It’s an unprecedented (possibly somewhat precedented, if you were alive in 2015 or 2009) Tour de France grand depart day × 4th of July combo. The United States of America’s 250th birthday! The Tour’s 123rd birthday. Wow, the Tour has been happening for half of America’s life.
To celebrate, here’s our objective ranking of all the many American Tour de France winners.
1. Greg LeMond
LeMond sneaked into the peloton with a French-sounding name, and walked away with the 1986 Tour. His biggest hurdle was his own teammate: Five-time winner Bernard Hinault ignored a “gentleman’s agreement” and tried to bury LeMond, forcing the American to beat his own squad to win the yellow jersey.
If anybody wasn’t aware that he was American, LeMond confirmed it by getting shot in the off-season. The first ever non-European winner of the race missed the next two editions while he recovered from shotgun injuries, but returned in 1989 to face two-time winner Laurent Fignon.
Trailing Fignon by 50 seconds entering the final time trial in Paris, LeMond rode the fastest time trial in Tour history (at that time) to win the race overall by eight seconds, the closest winning margin ever.
LeMond’s third and final Tour de France victory was in 1990, beating crazy climber Claudio Chiappucci by a little over two minutes. We really did have the best main characters in the 1980s and 1990s.
2. Lance Armstrong
The zero-times winner’s email signature would have you believe he won seven Tours de France in a row. If you were watching the Tour from 1999 to 2005 (which makes you old btw), your eyes might have you believe the same thing.
The Armstrong years were curious for the lack of one true rival. Marco Pantani had defeated Jan Ullrich so comprehensively in 1998 that the German needed to sit out the 1999 edition. Pantani himself was kicked out of the 1999 Giro as he was about to win it, and also sat out the 1999 edition. That left Alex Zulle, Fernando Escartin, and… an American returning from near-fatal cancer. The American won, and didn’t stop until he retired. He had brief but fierce rivalries with Ullrich, Pantani, and Ivan Basso, but there was no singular foil.
After a wobble in the 2003 Centenary edition that almost cost him his fifth Tour de France victory to Jan Ullrich, Armstrong’s sixth and seventh victories were assured, dominant, and quite boring.
Having retired, toured the celebrity circuit, and dated some women who looked like his mother, he returned to the Tour in 2009. There, he briefly tried to do the Hinault thing with teammate and overall winner Alberto Contador, before finishing third. Then he admitted to doping on the Oprah Winfrey show and got stripped of all his titles. So it goes. We watched it with Phil Liggett.
3. Floyd Landis
The only American Tour winner while we’ve had this website. The Mennonite Mandible was anointed victory-elect in the run-up to the Tour. He missed his prologue start time, eventually took the lead we all expected, then handed his race lead to former teammate Oscar Pereiro, who won a huge amount of time in a breakaway.
History books tell you that Pereiro took that yellow jersey from stage 13 all the way to Paris. We, of course, saw Floyd Landis take back the jersey, then massively blow up on stage 16, finishing 23rd while Oscar Pereiro regained his lead.
The next day, Landis launched an audacious solo breakaway. While Bjarne Riis and the other tactical geniuses tried to work out whether their teams should chase him down, Landis took the stage win by almost six minutes, putting him within 30 seconds of the yellow jersey again. A final time-trial secured Landis’s win.
Then, Landis’s drug test results came in. After spending a million dollars (donated by naive fans) and a whole year contesting his case in court, the jury came in: Oscar Pereiro had won the Tour de France. In 2010, Landis admitted to doping and accused Lance Armstrong of doing the same, ultimately causing the seven-time winner to become a zero-time winner. Well then. Can’t fault him for that part of the story.
