2012 Tour de France
The 2012 Tour de France was the 99th edition of cycling’s Grand Tour. It started in the Belgian city of Liège on 30 June and finished on the Champs-Élysées in Paris on 22 July. Bradley Wiggins won the overall general classification, and became the first British rider to win the Tour.
About 2012 Tour de France in brief
The 2012 Tour de France was the 99th edition of cycling’s Grand Tour. It started in the Belgian city of Liège on 30 June and finished on the Champs-Élysées in Paris on 22 July. Bradley Wiggins won the overall general classification, and became the first British rider to win the Tour. Wiggins’s teammate Chris Froome placed second, and Vincenzo Nibali was third. The points classification was won by Nibali’s teammate Peter Sagan. The riders came from 31 countries; France, Spain, Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Germany and Australia all had 12 or more riders. Riders from six countries won stages during the race; British riders won the largest number of stages, with seven. The average age of riders in the race was 30. 17 years, ranging from the 22-year-old Thibaut Pinot to the 40- year-old Jens Voigt. The Saur–Sojasun cyclists had the youngest average age while RadioShack–Nissan cyclists have the oldest. The race was the 18th of the 29 events in the UCI World Tour, and all of its eighteen UCI ProTeams were entitled, and obliged, to enter the race. On 6 April 2012, the organiser of the Tour, Amaury Sport Organisation, announced the four second-tier UCI Professional Continental teams given wildcard invitations, of which three were French-based and one was Dutch.
The presentation of the teams – where the members of each team’s roster are introduced in front of the media and local dignitaries – took place outside the Prince-Bishops’ Palace in Lièges on 28 June, two days before the opening stage held in the city. Each squad was allowed a maximum of nine riders, resulting in a start list total of 198 riders. Of these, 35 were riding the Tour deFrance for the first time. Andy Schleck, who finished second in the 2010 Tour and 2011 Tour, was not able to recover from an injury suffered in the Critérium du Dauphiné. The other riders considered contenders for the general classification were Ryder Hesjedal, Fränk Schleck, Samuel Sánchez, Jurgen Van den Broeck, Tony Martin, Denis Menchov, Levi Leipheimer and Alejandro Valverde. The 2011 Vuelta a España was a Grandverde a a fourth finishes a Grand Tour were a fourth place or better. The 2010 Tour winner Cadel Evans came back from an illness earlier in the season to win two-day critérium International Roméo-Vuelta and up-and-down stage races in Paris–Nice and Romandie. André Greipel of Lotto–Belisol and Team Sky rider Mark Cavendish also won three stages. Team Europcar’s Thomas Voeckler, winner of two mountain stages, won the mountains classification.
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This page is based on the article 2012 Tour de France published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
