1971 Tour de France

The 1971 Tour de France was the 58th edition, a 3,608 km race of 22 stages, three of them split, from Mulhouse on 26 June to the Vélodrome de Vincennes in Paris on 18 July, with three time trials and two rest days. Eddy Merckx defended his title to win a third Tour in a row; Joop Zoetemelk was second at 9 min 51 s and Lucien Van Impe third, just over eleven minutes down. New anti-doping rules from the UCI shortened the stages, capped the race at twenty stages and made rest days compulsory, so it was 646 km shorter than the previous year and the shortest Tour since 1905. Merckx took the first yellow jersey when his team won the prologue team time trial, lent it briefly to teammate Rini Wagtmans on the first day, and a sixteen-man breakaway of favourites on stage 2 sorted out the overall contenders.