DEFINING DANISH MOMENTS

As Denmark hosts the Tour de France Grand Départ this weekend, Richard Abraham counts down the Scandinavian nation's most memorable to Tour lore contributions

- Richard Abraham

For many people, Denmark in the Tour de France looks like one thing: an image of an emaciated balding man throwing his spindly arms in the air as if a malnourished accountant has won a competition to be the yellow jersey for a day. That disturbing dreamscape was a nightmare for cycling in the darkest days of the sport, but there's much more to Denmark's history in the Tour than Bjarne Riis and his mid-Nineties experimentations in pharmacological excess.

1 Denmark’s first Tour man

It began in 1913 when a Dane living in Cherbourg named Christian Christensen became the first from his country to line up at the Tour, then marking its 11th edition. This was the year that the Tour reverted back to awarding victory to the rider with the lowest cumulative time, as opposed to a points-based classification that had been in place since 1905. Christensen was a ‘touriste-routier’, a class of competitors that raced without sponsorship or team support. That meant he was solely responsible for his race, from equipment and clothing to lodgings and food. This is the Tour when Eugène Christophe was disqualified for receiving assistance while mending his forks at a Pyrenean smithy, so Christensen’s best stage result of 25th on stage 12 from Geneva to Belfort (a mere 335km) is more of an achievement than it first appears, even if he did finish that stage four hours behind the winner. Unfortunately for the Danish trailblazer, he failed to finish the following stage to Longwy, ending up a DNF just two stages from Paris.

2 The first finisher