h Berlin (40,5 km) 1987
Read more about this topic: Individual Time Trial
Famous quotes containing the words fastest, grand, time, trial and/or history:
“Assassination’s the fastest way.”
—Molière [Jean Baptiste Poquelin] (1622–1673)
“One of my playmates, who was apprenticed to a printer, and was somewhat of a wag, asked his master one afternoon if he might go a-fishing, and his master consented. He was gone three months. When he came back, he said that he had been to the Grand Banks, and went to setting type again as if only an afternoon had intervened.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The trial by market everything must come to.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)