2003 Tour de France
The 90th Tour de France was held from 5 to July 27, 2003 in 20 stages to a total of 3427 km. It was attended by 198 racers participated in the tour, of which 147 were classified. After one of the most exciting racing courses of the last few years Lance Armstrong won this time just ahead of Jan Ullrich. This tour should significantly affect the career of Joseba Beloki that on the 9th stage suffered a bad fall after a puncture and it never recovered. In addition, there were some surprises. Alexander Vinokourov was third, Tyler Hamilton fourth and fifth Haimar Zubeldia, before his captain Iban Mayo, who remained in sixth slightly below expectations.
On October 22, 2012 Cycling Union UCI announced the cancellation of all titles Armstrong since August 1, 1998, including all Tour de France successes of the American. Substitutes in the first place were not used.
100 years Tour
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Tour, the route to the first-time host in 1903 refused to: The tour started and ended like a hundred years ago in Paris, and the other five stage cities of the first tour of the history (Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux and Nantes) were visited. The anniversary tour also had no Routenabstecher stages and into neighboring countries and stayed first time in years only to French soil.
Pepe Danquart accompanied the cyclists Erik Zabel and Rolf Aldag during the tour for his documentary Hell tour.
Favorites
The French sports newspaper L' Équipe, organizer of the tour, awards traditionally before the start of the race stars to mark the favorites. Until then, four-time Tour winner Lance Armstrong got as top favorite five stars. Then Giro winner Gilberto Simoni followed (four stars ) and Jan Ullrich, Joseba Beloki and Santiago Botero (three stars).
The stages
Jerseys in the itinerary
The table shows the leaders in their respective standings at the start of each stage.
All teams and drivers
A: task during the stage, NA: non-runner to stage, S: Suspended / excluded timeouts: timeout
Music
To mark the anniversary of the tour, the band released the album Kraftwerk "Tour de France Soundtracks ".