Perhaps the most spectacular contests ever witnessed in the world of amateur cycling took place on the road between Prague, Berlin and Warsaw from 1954 to 1969. These 15 editions of the Peace Race saw too many great champions to enumerate here, offered too many great battles to recount. Sterile figures tell us that 1637 riders started in these 15 golden editions of the Peace Race and 1223 made it to the finish. There were of course only 15 Yellow Jersey winners, but great personal achievements were almost without count. UCI's official recognition of the Peace Race, in 1954, brought the best of Europe's amateur riders to the "May Stages", but the years 1954 to 1968 were very much held to ransom by the great wealth of cycling talent brought forth by the German Democratic Republic and by the Soviet Union. 

One rider who stood head and shoulders above the other 1636 starters in the "May Stages" of this period, was the East German legend, Täve Schur. Täve rode the Peace Race record 12 times, between 1952 and 1964. In addition to achieving the unique feat of winning the Peace Race twice, in 1955 and 1959, he won nine stages and led the GDR team to five overall Team Competition victories (in 1953, 1957, 1960, 1963 and 1964 – his last year in the Great Race). In addition to his decade long presence in the Peace Race, Täve Schur also won Amateur Road Championships twice in succession, 1958, and 1959. As for Täve Schur's team mates, Erich Hagen, Klaus Ampler and Axel Peschel, added further three overall Peace Race victories for East Germany to his two laurels, in 1960, 1963 and 1968.

The 1956 Peace Race did well and truly ushered in the era of Soviet predominance in the race. Under the guidance of their legendary coach Leonid Selesnev, the riders of the "Sbornaja Komanda" (or "the assembled/selected Soviet team") came to replace the Czechoslovaks as the main animators of the Peace Race - winning three individual and seven team overall victories, during the period from late 1950's to mid-1960's. Among the greatest riders to ride the Peace Race in Soviet colors were, Jurij Melichov (the winner in 1961), Gajdan Sajdchuzin (the victor in 1962), Victor Kapitonov (the Olympic Road Race Champion from Rome 1960) and the highly talented and on occasions a little unlucky Alexej Petrov. The strength of the Soviet team was, however, their great capacity to ride as a team, first and always. Let us take, for example, a look at the key the events of the 1965 edition of the Peace Race: When the race leader Alexej Petrov was forced to abandon while in Yellow, his less experienced teammate, Genadij Lebedev, suddenly found himself leading the race of his life. After two transit stages came perhaps the hardest stage of the 1965 event, stage 9: Dubnica - Svit. 215 hilly km, appeared to have been ready made to provide a decisive selection. Indeed, on the day a small break containing two strong contenders for the overall crown, Pavel Dolezel [CSSR] and Constantin Dumitrescu [ROM], got away and quickly worked well to an advantage of over 5 minutes. Jurij Melichov was the only Soviet rider to catch the break. Rather than seeing this as an opportunity to try to repeat his overall victory from 1961, he did all he could to slow the break down. But as one against six can achieve only so much, Melichov saved his strength for the finish, winning the stage and taking the 60 seconds time bonus that might have cost Lebedev the Yellow Jersey.

The Golden Age of the Peace Race also saw great victories by riders outside the East German and Soviet camps. The last Danish Peace Race winner, Eluf Dalgaard won in 1954, while in 1956 Stanislaw Krolak gave Poland (the Peace Race co-founding country) it's first ever overall race victory. A year later, in 1957, Bulgarian Nenco Christov won, virtually on his own, in one of the most hotly contested events in the history of the Peace Race. Jan Smolik's great win in 1964 came after ten years of indifferent personal results and heralded the beginnings of the renaissance of Czechoslovak cycling. 1958, 1966 and 1967 saw great wins by West European riders, Piet Damen, Bernard Guyot and Marcel Maes, all who would go on to join the professional peloton.

There was, however, much more to remember about Peace Race peloton during the first six years of the Great Race then simply the names of the race winners. There were the exploits of  that great Czechoslovak road sprinter Vlastimil Ruzicka, the sheer bad luck that pursued the promising Austrian rider Franz Deutch, the tireless team work of the Danish road captain Wedell Oestergaard and the brilliant individual efforts of Jean Stablinski, the future Professional World Champion and the "right-hand" of the great Jacques Anquetil.