Tour convenes former riders for 100th edition

PARIS (AP) From last-place finishers to great champions of yesteryear, the Tour de France hosted hundreds of former riders to celebrate the 100th edition of cycling's greatest race.

As the three-week race ended on Sunday, Tour veterans young and old all the way to 91-year-old Andre Brule converged on the Champs-Elysees for festivities including a glitzy video show and a tightly-coordinated air display by French military stunt pilots as the pack reached the famed Paris avenue.

Race organizers pored over their archives and identified roughly 1,480 former riders who are still alive and completed at least one Tour, and invited them to join the celebrations, said Pierre-Yves Thouault, the assistant director for cycling at Tour organizer ASO.

Of those, around 390 former racers mostly French were expected, including five-time winners Bernard Hinault of France, Miguel Indurain of Spain and Eddy Merckx of Belgium, as well as three-time champion Greg LeMond of the United States, Thouault said.

"Whether they were famous or anonymous, whether they wore the yellow jersey, won a stage or worked in the shadows of their leader, they won the Tour de France or finished last ... all of the riders who finished the Grande Boucle participated, in their way, in writing the great book of the Tour de France," a Tour statement said.

But it's been no easy task: The sport has been riddled with doping scandals in the past, and many of its top-name competitors and champions over the last decade have been shunned and stripped of their honors including Americans Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis, who lost their Tour titles for cheating.

Thouault said "no personal invitation" was sent to Armstrong. For the foreign invitees, Tour organizers deferred to national cycling federations and didn't issue invitations individually.

Armstrong was certainly not welcome.

"We're not going to go chasing after Landis and Armstrong," said former Tour director Jean-Marie Leblanc, who helped to arrange the reunion. "(Armstrong) is not in the record books (any more), end of story. We want to show the value of the riders who wrote the history of the tour in a positive way."

A glitzy, graphics-rich "video-mapping" show also accompanied the nighttime awards ceremony this year and, in finely scripted coordination, French military stunt pilots from the Patrouille de France or Patrol of France flew overhead in sync with the riders as they arrived on the Champs-Elysees for a series of laps before the finish.