Cycling
Cycling has been an important sport in Spain since the 1940s. The Vuelta a España (Spanish for "Tour of Spain") is one of the most important cycling events in the world, together with the Tour de France (French for "Tour of France") and Giro d'Italia (Italian for "Tour of Italy") racing tournaments.
Several Spanish cycling athletes have won the Tour de France, including Federico Bahamontes, Luis Ocaña, Pedro Delgado, Óscar Pereiro, Alberto Contador, and Carlos Sastre. The most successful Spanish cyclist is Miguel Indurain. He won the Tour de France in five consecutive years between 1991 and 1995. He also won the Giro d'Italia in two consecutive years (1992 and 1993), the 1995 Road World Championship time trial and the gold medal in the 1996 Olympic time trial.
More recently, in 2008, Sastre became the seventh and third consecutive Spaniard to win the Tour de France, then followed by Contador winning his second tour in 2009's edition. Contador was thought to have repeated his win in 2010 but the day before Stage 17, the queen stage finishing with atop the Col du Tourmalet, Contador tested positive for performance enhancing substance Clenbuterol, although he claimed it was a result of consuming contaminated beef and in January 2012, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled him guilty and gave him a two year ban backdated from July 21, 2010 and had all his results achieved after July 21 erased, including victory in the 2010 Giro d'Italia and a 5th place finish and most aggressive rider award for stage 19 at the 2011 Tour de France.
Óscar Freire shares the distinction of being one of four men to win the World Road Racing Championship three times, as well as being a three time winner of one of the most prestigious one-day classic cycle races, the Milan – San Remo. Abraham Olano won the Vuelta a España in 1998, and is the only man to win World Championships in both the road race (1995) and time trial (1998).
Read more about this topic: Sport In Spain
Famous quotes containing the word cycling:
“I shall not bring an automobile with me. These inventions infest France almost as much as Bloomer cycling costumes, but they make a horrid racket, and are particularly objectionable. So are the Bloomers. Nothing more abominable has ever been invented. Perhaps the automobile tricycles may succeed better, but I abjure all these works of the devil.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“If all feeling for grace and beauty were not extinguished in the mass of mankind at the actual moment, such a method of locomotion as cycling could never have found acceptance; no man or woman with the slightest aesthetic sense could assume the ludicrous position necessary for it.”
—Ouida [Marie Louise De La Ramée] (1839–1908)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)