Career
He twice rode on the Tour de France team that brought Lance Armstrong to victory, in 1999 and 2001. In the 1999 Tour de France Vande Velde was for a time the leader of the youth classification; he did not complete the 2001 Tour de France. Christian Vande Velde moved to Liberty Seguros in 2004 and switched to Team CSC in 2005. During this time, he worked as a domestique, riding in support of varying team captains, even though the 2005 season saw Vande Velde taking chances of his own including a breakaway on 4th stage of the Eneco Tour of Benelux, which was eventually hampered when the peloton was led on a false route, meaning the riders of the breakaway had to wait for the peloton to get back on track, at which time the gap between the break and the peloton was reduced from six to four minutes with 43 kilometres to go.
In the 2006 Tour de France, he was a domestique on Team CSC for team captains Carlos Sastre and Fränk Schleck. Vande Velde was the best of the climbers in the team apart from Sastre and Schleck, whom he supported in the high mountain stages. On stage 16, he pulled for most of the early slopes of the Col de La Croix de Fer, after team-mates Sastre and Schleck attacked to put then race leader Floyd Landis under pressure. On stage 17 to Morzine, he again pulled for most of the day along with team-mate Jens Voigt and Matthias Kessler and Serhiy Honchar from T-Mobile.
With the team time trial win by Slipstream-Chipotle in Stage 1 of the 2008 Giro d'Italia, Vande Velde became the first American to wear the Maglia rosa since Andy Hampsten in 1988. Vande Velde finished the 2008 Tour de France in 4th place, 3'05" behind the winner Carlos Sastre and 17th in the Olympic road race in Beijing. In 2009 Vande Velde finished 7th in the overall standings for the Tour de France.
He and his wife Leah are the parents of Uma (3 years-old) and Madeline, born in February, 2009.
Vande Velde crashed out of the 2010 Giro d'Italia on the third stage with a suspected clavicle break. Coincidentally, in 2009 he was forced out of the Giro after a crash, also on stage 3.
Vande Velde withdrew from the 2010 Tour de France upon completing the second stage on Monday, July 5, 2010, with two broken ribs. The injury was suffered in a crash caused by oil spilled from a fallen motorcycle that had been carrying a television camera operator filming on the Stockeu pass descent.
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