Alberto Contador – 2009 Comeback Victory

Lore & Background

The road to the 2009 Tour was paved with controversy. Contador's clenbuterol positive, detected at the 2007 Vuelta, initially drew a two-year ban that was later reduced to eighteen months on appeal. He sat out the 2008 season's biggest races, and when he returned to competition in late 2008, the cycling world was split: some saw a rider who had been caught red-handed, others pointed to the plausibility of a contaminated steak in a Spanish hotel kitchen. By the time the 2009 Tour rolled out of Mende, the question hanging over every mountain stage was no longer whether Contador could climb, but whether the peloton and the public would let him.

He answered in the only way he knew how. Across the three-week campaign, Contador attacked with a ferocity that made rivals look like they were pedalling through water. His time-trial form, usually a relative weakness, held up well enough that he never lost ground in the flat stages, while his climbing attacks in the Alps and Pyrenees stretched the field to breaking point. Andy Schleck, the young Luxembourgish prodigy, was the most consistent challenger, but even he could not match Contador's repeated surges on the decisive gradients. Frank Schleck, his older brother, finished third, and the image of the two Schleck brothers flanking the Spaniard on the Parisian podium became one of the Tour's most memorable tableaux.

The victory cemented Contador's place in the pantheon alongside Anquetil, Merckx, and Indurain as a rider who had conquered all three Grand Tours. Yet for many fans and rivals, the 2009 yellow jersey carried a permanent asterisk. Whether one viewed it as a hard-won redemption or a tainted triumph depended less on the cycling and more on the ethics one applied to the sport. What was undeniable was the sheer quality of the performance: 21 stages, countless kilometres of suffering, and a rider who refused to let a suspension define his legacy.

In Their Own Story

The air on the final climb tasted of iron and diesel. Contador's Astana jersey was soaked through, the yellow already pinned to his shoulders since a stage earlier, and he could feel the peloton's breathing behind him like a single lung. Andy Schleck was there, always there, a half-wheel ahead or a half-wheel behind, but Contador's legs found another gear that shouldn't have existed. The road crested, the gradient inverted, and for a moment the whole race hung in the silence between two riders who had given everything they had. Below, the crowd noise swelled like a tide. Contador dropped his head, hands to his hips, and let the yellow jersey catch the wind. He had not just won a stage. He had won the argument.

Reader's Guide

The General Classification (GC) is the Tour's heartbeat: every rider's stage times are added together, and the lowest cumulative time wears the yellow jersey. In 2009, Contador's margin of over a minute over Andy Schleck was modest in the grand scheme of Tour history but enormous in context, because it was built stage by stage against a field that included the strongest climbers of the decade. Winning the GC means you were the best all-rounder for three weeks, not just the fastest on one day.

The Mountains Classification, signalled by the polka-dot jersey, rewards riders who cross the highest categorized climbs first. Points are awarded by order of arrival at the summit, with steeper categories yielding more. Contador's polka-dot win in 2009 was a natural byproduct of his GC strategy: he was the first over the top on so many decisive climbs that no one could close the gap. The category has evolved since its introduction in 1975, with the current five-category system (HC through 4th) refined over the decades to reward genuine summit attacks rather than long, shallow rollers. Riders like Eddy Merckx and, in Contador's era, the Schleck brothers and Andy's brother Frank, have redefined what it means to dominate the mountains while simultaneously fighting for the yellow.

Did You Know?

• Both Andy and Frank Schleck finished on the 2009 podium, making it one of the rare occasions where brothers shared a Tour top-three.
• Contador's 2009 victory completed his set of all three Grand Tours (Tour, Giro, Vuelta), a feat shared by only a handful of riders in history.
• The 2009 Tour began in the south of France, with the opening stages running through the Languedoc and onto the slopes of Mont Ventoux.
• Contador won both the yellow and the polka-dot jerseys in 2009, a combination that highlighted how his GC advantage was built almost entirely on climbing dominance.