Oscar Freire: The rise of a legend at the 1999 World Championships

1999 had its highs and lows. For every No Scrubs by TLC there was a Mambo Number 5 or virtually anything from the Backstreet Boys’ back catalogue. Bluetooth came about, we all played Snake on our Nokia 3210s, and a Texan shocked the world by winning the Tour de France. Whatever happened to him?

But when it came to professional cycling, maybe the best thing about the sport was just how inaccessible it was. If you wanted to keep up with European racing, your options were either the four lines of text posted on Ceefax, loading up Cyclingnews on your parents’ dodgy modem, or waiting a week for your favourite cycling magazine to hit the shelves.

However you managed to follow cycling back then, the fact that you had work for it only added to the romance. And the final UCI World Championships of the 1990s were arguably the most romantic and beautiful of the entire decade. The setting was perfect, the line-up stellar, even the race-winning break was filled with a mouthwatering array of talent. And, to top it all, we had a shock winner.

This is the story of Oscar Friere’s 1999 Worlds win and how a complete unknown stormed to victory in one of the biggest upsets the sport had ever seen.

Join us as we re-tell the race on its 20th anniversary, and head to meet with Friere at his home in Northern Spain.

This issue of the Cyclingnews podcast was brought to you by Sportful, Pinarello, Floyds of Leadville, and Wattbike.

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A special thanks to everyone who was interviewed: Oscar Freire, Hugo Coorevits, Servais Knaven, Rolf Aldag, Scott Moninger, Sven Montgomery, Dirk Demol and Dimitri Konyshev.

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