Andreas Klöden  Andreas Klöden (born 22 June 1975) is a German former professional road bicycle racer, who competed as a professional between 1998 and 2013. His major achievements include a bronze medal at the 2000 Olympic Games and finishing second in the general classification at the 2004 and 2006 Tour de France. Klöden is a tall, lightly built racer with enough strength to place high in the overall classifications of the Grand Tours, but his performances have been afflicted by injuries. Klöden was born in Mittweida in 1975. Before he turned professional, he won the bronze medal in the Under 23 World Time Trial Championships in 1996, and two stages at the International Rheinland-Pfalz Rundfahrt in 1997. Klöden signed with "" (later T-Mobile Team) in 1998, and in his first pro season he won the Niedersachsen-Rundfahrt's General classifications (GC) and the prologue of the Tour de Normandie. In 1999, he won a stage at the Portuguese Tour of Algarve. But the first of his great seasons came in 2000, where after notching two important victories in the GC of Paris–Nice and Tour of the Basque Country, he went on to obtain the bronze medal at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, after fellow German Jan Ullrich and Kazakh Alexander Vinokourov, two riders with whom he would spend several seasons on T-Mobile. After that came three injury plagued seasons in which he gained no victories. He was forced to abandon the 2003 Tour de France due to a fractured tailbone. 2004 saw his cycling rebirth as he won the German National Road Racing Championships and so continued T-Mobile/Team Telekom's winning streak, which went back to Bernd Gröne's 1993 win of these Championships. Klöden held his great moment of form until the Tour de France, which began one week later. In that Tour, which he began as a domestique for Ullrich, he did not win any stage but finished second overall after taking second place from Italian Ivan Basso in the final time trial. Ullrich, whom Klöden was supposed to be supporting, finished fourth that year, the only time he finished outside the top three in the Tour de France. Finishing ahead of Ullrich brought Klöden international fame and rumours circulated that he was moving to or , where he would have led the team, but instead he stayed at T-Mobile with Ullrich.