Gerben Karstens

After the Olympic Games, Karstens started a successful professional career, where he won six stages in the Tour de France, 14 stages in the Vuelta a España, 1 stage in the Giro d'Italia, and other races such as Paris–Tours and GP Fourmies. He became Dutch national road race champion in 1966.

In the 1974 Tour de France, Karstens finished second in the fourth stage. Afterwards, he forgot to take the doping tests. The tour organisation set him back to the last place of the stage results, and gave him 10 minutes penalty time in the overall classification, which made him lose his third place.^[2] One day later, the jury took the penalty time back. Thanks to 5 seconds of bonification that Karstens won during intermediate sprints, he took over the yellow jersey from Eddy Merckx.^[3] He wore yellow for one stage before losing it to Patrick Sercu after stage 6A, but he reclaimed the overall lead after stage 6B to spend another stage in Yellow before Merckx took over the lead for the remainder of the Tour.

Karstens died of complications from a stroke on 8 October 2022, at the age of 80.^[4]

• List of Dutch Olympic cyclists
• List of Dutch cyclists who have led the Tour de France general classification

• "Website Gerben Karstens". Archived from the original on 25 August 2010. Retrieved 14 October 2017.
• "Dutch Olympic Committee" (in Dutch). Archived from the original on 9 June 2007. Retrieved 9 April 2007.
• Gerben Karstens at Cycling Archives (archived)
• Official Tour de France results for Gerben Karstens^{[permanent dead link‍]}