Favorite Tour de France Moments: 1997...

During the 1996 Tour, a new wunderkind was discovered. A year later he reached the apex of the sport. With 11 stages still to race, Jan Ulrich with a single dominant ride, became the new Tour de France champion at the finish of stage 10, a 252.5 km run through the Pyrenees between Luchon and Andorra. Exhibiting pure power and the smoothest pedal stroke in the peloton Ulrich, like Indurain before him, took control of the race by riding all the opposition off his wheel on the slopes leading to the Arcalis ski station at just under 10,000 feet elevation. Ulrich won the stage in a time of 7 hours, 46 minutes, finishing more than a minute ahead of Marco Pantani and Richard Virenque. Also like Indurain, Ulrich would use his massive engine to devastating effect in the individual time trial. Two stages later, in a 55 km time trial at St. Etienne he would finish more than three minutes ahead of the runner-up.

Following Ulrich's victory during the mountain stage, Richard Virenque had this to say: "I nearly exploded. He just went faster and faster. I thought he would blow, so I accelerated, and when I turned round, everybody was all over the shop." For his part, Pantani would say, "there was nothing we could do."