The contenders for the overall victory were thought to be Bernard Thévenet, Joop Zoetemelk and Lucien Van Impe, but all of them were about 4:00 off the lead. Indeed they were waiting for the mountains to start their battle as the 1976 Tour was designed to be especially grueling with eight high mountain stages including three consecutive high mountain stages in the Alps, followed by a rest day and then four consecutive high mountain stages in the Pyrenees making for seven straight mountain stages which would absolutely devastate the peloton leaving very few riders, and among them only the riders who excelled in climbing, in contention for the win by the time the final time trial came around in stage 17, followed by one last high mountain stage atop Puy de Dome in stage 20. The first of these mountain stages finished atop a mountain resort known as Alpe d'Huez. None of the riders in the Tour had ever ridden this stage during the Tour as it had not been included since the 1952 Tour de France when the owner of a hotel in town brought a box of money to Tour organizers and asked them to bring the Grande Boucle to his mountain. History repeated itself to get the Tour to return to the Alpine resort but history would not repeat itself by waiting another quarter century to return to it, rather the legend of Alpe d'Huez was born.