This article was first published in Rouleur Issue 143

For a while now, long stages in Grand Tours – we're talking 200 kilometres plus – have been considered out of date, old school – that they don't cater to the needs of modern racing, either for the peloton, or for an audience with an increasingly short attention span.

With recovery time at a premium, especially in the Grand Tours, the teams don’t really want them either. The emphasis has of late been on cutting down on long days, lengthy transfers and associated fatigue, and ensuring that riders don’t lose their ‘freshness’.

This year’s Giro d'Italia features four stages over 200 kilometres, with the longest being stage seven, from Formia to the mountain finish at Blockhaus, climbed via its steepest side, from Roccamorice, and featuring a final ten kilometres often in excess of ten per cent.

With only one other climb en route to Blockhaus, it's not perhaps as severe as some other past mountain epics. Nonetheless, evidence suggests, rather obviously, that beyond around 200 kilometres, performance levels drop away. Factor in heat exhaustion, severe weather, the terrain and speed and the variables increase.

After all, sports science and recovery pyjamas can only do so much: after that, it’s down to genetics. But is that really the case? How much, for example, of Tadej Pogačar’s lassitude towards the end of last year's Tour de France was down to mental weariness, rather than physical fatigue?

So sometimes, long stages tell us more, much more, than a punchy 156 kilometres can ever do. They tell us about mental resilience and self-belief, and not just physical prowess.

Here’s a look at five Grand Tour mythical mega-trawls that transformed careers – not always for the better – and that have now become legendary.

Il Campionissimo

Giro 1949: 254km to Pinerolo | Fausto Coppi

The ending of the Second World War ushered in a period of austerity, but also of renewed optimism across Europe. The long shadow of fascism was receding and there was a more forward-looking attitude taking hold, particularly in what had been a divided Italy.

The end of the war also opened doors to new ambition and new champions and, at the 1949 Giro, the duel between Italian rivals, Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali, reached its zenith.

Bartali was the older man, an adored champion, with 29-year-old Coppi seen as his usurper. There were big cultural differences between them too: the divorced Coppi was seen as more urbane and sophisticated, an icon of the Italian north, while Bartali – anti-fascist, religious and resilient – appealed to the poorer south.

There was some personal enmity too, that ebbed back and forth between them, which had come to the surface at the 1948 World Championships, with both men refusing to assist the other, to the point of actually quitting the race.

It was also an era before live television, a period in which fans relied on sporadic radio commentary and the written word for information, and sports journalism was at its most florid and embellished.

But there was scope for simplicity too. When Coppi attacked with great daring on the road to Pinerolo in 1949, the words of radio commentator, Mario Ferretti, passed into folklore.

“One man alone in the lead, in his white and sky-blue jersey: his name is Fausto Coppi,” Ferretti told his listeners.

Coppi had started the stage second overall, but racing at less than a minute from the race lead, taking control of the Giro was within his reach. Five mountain climbs, four of them on gravel, offered the ideal terrain on which to execute a coup.

If he was to pull it off, he had to distance Bartali, to assert his superiority, once and for all, over his compatriot. The climbs en route – Maddalena, Vars, Izoard, Montgenevre and Sestriere – became the terrain that fuelled his legend.

The bad weather, as Coppi accelerated on Maddalena, before definitively going solo on the Vars and the Izoard, further accentuated the scale of the task.

The pair of rivals had ridden through the eerie rocky cathedral of the Izoard's Casse Deserte in what became an epic pursuit, but Coppi did not falter. His lead on Bartali became a yawning chasm of eight minutes at Sestriere and grew to almost 12 minutes at Pinerolo.

We live in an age dominated by Tadej Pogačar, who's lone raids at races such as Strade Bianche have been a characteristic of his domination. But nothing the Slovenian has done to date bears comparison with Coppi’s mythical ride to Pinerolo.

The Hermit

Giro 1956: 242km to Monte Bondone | Charly Gaul

Few climbers laid waste to the peloton on the most gruelling mountain stages as surgically as Charly Gaul. Racing through the hardest climbs with a quiet but brutal intensity, Gaul inflicted damage to his rivals on multiple occasions, but most famously on Monte Bondone in the 1956 Giro d'Italia.

Rivals feared the Luxembourger, especially in the mountains, when the weather was bad. On Monte Bondone, in the late spring of 1956, the weather was atrocious.

There is no doubt that he was an outsider, a maverick. Gaul didn't really fit in and he didn't seem to care if he was popular or not. In fact, he even seemed to enjoy disturbing the status quo. The peloton’s traditionalists soon developed a disdain for the introverted young man, with boy-band good looks.

“He has the hide of a hippo,” Raphael Geminiani said. Fellow climber Federico Bahamontes said of Gaul that he had “a very strong character, terrible even”.

Gaul was darting eyed, high-cheek-boned and chiselled, although Paul Maunder, author of Angel of the Mountains: the strange tale of Charly Gaul, disputes at least some of the mythology of his life.

Maunder has said that although “as a rider Gaul was quite a loner; pretty grumpy most of the time, really quite introverted”, the stories of him becoming an estranged hermit in later life were somewhat exaggerated.

But those tales, of a broken, bearded man, gone to seed and living in a cabin, deep in a forest, also fit with the poetic, mystical image of the lone rider, the tortured soul, dancing through the high peaks, and racing ahead alone, to victory.

At the 1956 Giro, decades before the extreme weather protocol was even dreamt of, Gaul raced through apocalyptic conditions and put the peloton to the sword over the climbs of Costalunga, Rolle, Gobbera and Brocon, before the assault on the Bondone, from Trento.

The stage over the Bondone was perhaps the apogee of ‘Gaul-ness’ and of old-school, hard-man racing: there was terrible weather, a terrifying route and a pitiless relentless attack that seemed to take pleasure in inflicting suffering. Contrast that with 2026. These days, the weather would have ensured that the 1956 stage would have been called off.

Even before the Bondone, Gaul’s attack ensured the damage had been done, but then he relished bad conditions. Bahamontes, his great climbing rival, was among those to quit and seek refuge in a nearby farmhouse.

The snowstorm that closed in on the climb ended the hopes of many, including race leader Pasquale Fornare, who had started the stage with a 16 minute overall lead on the Luxembourger. Gaul, in shorts and jersey, persevered however, riding on to win the stage by almost eight minutes and take the race lead.

Gaul may have dealt the peloton a cruel blow, but at the finish, even he seemed broken. He was lifted off his bike, his clothing cut off, and was then eased, teeth chattering, into a warm bath. It was one of the greatest reversals in fortune in Grand Tour history.

“Charly ended partially deformed by the cold and I had frostbite in my hands and feet,” Bahamontes later told cycling author, Alasdair Fotheringham. “I couldn't use them properly for a month.”

The Baroudeur

TDF 1991: 259km to Le Havre | Thierry Marie

Only Albert Bourlon, back in 1947, had ridden as long a breakaway to win a Tour de France stage since the second World War. When a cross-eyed, gurning Thierry Marie, rode to a halt beyond the finish line in Le Havre in the opening week of the 1991 Tour de France, he was in a state of collapse.

Back in 1947, race organiser Jacques Goddet said of Bourlon, a former prisoner of war, that he was “one of the last of a dying breed”. He could have said the same of Marie, a rider who wore the leader's jersey in all three Grand Tours.

During his stage winner’s interview, the Frenchman had to be propped up by team helpers. “I was dead,” he said afterwards, of the closing kilometres into Le Havre.

Marie also rode 234 of the 259 kilometres, from Arras to Le Havre, dressed in Castorama's ‘dungaree’ kit, a look recently reprised by Jonas Vingegaard during this year's Paris-Nice. Until he broke away from the peloton, Marie was better known for prologue wins and for increasingly tortuous ‘low-pro’ riding positions.

Famously, he used a bulky, ugly and controversial ‘lumbar support saddle’ that smoothed out the kinks in his aero profile to win short, sharp time-trials. The habit drew column inches too, but also slightly ignored his phenomenal pulling power and stamina.

Marie was a beast, a rider who combined raw power with the kind of blind, unthinking determination suited to grinding out kilometre after kilometre. On the rolling roads of northern France, he was in his element.

He was also used to winning alone. After he retired, Marie recalled that his first win, as a cadet, was a lone break. “One day you'll ride the Tour de France,” he was told afterwards.

“I didn’t wait for the sprint to win races,” he remembered of his earliest racing experiences. “My Dad would pick a spot on the race route and when I saw him, ’d attack.”

The stage to Le Havre took close to seven hours, and Marie rode all but 25 kilometres on his own. At one point, he sang for the motorbike cameras, conscious perhaps that one man in a striped boilersuit, pedalling endlessly across the Pas de Calais, made for less than gripping viewing.

He was grateful for what the Tour win gave him. “Cycling gave me another perspective. I wasn't great at school. I was an unruly restless child, but introverted too. Cycling allowed me to meet new people and discover the world.”

Generation EPO

TDF 1991: 259km to Le Havre | Thierry Marie

Along with hundreds of others, I’m riding slowly up the Col d'Iseran, high above Val d'Isere in the Tarentaise valley. The gradients are interminable and relentless and my morale is low.

The Iseran climbs to 2,764 metres and as I pedal leadenly into the final kilometres, increasing numbers of vehicles from the 1992 Tour de France convoy speed past, tooting and hooting, as they race towards the finish of stage 13 in Sestrieres.

Behind me, Claudio Chiappucci is on the rampage, wreaking havoc on the Col de Saisies, shattering the peloton in preparation for an all-out assault on the long climb of the Iseran.

Eventually, the police motorbikes firmly direct us all to stop and wait at the side of the road. I unclip, wrap my cape around my shoulders and eat a banana.

The vast mountainside becomes a still, calm arena, brimming with expectation. Now there are no more cars, just photographers, biding their time, looking back down the road, crawling past on motorbikes. Far below, TV helicopters hover over the small, distant figure speeding up the winding road.

Finally, the helmetless, grimacing Chiappucci appears, his black hair drenched in sweat, plastered to his forehead. He climbs powerfully past us, rocking in the saddle and gripping the handlebars tight.

Then he is gone, on through the mountains and across the Italian border, to Sestriere.

Cast in the role of the chippy upstart, the Italian was fighting to establish himself as a real threat to Miguel Indurain, two years after Greg LeMond had dismissed him, deliberately, as 'cappuccino’, before despatching his challenge in the final time-trial of the 1990 Tour, at Lac de Vassiviere.

Chiappucci didn’t forget the American’s slights. By 1992, he was enjoying dishing out the pain to a fading LeMond, who was in the twilight of his career.

At the time, Chiappucci’s ride drew comparisons with Fausto ’s win in Sestriere in 1952. The Italian’s breakaway, initiated after 28 kilometres, lasted over seven hours, and, in a stage 6,500 metres of climbing, took in five notorious cols.

Nobody had really expected this kind of performance from Chiappucci, who had long been seen as little more than a gregario, to the better-known talents riding alongside him.

Years later, LeMond remained sceptical of the Italian's prowess.

“I’d raced with Chiappucci since 1986,” he said. “He was a domestique. I’m sorry, he was not that good a rider. I'd won the Tour three times. I was the last rider in that stage (to Sestriere). I was an hour behind him.”

LeMond's scepticism was understandable. Chiappucci's performance in the 1989 Tour de France was largely anonymous and while he climbed well, nothing had ever suggested that he was capable of completing such a raid on such infamous climbs.

But even after the spectacle at Sestriere, his window of celebrity was short-lived. He was eclipsed by a younger teammate, the more charismatic and spectacular Marco Pantani. Chiappucci was soon overshadowed as Pantani became the darling of the tifosi.

Yet I won’t ever forget witnessing his speed on the Iseran. Later that afternoon, I descended the climb, stopping at a packed bar in Val d'Isere in time to see the final few moments of the stage and an exultant and exhausted Chiappucci raise his arms in triumph.

Of course, we didn't know then what we know now. It was an epic and moving victory, but one that needs to be set into the context of its time. The Italian subsequently told the late Richard Moore that he'd won the stage to Sestriere through “passion, stubbornness, suffering, and willpower”.

Not everybody believed him.

Sunset for El Rey

TDF 1996: 262km to Pamplona | Miguel Indurain

Miguel Indurain was never a diva. Winning five Tours de France, between 1991 and 1995, may have made him wealthy and a household name in his native Spain, but it didn't change his down-to-earth nature.

That may have been why his pragmatic reaction to being hauled on stage in Pamplona in front of a home crowd, after losing all hope of a record-breaking sixth Tour de France in one of the hardest stages in the race’s history, was a wan smile and a half-hearted wave.

The 1996 Tour’s mountain stage through the Pyrenees to the capital of the Navarra province in northern Spain had been planned as a celebration of Indurain’s achievements. Instead, it served to emphasise his dramatic decline, as Bjarne Riis executed a decisive but cruel coup de grâce to his career.

The day before, after winning at Hautacam and distancing the five time Tour winner, Riis uttered the unthinkable. “I felt sorry for Indurain”, the Dane said.

Meanwhile, Indurain was forced to confront his own decline. “I knew that this day would come, but I did not think it would be today”, he said.

After he retired from racing, the French journalist Pierre Carrey remembers Indurain coming along to a film screening, as a VIP guest. Once the crowd had dissipated into the evening air, the unassuming Spaniard helped to tidy up and stack chairs.

His press conferences were often bland and unremarkable. He was a polite well-brought up and modest man, who looked a little lost in the glare of the media. He was, in truth, a little dull. “I am not a dreamer,” he once said. Until the July of 1996, Indurain had also been seen as unbreakable, dominant in time-trials and stifling in the mountains. Most of the time, his rivals wilted in acceptance, opting instead to pursue stage wins and other classifications.

The 262 kilometre 17th stage of that summer’s Tour de France, included 6,000 metres of climbing, and broke many riders. Indurain, already damaged in the Alps at Les Arcs, then more seriously wounded by a wide-eyed Bjarne Riis at Hautacam, was one of them.

The nail in the coffin of Indurain’s career came on that monstrous stage to Pamplona. It was a humiliation from which he never really recovered. Within weeks, after he'd quit the 1996 Vuelta, mid-race, retirement was inevitable.

The stage from Argeles-Gazost to Pamplona was raced in oppressive heat and took in the climbs of Soulor, Aubisque, Marie-Blanque, Soudet and Larrau. There were still over 60 kilometres to race to the finish, through the airless arid valley roads, even after the final third category climb.

Chris Boardman, still at that point harbouring some notions of Tour de France contention, described the stage as “the worst eight hours, 30 minutes of my sporting life”.

“I couldn’t stay with the peloton after just five kilometres, with 260 kilometres and seven mountain passes to go, but,” he added, “I still managed to get inside the time limit”.

Indurain later remembered that he’d already suffered enough through the Pyrenees. “I wanted to do well in the stage to Pamplona, because we were coming home and I was looking forward to it”, but by the time he reached the climb of the Larrau, he said, he had “no chance of anything”.

At the finish, Riis tried to make amends, holding the deposed champion’s arm aloft, smiling broadly and handing him a bouquet. Indurain looked embarrassed, tossed the flowers into the crowd and quickly left the stage.

Indurain deserved a more dignified ending to his career than he got. His painful ride to Pamplona will be remembered more for his personal calvary than for the triumphant homecoming that he’d hoped for.

Riis, of course, was subsequently discredited after belatedly confessing to doping, a fate he shared with most of his peers. In many ways, Indurain had got off the stage at exactly the right time.