Wikipedia:Main Page history/2017 July 22

Bradley Wiggins

The 2012 Tour de France was the 99th edition of the race, one of cycling's Grand Tours. The 21 race stages, including the prologue, covered 3,496.9 km (2,173 mi), from the Belgian city of Liège on 30 June to the Champs-Élysées in Paris on 22 July. Bradley Wiggins (pictured) from Team Sky won the overall general classification, becoming the first British rider to win the Tour. Wiggins's teammate Chris Froome placed second, and Vincenzo Nibali (Liquigas–Cannondale) was third. Wiggins maintained leadership of the race after stage seven, the first mountainous stage. The points classification was won by Nibali's teammate Peter Sagan, who won three stages, as did André Greipel of Lotto–Belisol and Team Sky rider Mark Cavendish. Team Europcar's Thomas Voeckler won the mountains classification. BMC Racing Team's Tejay van Garderen, in fifth place overall, won the young rider classification. The team classification was won by RadioShack–Nissan, and Chris Anker Sørensen (Saxo Bank–Tinkoff Bank) was given the award for the most combative rider. (Full article...)

Part of the 2012 Tour de France series, one of Wikipedia's featured topics.

Hannah Norsa

• ... that the story of Hannah Norsa (pictured) has been described as "an archetypal tale of how stage stardom might lead to social transformation"?
• ... that after the 1194 Battle of Fréteval, Richard I captured the French King's government archive which travelled with him, who as a result founded the French National Archives in Paris?
• ... that A Voz do Brasil is the longest-running radio program in the Southern Hemisphere?
• ... that Greek shipping tycoon Basil Goulandris and his wife Elisa died childless and left an art collection worth an estimated $3 billion that has been the subject of a family feud ever since?
• ... that the critically endangered shrub orange dryandra is known from an area of less than 4.5 square kilometres (1.7 sq mi) in Western Australia?
• ... that investment banker Peter W. Smith contacted Russian hackers in an unsuccessful attempt to locate missing emails from Hillary Clinton's computer system?
• ... that the Twelve Fantasias for Viola da Gamba solo, published by the composer Georg Philipp Telemann in 1735, were believed lost but published again in 2016?
• ... that Drop the Dip, the first roller coaster to use a lap bar, was inspired by a toy in a dentist's office waiting room?

• Ram Nath Kovind (pictured) is elected President of India.
• Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to receive the Fields Medal, dies at the age of 40.
• Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese pro-democracy activist, political prisoner and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, dies at the age of 61.
• Former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is sentenced to nearly ten years in prison over the Operation Car Wash corruption scandal.
• A giant iceberg, covering approximately 5,800 km² (2,200 sq mi), breaks away from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica.

July 22: Feast day of Mary Magdalene; Pi Approximation Day

Gia Long

• 1802 – Gia Long (pictured) conquered Hanoi and unified modern-day Vietnam, which had experienced centuries of feudal warfare.
• 1894 – Despite finishing in first place in the world's first auto race, Jules-Albert de Dion did not win, as his steam-powered car was against the rules.
• 1944 – In opposition to the Polish government-in-exile, the Soviet-sponsored Polish Committee of National Liberation published its manifesto, calling for radical reforms, a continuation of fighting in World War II against Nazi Germany, nationalisation of industry, and a "decent border in the West".
• 1992 – Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar escaped from his luxurious private prison and spent the next 17 months on the run.
• 2011 – Two sequential terrorist attacks in Oslo and Utøya claimed the lives of 77 people in the deadliest attack in Norway since World War II.

Josefa de Óbidos (d. 1684) · Edward Hopper (b. 1882) · Ursula Franklin (d. 2016)