Steve Bauer and the last time a Canadian led the Tour de France

07/16/20 • 15 min

This year marks three big anniversaries for Steve Bauer. The Canadian Cycling Magazine Podcast has covered his oh-so-close second-place finish in the 1990 Paris-Roubaix and the 1980 Olympic boycott that affected him and other Canadian athletes. Thirty years ago this summer, Bauer got into the leader's jersey at the Tour de France, just like he had in 1988. It's a feat that we haven’t seen since. Also, he did it in a way that you just can't duplicate anymore.

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Previous Episode

Talking bubbles and the sourdough revolution with Leah Kirchmann

Leah Kirchmann, Team Sunweb athlete and this country’s time trial champion, is expecting to start racing once again in August. Still, she’s not sure what exactly the UCI safety protocols—with their team bubbles and peloton bubbles—will mean for her events. Also, with international travel now more difficult, she might be faced with some tough choices. Will she be able to race the inaugural women’s Paris-Roubaix, if it happens, or will she make a return to the Tour of Chongming Island? Can she defend her national time trial title and attend the Giro Rosa, too?

The rider, who has studied public health and nutrition and is a passionate cook, also talked sourdough and salmon. Check out her popular banana oat pancakes as well as the recipes she’s developed for her team’s Food Friday.

Please rate and review the Canadian Cycling Magazine Podcast wherever you get your episodes.

Next Episode

The last time there were no Olympics [rebroadcast]

This episode is a rebroadcast of our look at the 1980 Olympic boycott. It happened 40 years ago, but contains some lessons for what athletes are facing today. On this day, BMX competition was originally scheduled to begin in Tokyo. But in March, as rising COVID-19 cases sent nations scrambling, the Canadian Olympic Committee and the Canadian Paralympic Committee announced that Canadians would not go to the 2020 Games. Two days later, the IOC said it would postpone the 2020 Olympics for a year.

Recently, as we passed the one-year-to-go-until-the-rescheduled-Olympics date, talk of cancelling the 2021 Games started up. On July 22, the president of the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee Yoshiro Mori said to Japanese media that if the pandemic continued has it had been so far, the Games could not go ahead in 2021. A few days before that, the Kyodo news agency released the results of a poll that showed that only 23.9 per cent of the people surveyed throughout Japan thought the Olympics should be held. A segment as large as 36.4 per cent thought the Games should be postponed again. From the survey, 33.7 per cent said the Games should be cancelled.

With the threat of Olympic cancellation creeping in once again, let’s listen to track cyclists Gordon Singleton and Steve Bauer, and road cyclist Louis Garneau as they discuss the time, 40 years ago, that the Olympics didn’t happen for Canadian athletes.