Alive per year

From the first Tour de France in 1903, no participant is still alive. From the most recent Tour de France, every participant is still alive. Below is an overview of how many riders are alive from the Grand Tours in between.

Some riders have faded into obscurity. This could mean that after their professional career, they retired to become a farmer out of sight of the public, or they could have also died 60 years ago. In this overview, such riders are counted as alive. Only when a rider is 110 years or older, and does not show up on lists of supercentenarians, I consider them no longer alive, or if I can find a list of oldest living man from their country, and they are not on this list while they would have been old enough to be on it. For riders without a known birth data, I assume that in the first professional race that I can find, they were at least 17 years old. Now (in 2025), this means that everybody who is not yet 110 years old, was born in 1915 or later, so they could not ride a professional race before 1932. Everybody who rode a professional race before 1932, I consider to be no longer living. (For riders from countries wherer the oldest living men is younger than 110 years, the calculation is of course adjusted to account for this.)

Graphical overview

The list below is generated from my database. My database is not complete, so I know that this overview is also not complete. There can be riders that are no longer alive, but for which I have not changed their status yet.

A rough analysis shows that the percentages agree reasonably well with a cumulative distribution function of the normal distribution with average 60 years ago, and standard deviation 15 years. This would mean that after a Tour de France participations, riders on average 60 more years, plus or minus 15 years. This seems reasonable.

Giro d'Italia

Because the information of Giro participants is a little bit more difficult to find than for Tour participants, percentages are slightly higher than for the Tour de France.

Vuelta a España

My database also has all participants of the Vuelta, see their statistics below. The Vueltas up until 1950 figured a lot of obscure Spanish/Portuguese riders, for which not much information is available, so the percentage of riders alive in that time is clearly overestimated.

Graphical overview

And below, all information is summarized in a graph. The x-axis are the years, and the y-axis shows the percentage of participants that are still alive. The Tour data is shown in yellow, the Giro in purple and the Vuelta in red. The outcome is a curve with an S-shape, except for the early editions of the Vuelta.

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Grand Tours

Tour Giro Vuelta

• General

  • Double
  • Did not defend title
  • Jersey in every race
  • Straightness
  • Win then drop out
  • Doping per year
  • Disqualifications
  • Left as leader
  • Nationalities
  • Table of nationalities
  • Half stages
  • Drop-outs
  • Stage type wins

• Statistics

  • Stage lengths
  • Jersey ratios
  • No finishers
  • All finishing
  • Three jerseys
  • Slowest finisher
  • Grand slam
  • Fake grand slam

• TGV

  • TourGiroVuelta
  • Nine jerseys
  • Three GTs
  • Best renner

• Incompleteness

  • Final standings
  • Incomplete mountains
  • Incomplete sprints
  • Rider not in db
  • No birthdate
  • No deathdate
  • Number check

• Ages

  • Alive per year
  • Best living
  • Result per age
  • Table of ages
  • Oldest per country
  • Lifespans