1998 Tour de France
The Prologue
The prologue is a short time trial, usually between 5 and 9 kilometres
long, that establishes the first holder of the yellow jersey of race leadership.
Britain's Chris Boardman is a specialist at this discipline: it requires
a high power output for a period of between 5 and 10 minutes, at which
he excels, and he didn't disappoint his many fans who had crossed the Irish
Sea to see him win his third maillot jaune. The course was ideal,
but the weather not so. A cold and cloudy morning became a rainy afternoon,
and memories of Boardman's spectacular crash in this event three years
before came back to haunt us all. We stood on the approach to a sharp right-hand
hairpin bend, and witnessed several methods of taking this corner, but
only one crash - Francisco Cabello (Kelme), the winner of the Brighton
stage in Le Tour en Angleterre in 1994 - and he got up pretty quickly.
Sorry, I didn't manage to capture that bit of action :-)
Go
to Stage 1 photos
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Stage 1
The following day saw Stage 1 proper - a loop south out of Dublin,
passing Stephen Roche's home town of Dundrum, before going down and over
the Wicklow mountains before returning to Dublin, for a finish in Phoenix
Park. We caught the riders at the start in O'Connell Street, and then wandered
over to Phoenix Park to see them hurtle past us twice. Tom Steels of Mapei
won the stage, the first of 4 that he chalked up over the Tour. A crash
as the riders entered the park meant that several - including stage favourite
Mario Cipollini - were held up, and crossed the line a few minutes down.
Sorry that there aren't as many pictures from this stage - most of them
are too blurred!
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