The alternative Grand Tour hat-trick

Winning a stage of all three Grand Tours is quite a good achievement isn’t it? The three biggest, hardest stage races in men’s cycling. To have crossed the line first as the best rider on the day in each one is what careers are made of.

111 careers to be exact. That’s how many riders have managed this career hat-trick. Five riders joined the club this year - Ben O’Connor, Richard Carapaz, Remco Evenepoel, Julian Alaphilippe and Tadej Pogačar. Five is the most amount of riders to have done this in the same year since it became a thing when Fiorenzo Magni first completed this treble at the 1955 Vuelta a España.

It’s becoming more and more of a thing each year. The rate at which this achievement is being completed is increasing. It must have been encouraged by the ProTour/WorldTour which began in 2005, which meant that the same 18 teams (and therefore a lot of the same riders) actually race the three Grand Tours every year. To illustrate this with a counter-example of what life was like before the ProTour, Sean Kelly is not on this list. He only rode the Giro once at the end of his career. The main reason why he never rode the Giro during the height of his career is that his team didn’t bother entering - Skil weren’t at it in 1984 and Kas didn’t bother for each of the three years Kelly was there from 1986 to 1988, that team only cared about Spanish races. This kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore.

It’s not only that. Daniel Friebe on a recent episode of The Cycling Podcast reckoned that riders are actually targeting this specific hat-trick more and more, and declaring their intention to complete it during their career. It has become something specific to aim for, not just a byproduct of a palmarés after the fact.

But we’re not here to celebrate the winners, not this time. We’re here to celebrate the losers. The nearly men.

There might be 111 riders who’ve bagged a stage of the Giro, Tour and Vuelta, but there is a more elite list of riders who have managed the dubious honour of finishing second on a stage in all three Grand Tours and have never won a stage in any of them.

“Only four?!” I can hear you cry… “how can it be only four?!”

Well this new list I’ve invented is harder to get on because while you might be someone like Peter Sagan or Erik Zabel or Raymond Poulidor and you might finish in second place an awful lot, but as soon as you win a stage, you’re cut, you’re off my list. Riders who finish second a lot also tend to win every now and again. So to get on this list you’ve really had to have been involved in a curious set of circumstances.

The most recent rider to do it and the only one still riding as a professional is…

Jonathan Castroviejo

#	Year	Grand Tour	Stage	Stage winner
1	2016	Vuelta	19 (ITT)	Chris Froome
2	2020	Giro	9	Ruben Guerreiro
3	2022	Tour	9	Bob Jungels

Now a stalwart at Team Ineos, next year will be Castroviejo’s eighth on that team. He turns 38 next year and besides old man Thomas, there is nobody older there now. His close calls at Grand Tours date back to his time at Movistar when he was beaten in a time trial by Chris Froome at the 2016 Vuelta. This is the only time trial stage that any of these riders finished second in and I think a time trial takes the edge off the heartbreak a little bit. You never see the winner actually winning in front of you. Castroviejo most likely watched Froome winning on a little telly while he was sitting on a make-shift throne of some kind. He probably never thought he was going to win that stage as Froome was the penultimate rider off the start-ramp.

I certainly remember the day that Castroviejo completed the hat-trick because this was the same day as the Étape du Tour in 2022. While I was close to dehydration failure travelling at 1 kilometre per hour on the Col de la Croix de Fer, Jungels was about 200km north east barreling down the Col de la Croix at, literally, 100 times my speed. He won masterfully from the breakaway that day with Castroviejo crossing the line just 22 seconds behind him. Incidentally, the instigator of the day’s breakaway was Matteo Cattaneo who only just misses out on making this list as he finished 2nd, 2nd and 3rd on Giro, Tour and Vuelta stages respectfully. Sorry Matteo, you’re cut. The next on the list is…

Darwin Atapuma

#	Year	Grand Tour	Stage	Stage winner
1	2016	Giro	20	Rein Taaramäe
2	2016	Vuelta	4	Lilian Calmejane
3	2016	Vuelta	20	Pierre Latour
4	2017	Tour	18	Warren Barguil

Atapuma went one better than Castroviejo and managed two second places at the Vuelta to make it four in total across the three Grand Tours. The Colombian packed his runners-ups into quite a short space of time. He was done and dusted in just over a year. A bit like his professional career in general. He’s in my head as someone who was around for quite a while but he was actually only part of the World Tour for five years, three years at BMC and two years at UAE. He continued his career in the continental ranks and only retired in 2023.

Again, for me, it’s the Tour de France stage which sticks in my memory most here. The stage was won by Warren Barguil atop the Col d’Izoard. He was wearing the polka-dot jersey so it led to a fantastic finish line photo. This was Alberto Contador’s final Tour de France mountain stage and for a while it looked like he might actually do it. He attacked with Barguil and the pair were away together. Eventually Contador cracked and Barguil forged ahead alone. Contador would get swallowed up by various riders including Atapuma, but he would eventually get his fairy tale ending on the Angliru a couple of months later at the Vuelta. Contador ended his Tour career eight years after he last officially won the Tour in 2009. During those eight years he didn’t finish on the podium, wear the yellow jersey or win a stage.

Julian Dean

#	Year	Grand Tour	Stage	Stage winner
1	1999	Vuelta	21	Jeroen Blijlevens
2	2010	Giro	18	Andre Greipel
3	2010	Tour	4	Alessandro Petacchi
4	2010	Tour	18	Mark Cavendish

I like neat statistics. And I particularly like what Julian Dean has done here because on all four occasions that he finished second at a Grand Tour he managed to finish behind a rider who is on that original list of 111 riders who have won a stage of all three. Shite for Dean, must be galling, but great for stat nerds. Petacchi is one of only three riders who have managed to win a stage of all three in a single year, something he did in 2003. I also like the fact that there was eleven years between Dean’s first entry at the Vuelta in 1999 and the rest of his efforts in 2010.

If you go back and look at the footage of his defeat to Cavendish on Stage 18 of the 2010 Tour you might be struck, as I was, by the lack of help that Cavendish had during the final couple of kilometres that day. He was rather on his own ‘surfing’ the wheels - not really what we had come to expect from that Columbia HTC team. The reason for this, in large part, is because Cavendish’s supreme leadout man Mark Renshaw had been kicked out of the race the week before for headbutting… yes, you guessed it, Julian Dean. I remember thinking at the time that if your leadout man is smashing your rivals out of the way with his head then it doesn’t seem like the right thing to only punish the leadout man. Cavendish won that stage as well and benefitted from Renshaw’s actions but was allowed to keep the stage victory, his 13th Tour stage - perhaps I should remind Eddy Merckx about it and he can get grumpy about it to the cycling media.

Harm Ottenbros

#	Year	Grand Tour	Stage	Stage winner
1	1967	Giro	13	Georges Vandenberghe
2	1967	Giro	15	Michele Dancelli
3	1969	Vuelta	14a	Raymond Steegmans
4	1969	Tour	18	Barry Hoban
5	1969	Tour	21	Herman van Springel

I’m grateful that Ottenbros did this back in the 60s because it shows that I didn’t just get bored and stop checking when I got as far back as Julian Dean. It is peculiar that the first three riders’ careers all overlapped slightly (in 2012) and nobody else has done this besides one guy nearly 60 years ago. This, I believe, is an illustration of one of my original points that teams and riders riding all three Grand Tours in their careers is still a (relatively) recent thing. There is an excellent analysis and breakdown of this by a kindred cycling nerd spirit Simon Crisp on his website Sicycle, published only a few days ago.

Stage 18 of the 1969 Tour de France, Ottenbros was beaten by Barry Hoban. All of this is quaint now given what Cavendish has done since, but at the time, that was Hoban setting a British record of three Tour de France stage wins beating the previous record of two jointly held by himself, Michael Wright and Brian Robinson. Hoban would extend this record the following day and bring it up to eight stage wins before he retired. That remained the record until Cavendish surpassed it in 2009.

On paper perhaps we shouldn’t feel too sorry for Ottenbros because although he completed his hat-trick at the Tour in 1969, just three weeks later Ottenbros would be pulling on the Rainbow Jersey as World Road Race Champion. The reality though was quite different, for Ottenbros was most certainly a victim of the curse of the rainbow jersey in a unique way. Ottenbros was the beneficiary of a catastrophic stalemate among all of the pre-race favourites particularly among the Belgian team which included Eddy Merckx, Rik van Looy and Roger de Vlaeminck. They all didn’t want each other to win and they all got their way.

I don’t think Ottenbros got a mention in the film about the curse that we made for GCN+, he must have been left on the cutting room floor but he was perhaps the most tangibly and directly affected rider by the curse. The sport ganged up on him. Everyone tagged him as a ‘nobody’, unworthy to wear the rainbow jersey. As a result he was cast out, uninvited to the usual events and races that a world champion could reasonably expect and therefore unable to capitalise financially on his achievement. He did win one race as world champion, a stage of the Tour of Luxembourg but after that, aged just 26, he never won again.

In one of those quotes from Wikipedia which you can never be sure are accurate, he said “If I could live my life all over again, I'd miss out the cycling bit”