frontiers, and the Tour increasingly zig-zagged across the country, sometimes with unconnected days' races linked by train, while still maintaining some sort of loop. The Tour returned to national teams for 1967 and 1968 as "an experiment". The Tour returned to trade teams in 1969 with a suggestion that national teams could come back every few years, but this has not happened since. 1969–1987 In the early 1970s, the race was dominated by Eddy Merckx, who won the General Classification five times, the Mountains Classification twice, the Points Classification three times, and posted a record of 34 stage victories. (This record was tied in 2021 by Mark Cavendish) Merckx's dominating style earned him the nickname "The Cannibal". In 1969, he already had a commanding lead when he launched a long-distance solo attack in the mountains which none of the other elite riders could answer, resulting in an eventual winning margin of nearly eighteen minutes. In 1973 he did not win because he did not enter the Tour and his winning streak only truly came to an end when he finished 2nd to Bernard Thévenet in 1975. During this era, race director Felix Lévitan began to recruit additional sponsors, sometimes accepting prizes in kind if he could not get cash. In 1975, the polka-dot jersey was introduced for the winner of the Mountains Classification. This same year Levitan also introduced the finish of the Tour at the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Since then, this stage has been largely ceremonial and is generally only contested as a prestigious sprinters' stage. (See 'Notable Stages' below for examples of non-ceremonial finishes to this stage.) Occasionally, a rider will be given the honor of leading the rest of the peloton onto the circuit finish in their final Tour, as was the case for Jens Voigt and Sylvain Chavanel, among others. From the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, the Tour was dominated by Frenchman Bernard Hinault, who would become the third rider to win five times. Hinault was defeated by Joop Zoetemelk in 1980 when he withdrew, and by his own teammate Greg LeMond in 1986, but he was in contention during both of these Tours. Only once in his Tour de France career was he soundly defeated, and this was by Laurent Fignon in 1984. The 1987 edition was more uncertain than past editions, as previous winners Hinault and Zoetemelk had retired, LeMond was