Bjarne Riis

Danish cyclist who won the 1996 Tour de France, ending Miguel Indurain's five-year winning streak, and who in 2007 became the first Tour winner to publicly admit doping during his title-winning race.

Born on 3 April 1964 in Herning, Denmark, Bjarne Riis turned professional and built a strong reputation in stage races through the early 1990s. His career peak came at the 1996 Tour de France, where he won the general classification, ending Miguel Indurain's run of five consecutive Tour victories and becoming the only Dane to win the race. Riis also won the Amstel Gold Race in 1997 and multiple Danish national road race titles, along with individual stage wins at the Tour de France and Giro d'Italia over his career. After retiring in 2000, he moved into team management, founding and leading Team CSC, which competed under several successive sponsor names — Saxo Bank, Saxo Bank–SunGard, and later Tinkoff-Saxo — and became one of the sport's dominant teams through the 2000s and early 2010s. On 25 May 2007, Riis became the first Tour de France winner to publicly admit to doping during his victorious race, confirming he had used EPO, cortisone and human growth hormone from 1993 to 1998, including during his 1996 title. The Tour's organisers initially removed him from the official list of winners, though his result was reinstated in 2008 with a footnote acknowledging the doping confession, after the World Anti-Doping Agency's statute of limitations had expired. Riis was dismissed from Tinkoff-Saxo in 2015 following a dispute with owner Oleg Tinkov, and was later implicated in a broader Danish anti-doping investigation into his management practices. Speaking at a cycling conference in 2025, Riis said he was not ashamed of his doping past, describing it as part of a system that was widely tolerated at the time.

Strong, consistent stage racer with excellent time-trialing ability

A hugely successful team manager whose riding legacy remains defined by his 2007 doping admission