When Donald Trump got into cycling: "The Tour de Trump will soon be as important as the Tour de France"

Donald Trump, the eccentric American tycoon who has just been proclaimed president of the United States for the second time, starred in 1989 in a failed attempt to overshadow the most important cycling race in the world, the Tour de France. The Tour de Trump, as the competition was called, was born out of the American's passion for cycling, which he may have inherited from his European roots - son of a Scottish mother and grandson of Germans.

Tour de Trump: an ambitious birth

One thing that cannot be doubted is that Donald is an ambitious and confident man in his abilities. If at the beginning of the race to become the Republican Party candidate in the American elections many took him for a buffoon, and he persisted in the idea, when he created the Tour de Trump he showed the same faith. "I put my name because I believe that the Tour de Trump will soon be as important as the Tour de France" - the tycoon affirmed in 1989.

The race, which consisted of 10 stages and 1,347 kilometers that started in New Albany, had an extraordinary economic reward for the winner ($250,000), only surpassed at that time by the one obtained by the final winner of the mythical yellow jersey.

Short life for the Tour de Trump

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The Tour de Trump never came close to its founding objectives, only surviving two seasons - in which Otto Lauritzen and Raúl Alcalá prevailed - and, yes, it had the participation of great cycling figures like Greg LeMond.

One of the failed ventures in Donald Trump's life was to overshadow the Tour de France, and in 1991 it disappeared as such after Trump declared bankruptcy. But the race organizers managed to continue it with the investment of the magnate John du Pont, and that's when The Tour DuPont began, lasting until 1996, when DuPont murdered Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz and was subsequently imprisoned.