When did you FIRST start following the Tour de France?

[Anonymous]

You'd know by August who'd won the Vuelta which is being held in September... amazing!
(But... the Vuelta used to be earlier... right?)

Anyway... how old are you guys... ?Sorry... no offence...

You could have bothered to check - but the Vuelta used to be an April event.

Yes I would know by August who had won an event run in April.


Satisfied?

 

[richo36]

First time i started following the tdf was in 2007. I was flicking through the channels on tv and saw that it was on. Thought i would watch it just for a laugh, Laughing to myself, Thinking who would actually watch this crap. Then i lost the remote and was to lazy to get up and change it manually, so i just kept watching. By the end of this stage i was hooked. Naturally being aussie, became an evans fans and watched every stage for the rest of the 2007 tour.

 

[Escarabajo]

First time i started following the tdf was in 2007. I was flicking through the channels on tv and saw that it was on. Thought i would watch it just for a laugh, Laughing to myself, Thinking who would actually watch this crap. Then i lost the remote and was to lazy to get up and change it manually, so i just kept watching. By the end of this stage i was hooked. Naturally being aussie, became an evans fans and watched every stage for the rest of the 2007 tour.

Ha ha. You are not the first one who gets hooked by accident. An American friend of mine in Colorado was bored and was changing the channels to find something to watch and he remembered that I was a cycling nut fan that I used to watch OLN (Versus now) at night for the Tour re-runs. So he decided to find out what was that about and he found nothing more than the Alpe d'Huez stage in the 2001 Tour. He was hooked ever since.

 

[RedheadDane]

You could have bothered to check - but the Vuelta used to be an April event.

Yes I would know by August who had won an event run in April.


Satisfied?

WOW!! Thank God for better TV broadcasting and internet reports huh? I wouldn't have the patience to wait that long to find out!!

 

[luckyboy]

My first Tour was 2003, first race was the Dauphiné of that year. I remember Beloki's crash, Luz-Ardiden, Virenque ruling and also Mayo and Virenque winning. Great stuff

I think I missed the Vuelta that year, but started watching all the GTs the next year. Didn't know about the classics for like 2 years

 

[A.Rabadan]

My first Tour? I think it was 2002. Armstrong-Beloki-Heras in La Mongie, with Béjar's Lance teammate working hard and a exciting rush by The Boss in the final sprint. I think Beloki lost nearly 10-15 seconds in 200 metres.

Heras and Beloki were my heros. So, imagine which were my sensations after that!

 

[Runitout]

1989, when my dad won it.

That would tend to do it.

First I saw was maybe 1992. Heard about it in 1988 from my PE teacher - and this animal called Indurain, who was going to be a big star one day.

 

[royalpig180]

The first time I really watched to tour was 2009. Not really sure how this got me hooked on cycling, especially since I left for 2 weeks backpacking in the backcountry the day before Contador took yellow (basically when the "action" started). Not sure how the boring part of a fairly boring tour got me involved in cycling but something clicked and I've spent the ensuing year and a half readin up on my cycling history.

 

[Hawkwood]

My first Tour was 1976. World of Sport ran a weekly ten minute summary of the Tour which I watched. Later that summer a mate of mine brought back a Miroir du Cyclisme Tour special magazine, plus clubmates passed on their old Cycling Weekly mags to me and I was hooked. I have a very vague recollection of seeing a World of Sport report of Barry Hoban winning on the Bordeaux track in 1975, the commentator was David Saunders who sadly died in 1978.

 

[L'arriviste]

After catching up on tapes of the 1989 and 1990 editions on VHS during the school holidays, I was ready to go through it all in realtime in 1991.

I remember being a bit surprised not to see a Lemond tour de force, but it didn't matter. It was all fun anyway: killer Indurain, a Panasonic stage win and Abdoujaparov's Champs-Elysées tumble for a dose of last-minute drama (Konyshev won the stage but almost no-one remembers it for that).

Back then, the summers were hotter and longer, the race was more beautiful, the jersey was yellower...

 

[El Pistolero]

1998 Tour.

 

[Matthijs]

1995, the last year of true champion Miguel Indurain

 

[adamski101]

1983 for me, watching Robert Millar stage win on the brief weekly highlights on World of Sport....and the same in '84. 1985 was first year that the UK had a daily highlight show and that was me pretty much hooked since then.

 

[kurtinsc]

1989. It's a bit cloudy, so I'm not sure if it was the tour live, or weekly updates, but my dad and I watched it together. He filled me in on the whole back story of Greg Lemond and after that I was hooked.

I've followed pretty much every tour since then, but it's only in the last 5 years or so I've started following other races. I've come to realize how much of the sport I was missing.

 

[Sydney21]

2008 was the first for me. Cadel fighting for the Tour vs CSC. In 2009 I watched again and since then I've rarely missed watching a stage of a GT or a monument or other important race. I've read up on some recent cycling history (bless wikipedia's soul) and followed the most beautiful sport in the world in a close to obsessive way. Saw my first live race at the WC this year and bought a road bike and just cant get enough of it. Living in Australia it takes real commitment to follow all of the euro races especially since I don't have pay TV. Bandwidth takes a smashing especially every May and September but its worth every minute.

 

[masking_agent]

'85 for me..

 

[The Sheep]

1997 first time I watched started really following in 1998

 

[Parrulo]

i have memories of watching the tour before i was actually a person(old enough to understand what was happenning)

and i can remember stuff clearly since roughly 2000(funny how i always cheered for the other guys like beloki, ulrich, kloden, vino and basso) my biggest dream was that armstrong would crash a la beloki so jose azevedo could lead the team to victory.

i have always watched the vuelta and the volta and the other races with coverage one portuguese/spanish public tv.

i have been watching everything on eurosport since 2007 tho

 

[mortand]

As a kid I was quite a sports fan, watching just about everything covered on tv, including speedway (!?) and alpine skiing (big Pirmin Zurbriggen fan, if anyone cares), though excluding gymnastics and various ice skating events. That's probably why I remember watching the very wet World Champs in Chambery 1989. I don't actually remember the race itself, but the horrible weather.

I recall fragments of racing the following years - Stephen Roche winning on a foggy mountain top 1992, Jean-Claude Colotti winning the stage the day after (no idea why, his name's just stuck with me). I remember hopping up and down watching Rolf Sørensen beat Tony Rominger in Liege-Bastogne-Liege 1993, Rolf being the local hero from my neighbouring town.

My interest in le Tour and cycling in general grew through 1994-95, exploding into outright insanity around 1997, where I even started writing about the races myself. Thank you, TV2, for massive tv coverage of the classics, Tour and Vuelta. And thank you, Internet!

I've been a huge cycling fan ever since, through bad times and worse, missing very few races, despite my general sports interest fading dramatically.

 

[BeachBum]

Oh wow, this is a tough one. I remember in the mid-70s I wanted a Peugeot PX-10 because I saw some advertising that had Thevenet as a 2 time winner. Don't think I really followed it, it was only in the newspaper over here.

Probably mid-80s. CBS would have a half hour summary on weekends.

Never have seen the Tour in person, but I DID see Hinault when he raced in the Coors Classic in 86, including his stage win in Truckee over Davis Phinney when Phinney sprinted for the wrong line.

 

[Derrick]

Been scrolling through thinking I was going to claim equal first with Brianf7
{1956-Roger Walkowiak} but dedelou gets it with stories of Coppi,Bartali et al. I still have the Miroir du Tour, it's open in front of me now. Great pictures of De Bruyne, Defilippis, Ockers, Bauvin, Hassenforder and 100 others. Great stuff.

 

[knewcleardaze]

I think I was first exposed to watching cycling on TV when the late Professor Laurent Fignon was The Boss. This must have been about the time when my car threw a rod and I bought a bicycle to ride to work.

 

[Francois the Postman]

Nice to see this thread revived again.

 

[on3m@n@rmy]

'89 due to Andy Hampstens '88 Giro win, which got me interested, and LeMond in '89, which added gas to the flames. Every year since.

 

[Izzy eviel]

When I got home from school, all I wanted to do was watch cartoons. However my dad always had the remote and watched anything on Eurosport. Cycling was one of them. I hated it. I always remembered Jalabert's & Fabio's crashes thou, and Pantani V Ullrich in '98 & all that funny drug business. A few years later...