Joël Pelier
road bicycle racer

Joël Pelier (born 23 March 1962, in Valentigney) is a French former professional road bicycle racer.
After the final climb of stage 17 in the 1986 Tour de France, Pelier collapsed from exhaustion and fell into a 7-hour coma.
In the 1989 Tour de France, then 27-year-old domestique had never been watched in his pro career by his parents who were dedicated to caring for Pelier's severely disabled sibling who needed constant attention. His parents made arrangements to watch stage 6 from near the finish line to which he responded with an attempted lone breakaway, and held out to win the stage by 1 minute and 34 seconds. He rode on his own for 4 and a 1/2 hours through wind and rain for 102 of the stage's 161 miles. It was the then second longest breakaway in Tour de France history after Albert Bourlon in 1947 and since surpassed by Thierry Marie. On the podium for the day's presentations a tear drenched Pelier was seen on television saying, "Mon per, mon per". and "This win is so special to me because today is the first time that my mother and father have seen me in the Tour de France".
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Joël Pelier” is road bicycle racer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Joël, Pelier and road, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 29, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q958472. VIAF identifies the subject as 1691153532453848820009. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1962, 1986, 1989 and 1947.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joël Pelier” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.