Laurent Jalabert

Laurent Jalabert
	Laurent Jalabert
To person
Date of birth	November 30, 1968
nation	France
discipline	Street
Team (s)
1989-1991 ; 1992-2000 ; 2001-2002	Toshiba ; Once ; CSC
Most important successes
	Tour de France; Scoring: 1992, 1995; Mountainscoring:2001, 2002; Most competitive rider: 2001, 2002; Stage wins: 1992, 1995, 2001 (2 stages); Vuelta a España; Overall winner: 1995; Scoring: 1994, 1996, 1997; Mountainscoring: 1995; Stages:; 1994 ( 7 stages), 1995 (5), 1996 (2), 1997 (2); Giro d'Italia; Scoring: 1999; Stages: 1999 (3 stages); World Championships Vice World Champion Professional Road Race World Time Trial Champion 1997 Road; ; 0
	Last updated: July 17, 2010

Laurent Jalabert, Arrival of the Tour d'Alsace (Tour of Alsace) at the Ballon d'Alsace , 2005

Laurent Jalabert (born November 30, 1968 in Mazamet , Département Tarn ) is a former French cyclist and one of the most successful professional cyclists of the 1990s.

Athletic career

Jalabert, known as "Jaja" by his French fans, was first of all successful as a sprinter and won the green jersey twice at the Tour de France (1992 and 1995).

From the second half of the 1990s, Jalabert was one of the most versatile riders in cycling . Between 1995 and 2000 he was number 1 in the UCI world rankings with brief interruptions . He was particularly successful as a classic hunter and on shorter tours . In 1995, after five stage wins, he also won the overall ranking of the difficult Vuelta a España . In the same year, on the French national holiday, the climb on the Côte de la Croix-Neuve was on the Tour de France program for the first time . Jalabert attacked from a leading group and reached the destination Mende as the winner . Ten years later, the mountain was nicknamed Montée Laurent Jalabert in honor of the French. During the 1995 tour, Jalabert wore the yellow jersey for two days, and in other years he also led the overall standings at times, but at the end of the tour never came out of fourth place. In 1997 he won the individual time trial of the road cycling world championships .

Towards the end of his career, the French racer changed the CSC team of Bjarne Riis his tactics and won in the Tour de France twice the jersey of the best mountain rider (2001, 2002). Besides him, only Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault were able to win both the green jersey of the sprinters and the dotted jersey of the mountain drivers on this tour. Laurent Jalabert achieved a total of four stage wins in the most important stage race in the world (1992, 1995, 2 × 2001).

Laurent Jalabert retired from cycling after the 2002 season and devoted himself to the marathon (2:55 hours in the New York City Marathon 2005) and the triathlon , where he started in 2010 in Ironman 70.3 competitions over half the Ironman distance (1.9 km swimming, 90 km cycling and 21.1 km running). He started twice at the Ironman World Championship 70.3 and at the long-distance Ironman World Championship in Hawaii.

National coach

From 2008 to 2013 Jalabert worked as the French national coach. In an accident in March 2013, Jalabert crashed into a car on his bicycle near Montauban and suffered several broken bones. A few weeks after his accident, he resigned as national coach. The reason he gave was a lack of support from the French association.

Doping allegations

At the end of June 2013, the French daily sports newspaper L'Équipe reported that EPO had been detected in a follow-up test carried out on a doping sample of Jalabert at the 1998 Tour de France . Jalabert, who allegedly denied under oath to the anti-doping commission of the French Senate on March 14, 2013 , that he had committed illegal acts during his career as a professional cyclist, but indicated that he might have been unknowingly doped, made a statement after it became known of the report that he did not know whether it was true.