Puy de Dôme, France, July 16, 1983
Fans atop the Puy de Dôme in the Massif Central await the cyclists of the 1983 Tour de France during stage 15 of the race, a 15.6-kilometre uphill time trial from Clermont-Ferrand to the summit of the iconic mountain.
The Puy de Dôme was a regular waypoint on the Tour’s itinerary from its first appearance in 1952, through to the late 1980s. Conveniently located right in the centre of France, it could be used as a telegenic summit finish to ginger up the transition from the Alps to the Pyrenees or vice versa, or a last-chance saloon in the final days before Paris, its unique corkscrew road wrapping its way around the mountain.
Race leader Pascal Simon probably enjoyed the view from the summit least of all the GC contenders on this 1983 visit. He’d exited the Pyrenees with what looked like a Tour-winning lead of over four minutes, but had crashed and cracked his shoulder blade on stage 11, weakening himself considerably. In a dogged display of optimistic denial, he rode on across Languedoc and the southern Massif Central, and a combination of his own resistance and the other riders’ understandable reluctance to be the one to attack the stricken race leader, saw him start stage 15 with a 4:14 cushion on second-placed Laurent Fignon.
Fignon, riding his first Tour, put in a reasonable performance on the Puy, in 10th place, 1:48 behind stage winner Ángel Arroyo. Simon, however, struggled up in 55th place, over five minutes down, and though he managed to survive one more day in the yellow jersey, he was forced to pull out on stage 17 to Alpe d’Huez, while Fignon never relinquished the race lead he inherited from Simon.
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