The Birth of the Tour de France, 110 Years Ago - History in the Headlines The Birth of the Tour de France, 110 Years Ago June 28, 2013 By Christopher Klein 2012 Tour de France The Birth of the Tour de France, 110 Years Ago Author The Birth of the Tour de France, 110 Years Ago URL Google Launched as a newspaper publicity stunt in 1903, the Tour de France instantly proved itself an epic test of endurance, with competitors in the first race pedaling through the night on grueling stages that lasted upwards of 24 hours. Cheating was also endemic from the very start. As the Tour de France embarks on its 100th edition—world wars canceled 11 races—take a look back at the birth of the world’s most famous cycling race. On July 1, 1903, 60 men mounted their bicycles outside the Café au Reveil Matin in the Parisian suburb of Montgeron. The five-dozen riders were mostly French, with just a sprinkle of Belgians, Swiss, Germans and Italians.

A third were professionals sponsored by bicycle manufacturers, the others simply devotees of the sport. All 60 wheelmen, however, were united by the challenge of embarking on an unprecedented test of endurance—not to mention the 20,000 francs in prize money—in the inaugural Tour de France. At 3:16 p.m., the cyclists turned the pedals of their bicycles and raced into the unknown. Nothing like the Tour de France had ever been attempted before. Journalist Geo Lefevre had dreamt up the fanciful race as a stunt to boost the circulation of his struggling daily sports newspaper, L’Auto. Henri Desgrange, the director-editor of L’Auto and a former champion cyclist himself, loved the idea of turning France into one giant velodrome. They developed a 1,500-mile clockwise loop of the country running from Paris to Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux and Nantes before returning to the French capital. There were no Alpine climbs and only six stages—as opposed to the 21 stages in the 2013 Tour— but the distances covered in each of them were monstrous, an average of 250 miles.

(No single stage in the 2013 Tour tops 150 miles.) Between one and three rest days were scheduled between stages for recovery. The inaugural Tour de France, July 1903. The first stage of the epic race was particularly dastardly. The route from Paris to Lyon stretched nearly 300 miles. No doubt several of the riders who wheeled away from Paris worried not about winning the race—but surviving it. Unlike today’s riders, the cyclists in 1903 rode over unpaved roads without helmets. They rode as individuals, not team members. Riders could receive no help. They could not glide in the slipstream of fellow riders or vehicles of any kind. They rode without support cars. Cyclists were responsible for making their own repairs. They even rode with spare tires and tubes wrapped around their torsos in case they developed flats. And unlike modern-day riders, the cyclists in the 1903 Tour de France, forced to cover enormous swathes of land, spent much of the race riding through the night with moonlight the only guide and stars the only spectators.

During the early morning hours of the first stage, race officials came across many competitors “riding like sleepwalkers.” Hour after hour through the night, riders abandoned the race. One of the favorites, Hippolyte Aucouturier, quit after developing stomach cramps, perhaps from the swigs of red wine he took as an early 1900s version of a performance enhancer. Twenty-three riders abandoned the first stage of the race, but the one man who barreled through the night faster than anyone else was another pre-race favorite, 32-year-old professional Maurice Garin. The mustachioed French national worked as a chimney sweep as a teenager before becoming one of France’s leading cyclists. Caked in mud, the diminutive Garin crossed the finish line in Lyon a little more than 17 hours after the start outside Paris. In spite of the race’s length, he won by only one minute. “The Little Chimney Sweep” built his lead as the race progressed. By the fifth stage, Garin had a two-hour advantage. When his nearest competitor suffered two flat tires and fell asleep while resting on the side of the road, Garin captured the stage and the Tour was all but won.

The sixth and final stage, the race’s longest, began in Nantes at 9 p.m. on July 18, so that spectators could watch the riders arrive in Paris late the following afternoon. Garin strapped on a green armband to signify his position as race leader. (The famed yellow jersey worn by the race leader was not introduced until 1919.) A crowd of 20,000 in the Parc des Princes velodrome cheered as Garin won the stage and the first Tour de France. He bested butcher trainee Lucien Pothier by nearly three hours in what remains the greatest winning margin in the Tour’s history. Garin had spent more than 95 hours in the saddle and averaged 15 miles per hour. In all, 21 of the 60 riders completed the Tour, with the last-place rider more than 64 hours behind Garin. For Desgrange, the race was an unqualified success. Newspaper circulation soared six-fold during the race. However, a chronic problem that would perpetually plague the Tour de France was already present in the inaugural race—cheating.

The rule breaking started in the very first stage when Jean Fischer illegally used a car to pace him. Another rider was disqualified in a subsequent stage for riding in a car’s slipstream. That paled in comparison, however, to the nefarious activity the following year in the 1904 Tour de France. As Garin and a fellow rider pedaled through St. Etienne, fans of hometown rider Antoine Faure formed a human blockade and beat the men until Lefevre arrived and fired a pistol to break up the melee. Later in the race, fans protesting the disqualification of a local rider placed tacks and broken glass on the course. Riders acted little better. They hitched rides in cars during the dark and illegally took help from outsiders. Garin himself was accused of illegally obtaining food during a portion of one stage. The race was so plagued by scandal that four months later Desgrange disqualified Garin and the three other top finishers. It, of course, wouldn’t be the last time a Tour winner was stripped of his title. Tags Tour de France - the greatest cycling contest on earth Tour de France - the greatest cycling contest on earth You are here: France information Tour de France The early days of the Tour de France.

On the 1st July 1903, 60 cyclists set off from Paris. After more than 2400 kilometres of cycling, at an average speed of 25.7 kmh, they returned to Paris on the 19th July, in a competition won by Maurice Garin of France. The Tour de France had been born. See further down this page for the fascinating story of the first ever Tour de France. The race was threatened in 1904-1914 by an extraordinary amount of cheating, with spectators eagerly trying to ensure that certain contestants failed to finish, and several contestants taking buses and trains instead of cycling (!) but the race struggled on through these difficult years - mountains were introduced to the circuit in 1905. Apart from the war years of 1915-1918 and 1940-1946 the Tour de France has taken place every year since. By 2000, the number of participants had increased to 200, the distance covered to 3,660 kilometres, and the average speed to 39.6 kmh.

There are now 20 stages instead of the six (longer) stages that made up the very first race. But that is in no way to detract from those early racers, when both roads and equipment were much inferior to those found today. The Tour de France is now watched all around the world, with an audience that includes many non-cyclists, and is perhaps the greatest 'mainstream' endurance event there is. During the race there are four 'shirts' awarded to the leaders. The 'maillot jaune' goes to the overall leader at that point in the race; the 'maillot vert' to the winner of that days stage; the 'maillot a pois' (they look more like cherries than peas...) to the best climber; and the 'maillot blanc' to the best youth competitor. The overall winner of the Tour de France is the competitor who takes the lowest overall time. So it is possible to win the competition without ever actually winning a stage in the race. Some entrants are faster on the flatter parts of the course, some are better in the mountains, but it is performing well and consistently in all stages that is ultimately important. See Tour de France winners .

It is important to realise also that many of the entrants have no chance of winning, because the cyclists each form part of a team, and many of the team members are there to support the 'team leader'. So in recent years, for example, while Lance Armstrong was the team leader for Discovery Channel, other members of the same team were responsible for cycling in front of him (to reduce wind resistance on him), or going to the supply cars to get water and food for him. So the team leaders are chosen before the Tour de France starts, and they are much more likely to win than other members of the same team. There is as much tactical planning and psychology involved as physical fitness, which adds to the excitement. Almost like a game of chess sometimes, the mental battles between the competitors, along with the tactical decisions - when to push ahead, when to hang back etc are vitally important. An example of a tactical decision - riders in the peloton (the main pack of cyclists) are very protected from wind, and this can save up to 50% of the energy required to cycle. So making a break to move ahead of the group means using far more energy.

As a result the main pack usually catches up with these break away groups, that have over-tired themselves. The cyclists are in constant radio communication with their support vehicles to help them with these decisions. Indeed, far from being a chance to enjoy the French countryside, competitors in the Tour de France have crowds of enthusiasts along much of the route, their support vehicles talking in their headsets, television motorbikes around them and television helicopters overhead. Not to mention the other competitors...so it is far from being a peaceful race. Above all it is the mountain stages in the Tour de France that are most popular with viewers. To see the superhuman effort required of the cyclists, day after day, to ride up some of the most gruelling roads in Europe is somehow completely gripping. The last few minutes of each days race are usually equally exciting on the flatter stages of the race, as riders make last minute sprints to try and take the lead for that stage. Two of the most famous mountain passes are Alpe d'Huez in the Alps and Col du Tourmalet in the Pyrenees.

So I recommend you take a look at the Tour de France - even better come to France and watch a couple of stages as part of your holiday - and see why so many of us all around the world think it is the highlight of the years sporting calendar. List of previous Tour de France winners Year Australia 1903 - the first Tour de France On the 20th November 1902 the journalist Geo Lefevre, from the newspaper L'Auto, sat down in a cafe with his editor, Henri Desgrange - he had an idea to boost circulation of the newspaper. The idea was the Tour de France. The details quickly came together and by January 1903 the race had been announced in the newspaper. Sixty riders started the first Tour de France, on 1st July 1903. The conditions were hard, with the stages frequently taking place on roads that were in a very poor state. Outside help was not permitted and cyclists had to maintain and repair their own bikes when problems arose. M Lefevre acted as judge and timekeeper for the race. Teams did not exist - just individuals who entered the race for themselves, having first paid a small entrance fee.

There was no sponsorship, and certainly no publicity caravan preceding the arrival of the riders on the course! The bikes of course were very basic and heavy when compared with those ridden by modern competitors. Just 21 riders were to finish, after six long and gruelling stages totalling 2,428 kilometres. Individual stages were from 270 to 470 kilometres each, substantially more than in current Tour de France competitions. Competitors frequently had to contine cycling late into the night. Competitors were allowed to enter a stage even if they had withdrawn from an earlier stage, although they were no longer eligible to win the overall prize. Hence Hippolyte Aucouturier won the 2nd and 3rd stages despite not completing the 1st stage. The route followed was: Paris - Lyon - Marseille - Toulouse - Bordeaux - Nantes - Paris. Mountain stages were not to be added to the Tour de France until 1905. The average speed achieved in this first contest was almost 26kmh - an extraordinary feat given the condition of the roads, the basic bikes used, and the rule prohibiting spare bike parts or assistance in making repairs when problems arose.

Despite a fine effort by several other riders the lead was with Maurice Garin from the first stage - he went on to win the 1903 tour with a lead of almost three hours over Lucien Pothier, who was placed second. Garin won 6,075 gold francs for his efforts. (Maurice Garin also came first in the 1904 Tour, but was later disqualified from collecting the prize, along with those who came 2nd, 3rd and 4th.) For the newspaper (later to become L'Equipe) the Tour de France 1903 was an enormous success, boosting their circulation very substantially and putting their rival, Le Velo, out of business. History - Great moments, archives - Tour de France 2014 2007 Great moments in the history of the Tour The line between insanity and genius is said to be a fine one, and in early 20thcentury France, anyone envisaging a near-2,500-km-long cycle race across the country would have been widely viewed as unhinged.

But that didn’t stop Géo Lefèvre, a journalist with L’Auto magazine at the time, from proceeding with his inspired plan. His editor, Henri Desgrange, was bold enough to believe in the idea and to throw his backing behind the Tour de France. And so it was that, on 1 July 1903, sixty pioneers set out on their bicycles from Montgeron. After six mammoth stages (Nantes - Paris, 471 km!), only 21 “routiers”, led by Maurice Garin, arrived at the end of this first epic. Having provoked a mixture of astonishment and admiration, le Tour soon won over the sporting public and the roadside crowds swelled. The French people took to their hearts this unusual event which placed their towns, their countryside and, since 1910, even their mountains, in the spotlight. Le Tour has always moved with the times.

Like France as a whole, it benefited from the introduction of paid holidays from 1936; it has lived through wars, and then savoured the “trente glorieuses” period of economic prosperity while enjoying the heydays of Coppi, Bobet, Anquetil, Poulidor and it has opened itself up to foreign countries with the onset of globalisation. Over a hundred years after its inception, le Tour continues to gain strength from its experience. Search The history of the Tour de France since 1903 By rider © Presse Sports Bernard Hinault The French cyclist who has won the most races won his first Tour de France in 1978 while he was still a rookie in the Grande Boucle. Hinault won the Tour four times (79, 81, 82 and 85). Nicknamed “The Badger”, this fierce rider retired after the 1986 Tour, during which he supported his team mate Greg LeMond.

View results All about the tour View the history of a stage departure or arrival town or, learn about the various Alps’ summits on the road of the Tour, discover all kinds of records set on the Tour, check if you know the different winners of the various classifications… Discover all the stats of the Tour. Grand Tour Tour de France The line between insanity and genius is said to be a fine one, and in early 20thcentury France, anyone envisaging a near-2,500-km-long cycle race across the country would have been widely viewed as unhinged. But that didn�t stop Géo Lefèvre, a journalist with L�Auto magazine at the time, from proceeding with his inspired plan. His editor, Henri Desgrange, was bold enough to believe in the idea and to throw his backing behind the Tour de France. And so it was that, on 1 July 1903, sixty pioneers set out on their bicycles from Montgeron. After six mammoth stages (Nantes - Paris, 471 km!), only 21 �routiers�, led by Maurice Garin, arrived at the end of this first epic.

Having provoked a mixture of astonishment and admiration, le Tour soon won over the sporting public and the roadside crowds swelled. The French people took to their hearts this unusual event which placed their towns, their countryside and, since 1910, even their mountains, in the spotlight. Le Tour has always moved with the times. Like France as a whole, it benefited from the introduction of paid holidays from 1936; it has lived through wars, and then savoured the �trente glorieuses� period of economic prosperity while enjoying the heydays of Coppi, Bobet, Anquetil and Poulidor; it has opened itself up to foreign countries with the onset of globalisation, and now finds itself at the forefront of the debate on the malaise afflicting world sport in general. Over a hundred years after its inception, le Tour continues to gain strength from its experience. Giro d´Italia The Giro d'Italia is an annual stage race bicycle race primarily held in Italy, while also occasionally passing through nearby countries. The race was first organized in 1909 to increase sales of the newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport; however it is currently run by RCS Sport.

The race has been held annually since its first edition in 1909, except when it was stopped for the two world wars. As the Giro gained prominence and popularity the race was lengthened, and the peloton expanded from primarily Italian participation to riders from all over the world. Vuelta a España First held in 1935 and annually since 1955, the Vuelta runs for three weeks in a changing route across Spain. The inaugural event (1935) saw 50 entrants face a 3,411 km (2,119 mi.) course over only 14 stages, averaging over 240 km (149 mi.) per stage. It was inspired by the success of the Tours in France and Italy, and the boost they brought to the circulations of their sponsoring newspapers (L'Auto and La Gazzetta dello Sport respectively); Juan Pujol of the daily Informaciones instigated the race to increase its circulation. It was originally held in the spring, usually late April, with a few editions held in June in the 1940s.

In 1995, however, the race moved to September to avoid direct competition with the Giro d'Italia, held in May. As a result, the Vuelta is now often seen as an important preparation for the World Championships, which moved to October the same year. A Vuelta was also organized in August and September 1950. History Of The Tour de France - Yorkshire Reporter History Of The Tour de France 0 Comments Tour de France fever has hit across the country this July after months of preparation and excitement. To celebrate the world famous sporting event taking place across England and of course Yorkshire hosting the Grand Départ, we are taking a look at how it all started and the legacy it will leave behind in Yorkshire. The Dreyfus Affair The birth of the Tour de France can be traced back to the Dreyfus Affair. From 1894 to its final resolution in 1906, the Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal which divided the people of France. It started when Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer in the French army was convicted of treason for giving French military secrets to the German Embassy.

Two years later, the military suppressed evidence that had come to light proving Dreyfus innocent and a higher ranking officer guilty. Rumours of the military framing Dreyfus became widely known amongst the public and caused uproar across France. The people were divided into those who believed him innocent, and those who thought him guilty. [private] But what has this got to do with the Tour de France? Le Vélo was the largest daily sports paper in France at this time. Pierre Giffard, the editor of the paper, who was pro Dreyfus, wrote an article about the affair and a subsequent incident at a horse race course. One of the individuals who featured heavily in the article after his arrest at this incident was the Comte Jules-Albert de Dion. He served 15 days in jail and was heavily fined for hitting the French President on the head with a walking stick during the demonstration. De Dion was so infuriated at his portrayal in the article that he decided to start up a rival newspaper in order to put Giffard out of business. This paper was called L’Auto.

The Tour de France is Born At this time Le Vélo was selling around 80,000 copies a day, and by late 1902 L’Auto was not succeeding in being the rival paper it was intended to be. De Dion had appointed Henri Desgrange – a prominent cyclist and co-owner of a velodrome as the editor of L’Auto. During a crisis meeting on the 20th November 1902 to discuss the falling sales of the paper, a radical idea was suggested. Géo Lefévre, the chief cycling journalist for the paper, thought that if the highly popular long distance cycling races which normally took place on the track, could be held around the villages and towns of France, this would prove to be a major event on which to report. The idea was that his proposed 6 day race would boost sales of L’Auto dramatically. The length of race suggested had never been attempted before, and many of the staff at the paper including Desgrange had doubts. However, after much discussion it was agreed upon, with the financial director of the company handing over the safe keys and saying “take what you need”.

The first ever Tour de France was announced in L’Auto on the 19th January 1903. The First Tour de France The initial plans for the race were highly challenging and costly for the cyclists, and as a result there were only 15 entrants. It was to take place from the 31st May to 5th July, starting and ending in Paris, and passing through Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux and Nantes. The cyclists would have to travel through the night until the following afternoon with a rest day before setting off again on the next leg of the journey. Due to the disappointing sign up for the event, Desgrange was close to cancelling. Instead, he changed the plans by cutting the length to 19 days which would now be on the 1st-19th July. He also offered a daily allowance equivalent to an average factory workers wage for all cyclists who travelled an average of 20km/h minimum on all stages. As well as this financial incentive, the entry fee was halved from the original 20 Francs.

The changes encouraged many more to enter the race and on 1st July 1903, 60 cyclists set off from the village of Montgeron. At the end of six massive stages, only 21 cyclists arrived at the finish line in Paris with the overall winner Maurice Garin. Garin’s prize was 6075 francs, which at the time was a large amount of money. The French public had taken the event to their hearts and had lined the roads of their villages and countryside to watch with astonishment as the cyclists passed through. The first Tour de France was a great success! The second Tour the following year was nearly the last due to problems with cheating and “passionate fans” who were even beating up rival cyclists. The leaders of this race including the winner – again Maurice Garin were eventually disqualified. The decision was delayed until November of that year as the UVF were “…aware of the passions aroused by the race.” Despite these problems, L’Auto achieved what they had set out to do when they created the Tour. Le Vélo went out of business in 1904 and their own circulation rose steadily over the years.

The popularity of the Tour has continued to flourish over the years, and while most stages still take place in France it has become increasingly common to start, or pass through nearby countries. Tour de France Yellow Since the announcement of the 2014 Grand Départ, the people of Yorkshire have been seeing yellow. Yellow bikes have appeared all over the race route, for months people have been planting yellow flowers, in fact the whole of the county is really getting into the spirit of things. Businesses flying yellow flags and of course there is the famous yellow jersey. Yellow has always featured in the Tour – the leader of the first Tour de France was given a yellow armband to wear and in 1930 Desgrange insisted that all competitors ride a plain yellow bicycle without a maker’s name in a campaign against sponsors. The yellow jersey appeared in 1919 and has been a major symbol of the Tour ever since. The first British cyclist to ever wear the yellow jersey was Tom Simpson back in 1962. Why yellow? A possible answer is that the L’Auto newspapers were printed on yellow paper and this is why the colour was originally chosen.

British Cyclists in the Tour de France The 2012 Tour de France was the first to be won by a British cyclist, Bradley Wiggins. We can all remember him standing proudly on the podium in the yellow jersey with his teammate Christopher Froome also up there taking 2nd place, this was followed in 2013 with an overall classification win for Froome. Wiggins said at the time “It's been a magical couple of weeks. Some dreams do come true. My old mother over there, her son's just won the Tour de France!” Perhaps the most famous UK cyclist though, is Mark Cavendish who has won a massive 23 stages out of the total 51 stage wins by us Brits. Two of these stage winners were from Yorkshire – Barry Hoban with 8 wins, and Brian Robinson who was the first to win two stages in 1958 and 1959. Brian Robinson said of his 1959 win “I’d planned several days before, that that was the day I was going to put 110% in…………I got to the top and I was off.

I could hear the other riders shouting behind me and I just put my head down and went.” The Tour de France Legacy in Yorkshire With the opening ceremony at Leeds Arena being the biggest in the history of the Tour de France, and a Yorkshire wide ringing of bells- from church to bike bells, we are certainly showing our enthusiasm and excitement for the event. The Tour is receiving our famous Yorkshire welcome! But what do the people of Yorkshire hope to take from the Grand Départ long after this year’s Tour has passed through our beautiful county? There are many more individuals taking up cycling in our region due to the publicity of the event, and also the many new cycle tracks and facilities that have opened as a result of hosting the Tour. These include the Wyke Beck Way cycle route which runs from Temple Newsam to Roundhay Park, and the Eccup Reservoir and North Leeds Countryside route. Our local councils have been holding cycling events, and it was announced that Yorkshire will host an annual international cycling race from next year. The race will be over a 3 day period and will hopefully attract entrants from across the globe.

The Yorkshire Reporter wishes Chris Froome good luck in defending his title and the rest of the team best of luck for the 2014 Tour de France. We hope to see him on the podium again when the race ends on the 27th July for another British victory! [/private] This Day in History… January 19 — Tour de France: Cycling Race Created - Prof. Boerner's Explorations Prof. Boerner's Explorations Commentary: Several sports emerged during the latter part of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. In the United States, we saw the emergence of basketball, baseball, (American) football, and ice hockey. In France, sport of long-distance bicycle racing; the grand-daddy of these races was Le Tour de France. Unlike the American sports that emerged for their fitness benefits, the Tour de France emerged in 1903 for commercial, not fitness, purposes. As we summarized in a recent posting, the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the 19th century resulted in powerful groups aligning themselves into opposing camps. This created a field day for the French newspapers, including L’Auto.

When the excitement started fading, so did circulation. To boost circulation, editor Henri Desgrange and sports journalist Géo Lefèvre proposed “the greatest cycling trial,” Le Tour de France. Desgrange basically created this sporting event from nothing. The real purpose, to sell newspapers! Le Tour de France was almost canceled after the second year, but it gained momentum. It is now the premiere bicycle race, eclipsing even the the Olympic bicycle events. So, let’s get this show on the road and explore the history of the Tour de France… GLB These Introductory Comments are copyrighted: Copyright©2011 — Gerald Boerner — All Rights Reserved [ 3990 Words ] “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” — Gloria Steinem “Life is like a ten speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use.” — Charles M. Schulz “One of the most important days of my life was when I learned to ride a bicycle.” — Michael Palin “Communication is a skill that you can learn. It’s like riding a bicycle or typing.

If you’re willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of evry part of your life.” — Brian Tracy “Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.” — Terry Pratchett “I still love to walk in the mountains or be on the sea. I like to be in nature. Sometimes I bicycle. It’s important to feel good with your body. The body is extremely important. If you feel good, you have more energy in your singing.” — Cecilia Bartoli “I simply haven’t the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.” — Quentin Crisp “I know that a good many champions have entertained the thought that the more they discourage youngsters, the longer they would reign.

However, this theory never impressed me, and I always made it a point to give youths the benefit of my experience in bicycle racing.” — Major Taylor Tour de France: Cycling Trial Created to Sell Newspapers The Tour de France is an annual bicycle race held in France and nearby countries and is the most important cycling event in the world. First staged in 1903, the race covers more than 3,600 km (2,200 mi) and lasts three weeks. As the best known and most prestigious of cycling’s three "Grand Tours", the Tour de France attracts riders and teams from around the world. The race is broken into day-long segments, called stages. Individual times to finish each stage are aggregated to determine the overall winner at the end of the race. The rider with the lowest aggregate time at the end of each day wears a yellow jersey. The course changes every year, but the race has always finished in Paris. Since 1975, the climax of the final stage has been along the Champs-Élysées. The tour typically has 21 days of racing and covers 3,200 km (2,000 mi).

The shortest Tour was in 1904 at 2,420 km (1,500 mi), the longest in 1926 at 5,745 km (3,570 mi). The three weeks usually include two rest days, sometimes used to transport riders from a finish in one town to the start in another. The race alternates between clockwise and anticlockwise circuits of France. The first anticlockwise circuit was in 1913. The New York Times said the "Tour de France is arguably the most physiologically demanding of athletic events." The effort was compared to "running a marathon several days a week for nearly three weeks", while the total elevation of the climbs was compared to "climbing three Everests." Description of Le Tour de France The number of teams usually varies between 20 to 22, with nine riders in each. Entry is by invitation to teams chosen by the race organizer, the Amaury Sport Organization. Team members help each other and are followed by managers and mechanics in cars.

The 2004 Tour rides the Champs-Élysées Riders are judged by the time each has taken throughout the race, a ranking known as the general classification. There may be time deductions for finishing well in a daily stage or being first to pass an intermediate point. It is possible to win without winning a stage, as did Alberto Contador in 2010; this has occurred six other times. There are subsidiary competitions (see below), some with distinctive jerseys for the best rider. Riders normally start together each day, with the first over the line winning, but some days are ridden against the clock by individuals or teams. The overall winner is usually a master of the mountains and of these time trials. Most stages are in mainland France, although since the 1960s it has become common to visit nearby countries. Stages can be flat, undulating or mountainous. Since 1975 the finish has been on the Champs-Élysées in Paris; from 1903 to 1967 the race finished at the Parc des Princes stadium in western Paris and from 1968 to 1974 at the Piste Municipale south of the capital.

Origins of Le Tour de France The roots of the Tour de France can be traced to the Dreyfus Affair, a cause célèbre which divided France at the end of the 19th century over the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus, a soldier convicted – though later exonerated – of selling military secrets to the Germans. Opinions became heated and there were demonstrations by both sides. One was what the historian Eugen Weber called "an absurd political shindig" at the Auteuil horse-race course in Paris in 1899. Among those involved was Comte Jules-Albert de Dion, the owner of the De Dion-Bouton car works, who believed Dreyfus was guilty. De Dion served 15 days in jail and was fined 100 francs for his role at Auteuil, which included striking Émile Loubet, the president of France, on the head with a walking stick. The incident at Auteuil, said Weber, was "tailor-made for the sporting press." The first and the largest daily sports newspaper in France was Le Vélo, which sold 80,000 copies a day.

Its editor, Pierre Giffard, thought Dreyfus innocent. He reported the arrest in a way that displeased de Dion, who was so angry that he joined other anti-Dreyfusards such as Adolphe Clément and Édouard Michelin and opened a rival daily sports paper, L’Auto. The new newspaper appointed Henri Desgrange as editor. He was a prominent cyclist and owner with Victor Goddet of the velodrome at the Parc des Princes. De Dion knew him through his cycling reputation, through the books and cycling articles that he had written, and through press articles he had written for the Clément tire company. Birth of Le Tour de France L’Auto was not the success its backers wanted. Stagnating sales lower than the rival it was intended to surpass led to a crisis meeting on 20 November 1902 on the middle floor of L’Auto’s office at 10 rue du faubourg Montmartre in Paris. The last to speak was the most junior there, the chief cycling journalist, a 26-year-old named Géo Lefèvre. Desgrange had poached him from Giffard’s paper.

Lefèvre suggested a six-day race of the sort popular on the track but all around France. Long-distance cycle races were a popular means to sell more newspapers, but nothing of the length that Lefèvre suggested had been attempted. If it succeeded, it would help L’Auto match its rival and perhaps put it out of business. It could, as Desgrange said, "nail Giffard’s beak shut." Desgrange and Lefèvre discussed it after lunch. Desgrange was doubtful but the paper’s financial director, Victor Goddet, was enthusiastic. He handed Desgrange the keys to the company safe and said: "Take whatever you need." L’Auto announced the race on 19 January 1903. First Tour de France The first Tour de France was staged in 1903. The plan was a five-stage race from 31 May to 5 July, starting in Paris and stopping in Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux and Nantes before returning to Paris. Toulouse was added later to break the long haul across southern France from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. Stages would go through the night and finish next afternoon, with rest days before riders set off again.

But this proved too daunting and the costs too great for most and only 15 entered. Desgrange had never been wholly convinced and he came close to dropping the idea. Instead, he cut the length to 19 days, changed the dates to 1 July to 19 July, and offered a daily allowance of five francs to any rider in the first 50 who had won less than 200 francs and who had averaged at least 20 km/h on all the stages. That was what a rider would have expected to earn each day had he worked in a factory. He also cut the entry fee from 20 to 10 francs and set the first prize at 12,000 francs and the prize for each day’s winner at 3,000 francs. The winner would thereby win six times what most workers earned in a year. That attracted between 60 and 80 entrants – the higher number may have included serious inquiries and some who dropped out – among them not just professionals but amateurs, some unemployed, some simply adventurous.

Desgrange seems not to have forgotten the Dreyfus Affair that launched his race and raised the passions of his backers. He announced his new race on 1 July 1903 by citing the writer Émile Zola, whose open letter in which every paragraph started" J’accuse …" led to Dreyfus’s acquittal. Establishing the florid style which he used henceforth, Desgrange wrote: With the wide and powerful gesture that Zola lends to his ploughman in La Terre, L’Auto, a journal of ideas and action, is about to send out over France those tough and uncomplicated sowers of strength, the great professional roadsters. He continued: From Paris to the blue waves of the Mediterranean, from Marseille to Bordeaux, passing along the roseate and dreaming roads sleeping under the sun, across the calm of the fields of the Vendée, following the Loire, which flows on still and silent, our men are going to race madly, unflaggingly. The first Tour de France started almost outside the Café Reveil-Matin at the junction of the Melun and Corbeil roads in the village of Montgeron.

It was waved away by the starter, Georges Abran, at 3:16 p.m. on 1 July 1903. L’Auto – which hadn’t featured the race on its front page that morning – reported: The men waved their hats, the ladies their umbrellas. One felt they would have liked to touch the steel muscles of the most courageous champions since antiquity. Who will carry off the first prize, entering the pantheon where only supermen may go? Among the competitors were the eventual winner, Maurice Garin, his well-built rival Hippolyte Aucouturier, the German favorite Josef Fischer, and a collection of adventurers including one competing as "Samson". The race finished on the edge of Paris at Ville d’Avray, outside the Restaurant du Père Auto, before a ceremonial ride into Paris and several laps of the Parc des Princes. Garin dominated the race, winning the first and last two stages, at 25.68 km/h. The last rider, Millocheau, finished 64h 47m 22s behind him. Early Rules Desgrange and his Tour invented bicycle stage racing.

Desgrange experimented with judging by elapsed time and then from 1906 to 1912 by points for placings each day. He allowed riders to have personal pacers on the last stage in 1903 and on the first and last stages in 1905. Desgrange stood against the use of multiple gears and for many years insisted riders use wooden rims, fearing the heat of braking while coming down mountains would melt the glue that held the tires (they were finally allowed in 1937). From 1936 there were as many as three stages in a single day. His dream was a race of individuals. He invited teams but until 1925 forbade their members to pace each other. He then went the other way and from 1927 to 1929 ran the Tour as a giant team time-trial, with teams starting separately with members pacing each other. He demanded that riders mend their bicycles without help and that they use the same bicycle from start to end. Exchanging a damaged bicycle for another was allowed only in 1923.

He at first allowed riders who dropped out one day to continue the next for daily prizes but not the overall prize. He allowed teams who lost members in the team time-trial years to recruit fresh replacements. Above all, Desgrange conducted a campaign against the sponsors, bicycle factories, which he was sure were undermining the spirit of a Tour de France of individuals. In 1930 he insisted that competitors ride plain yellow bicycles that he would provide, without a maker’s name. Touriste-Routiers and Regionals The first Tours were open to whoever wanted to compete. Most riders were in teams which looked after them. The private entrants were called touriste-routiers – tourists of the road – from 1923 and were allowed to take part provided they make no demands on the organizers. Some of the Tour’s most colorful characters have been touriste-routiers. One finished each day’s race and then performed acrobatic tricks in the street to raise the price of a hotel. There was no place for individuals in the post-1930s teams and so Desgrange created regional teams, generally from France, to take in riders who would not otherwise have qualified.

The original touriste-routiers mostly disappeared but some were absorbed into regional teams. National Teams The first Tours were for individuals and members of sponsored teams. There were two classes of race, one for the aces, the other for the rest, with different rules. By the end of the 1920s, however, Desgrange believed he could not beat what he believed were the underhand tactics of bike factories. When the Alcyon team contrived to get Maurice De Waele to win even though he was sick, he said "My race has been won by a corpse" and in 1930 admitted only teams representing their country or region. National teams contested the Tour until 1961. The teams were of different sizes. Some nations had more than one team and some were mixed in with others to make up the number. National teams caught the public imagination but had a snag: that riders might normally have been in rival trade teams the rest of the season. The loyalty of riders was sometimes questionable, within and between teams. Return of Trade Teams Riders in national teams wore the colors of their country and a small cloth panel on their chest that named the team for which they normally rode.

Sponsors were always unhappy about releasing their riders into anonymity for the biggest race of the year and the situation became critical at the start of the 1960s. Sales of bicycles had fallen and bicycle factories were closing. There was a risk, the trade said, that the industry would die if factories weren’t allowed the publicity of the Tour de France. The Tour returned to trade teams in 1962, although with further problems. Doping had become a problem and tests were introduced for riders. Riders went on strike near Bordeaux in 1966 and the organizers suspected sponsors provoked them. The Tour returned to national teams for 1967 and 1968 as "an experiment". The author Geoffrey Nicholson identified a further reason: opposition to closure of roads by a race criticized as crassly commercial. He said: What the Tour did to placate the opposition in 1967 was to play the patriotic card. It scrapped trade teams in favor of national teams … since a contest between squads in French and Belgian colors would appear less blatantly commercial than one between Ford-France-Gitane and Flandria-Romeo.

‘It was being done,’ said L’Équipe, the voice of the Tour, ‘in response to the noble and superior interests of the race, to the wishes of the public and the desires of the public authorities.’ The sponsors had to accept the change, but did so with ill-grace. The new arrangement, they argued, was basically unfair: they paid the riders’ salaries all summer only to be denied publicity from the season’s major event. They also pointed to the danger of collusion between trade-team colleagues of different nationalities … Indeed loyalties were put under so much strain that the experiment was dropped after only two seasons. The Tour returned to trade teams in 1969 with a suggestion that national teams could come back every few years. This never happened. Distances The Tour originally ran around the perimeter of France. Cycling was an endurance sport and the organizers realized the sales they would achieve by creating supermen of their competitors. Night riding was dropped after the second Tour in 1904, when there had been persistent cheating when judges could not see riders. That reduced the daily and overall distance but the emphasis remained on endurance. Desgrange said his ideal race would be so hard that only one rider would make it to Paris.

A succession of doping scandals in the 1960s, culminating in the death of Tom Simpson in 1967, led the Union Cycliste Internationale to limit daily and overall distances and to impose rest days. It was then impossible to follow the frontiers, and the Tour increasingly zig-zagged across the country, sometimes with unconnected days’ races linked by train, while still maintaining some sort of loop. The modern Tour typically has 21 daily stages and not more than 3,500 km (2,200 miles). The longest Tour was in 1926 at 5,745 km, the shortest in 1904 at 2,428 km. Culture of Le Tour de France The Tour de France appealed from the start not just for the distance and its demands but because it played to a wish for national unity, a call to what Maurice Barrès called the France "of earth and deaths" or what Georges Vigarello called "the image of a France united by its earth." The image had been started by the 1877 travel/school book Le Tour de la France par deux enfants.

It told of two boys, André and Julien, who "in a thick September fog left the town of Phalsbourg in Lorraine to see France at a time when few people had gone far beyond their nearest town." The book sold six million copies by the time of the first Tour de France, the biggest selling book of 19th century France (other than the Bible). It stimulated a national interest in France, making it "visible and alive", as its preface said. There had already been a car race called the Tour de France but it was the publicity behind the cycling race, and Desgrange’s drive to educate and improve the population, that inspired the French to know more of their country. The academic historians Jean-Luc Boeuf and Yves Léonard say most people in France had little idea of the shape of their country until L’Auto began publishing maps of the race. They wrote: At the start of the 20th century, the French were still largely ignorant (connaissent encore très mal) of the geography of their country. Maps were rare and little used, even at school.

The physical shape of France and its contours remained an unknown for most Frenchmen … Efforts to interest school children in the image in general and maps in particular were in vain. The book Tour de France par Deux Enfants didn’t have a map of France before its 1905 edition, by which time it had sold seven million copies. By the maps of France [that it published], the Tour de France became at the same time a teacher, in printing a map of the contours of the country – which was rare at least until the Great War – and populist in portraying France as a hexagon, a France not only amputated from 1903 of its "lost provinces" but also its overseas possessions and Corsica, never visited in a century and still missing from maps of the Tour de France. Eugen Weber, in the foreword to Tour de France: 1903–2003 says: The Tour contributed more to France than new-model heroes. It put flesh on the bones of values taught in school but seldom internalized: effort, courage, determination, stoic endurance of pain, and even fair play. It familiarized a nation with its geography.

It brought life, activity, excitement into small towns where very little happened; it introduced a festive atmosphere wherever it passed; and it acquainted provincial backwaters with spectacular displays previously available only in big cities. The Tour de France has also given the language a word for a popular but persistent loser. Raymond Poulidor never won the Tour de France but was more popular than his rival, Jacques Anquetil, who won five times and unfailingly beat him. Poulidor is now associated with bad luck or a hard life, as an article by Jacques Marseille showed in Le Figaro when it was headlined "This country is suffering from a Poulidor Complex" Please take time to further explore more about LE TOUR DE FRANCE, HENRI DESGRANGE, GÉO LEFÈVRE, and the L’AUTO NEWSPAPER by accessing the Wikipedia articles referenced below… Other Events on this Day: In 1782… Statesman and orator Daniel Webster is born in Salisbury, New Hampshire. In 1807… Confederate general Robert E. Lee is born at Stratford Hall, Virginia. In 1861… Georgia secedes from the Union.

In 1898… Brown University defeats Harvard University in a 6-0 shutout at Franklin Field in Boston, winning the first intercollegiate ice hockey game and inaugurating the oldest college hockey rivalry in U.S. history. In 1903… The French newspaper L’Auto announces the creation of the Tour de France, a race across France billed as "the greatest cycling trial in the entire world." The race was conceived by editor Henri Desgrange and sports journalist Géo Lefèvre as a way to boost the newspaper’s circulation. Their idea will work — six months later, the special edition of L’Auto describing Maurice Garin’s Tour de France victory will sell more than 130,000 copies. In 1937… Millionaire aviator Howard Hughes sets a new transcontinental air speed record, flying from Los Angeles to New York in 7 hours, 28 minutes and 25 seconds aboard a redesigned H-1 Racer. At an average speed of 322 miles per hour, Hughes breaks his own record by nearly two hours.

In 1953… Seventy percent of homes with a TV watch Lucy Ricardo (Lucille Ball) give birth to a son on I Love Lucy. In 1955… Dwight D. Eisenhower gives the first presidential news conference filmed for TV. In 1977… Can the Tour de France ever be clean? | South China Morning Post South China Morning Post Can the Tour de France ever be clean? Tour de France 2015 Can the Tour de France ever be clean? A week before the 100th edition, doubts linger over whether it can still be taken seriously as doping has stripped the race of its credibility PUBLISHED : Sunday, 23 June, 2013, 12:00am UPDATED : Sunday, 23 June, 2013, 4:18am Five things we learned from this year’s Tour de France 27 Jul 2015 Ahead of its 100th running starting on Saturday, the Tour de France remains a fantastic idea.

Asking riders to pedal around Western Europe's largest country, and up and down some of its tallest mountains for three weeks is still zany and whimsical enough to be interesting. But is the Tour still worth taking seriously as a sports event? The fall of Lance Armstrong in the past year, along with other dopers who ruined the credibility of cycling and its showcase race, has opened that question to debate like never before. From the outset in 1903, when journalist Geo Lefevre and his editor Henri Desgrange, hatched the idea of an endurance race around France to boost sales of their newspaper, L'Auto, the Tour has always been part-publicity stunt, part-genuine sporting contest. Then, as now, it sucked in spectators with the theatre both gruesome and inspiring of men made to suffer on bicycles. And even now, at the sport's nadir, the Tour's essential charms to fans and sponsors remain the same: roads, mountains, the beauty of France and men willing to push themselves to extremes. The timing alone - in July when much of France is either on holiday or thinking about it - makes it more than likely that the Tour will be still be around for its 200th edition.

The competition is always colourful if not always believable, a fun excuse for sleepy villages to come alive and a free summer spectacle for holiday-makers. The millions of people who line the route largely do not seem to care how many riders are pumped up on banned drugs and blood transfusions. Just as long as they see the spandex-clad racers zoom by and get a good picnic spot and freebies from sponsors, whose floats precede the riders, tossing out sweets, cheap sunhats and bite-size packs of cured sausage. Tour spectators, surveys suggest, make a day of it, often coming in groups and spending six or more hours by the side of the road. Their presence and media coverage in a month when other sports, including soccer, are largely dormant means the Tour remains worthwhile for sponsors, which argues for it continuing to hold a special place in the athletic calendar. French lottery and gaming operator La Frangaise des Jeux spends €9.5 million (HK$97.2 million) per year on the cycling team that bears its name.

But in French television and newspaper publicity, it recouped nearly that same amount from the team at the 2012 Tour, when its rider, Thibaut Pinot ,finished 10th and won stage eight, said FDJ sponsorship director Thierry Huguenin. Nestle Waters' sponsorship manager, Francoise Bresson, said it spends €3 million to €5 million each year to have its Vittel brand plastered over the end of each day's stage, generating publicity in France and overseas that otherwise might have cost at least 10 times that amount to buy. The Tour makes a profit for its owners, ASO, but the company will not say how much. "For its 100th edition, it is in rude health," Bresson said in an interview about the Tour. "Doping has no or little impact. The sporting exploits dominate and the festive dimension. In these times of crisis, there aren't that many free sporting events which are a pleasure for the spectators." Doping also is not new to the Tour. The intense physicality of the race long encouraged it.

As far back as 1924, the Pelissier brothers, Henri and Francis, were telling famed French journalist Albert Londres that they dosed up on cocaine, chloroform and assorted pills. "In short," said Francis, "we run on 'dynamite'." Armstrong might have scoffed at that. Dynamite? Amateurs. By 1999, when he and his US Postal Service teammates hijacked the Tour, riders had become lab rats. Drops of testosterone, shots of cortisone, human growth hormone to help build muscle. Transfusions of blood and injections of erythropoietin, a hormone that stimulates the body to produce oxygen-bearing red blood cells and is used in medicine to treat anaemia. Engrained, widespread and relatively risk-free because drug testing was so poor, doping became more of a necessity than a choice in professional cycling. Scientists estimated at least 80 per cent of riders in the Grand Tours of France, Spain and Italy were manipulating their blood.

It became as routine as "saying we have to have air in our tyres or water in our bottles", Armstrong told interviewer Oprah Winfrey this January, when he finally confessed, after years of lawyer-backed denials, that he doped for all seven of his Tour wins from 1999 to 2005. Those titles have now been stripped from him and not reattributed, blowing a hole in the Tour's roll of honour as large as that left by the second world war. Armstrong, his doping peers and cycling's woeful failure to unmask them earlier blew even larger holes in the credibility of the sport and its administrators. The ultimately bogus tale of the cancer survivor who conquered the Tour with willpower and sweat had drawn new interest and fans to what had mainly been a European sport and its most famous race. Now that the US Anti-Doping Agency has jimmied open the secrets Armstrong kept hidden for so long, how many fans have been lost to cycling forever? "What is disappointing is the amount of people that say, 'You know, look, I've lost faith in it, I don't believe in it anymore. Because, you know, fool me once, fool you.

Fool me twice, fool me',"Jaimie Fuller, owner of sportswear manufacturer and cycling sponsor Skins, said. "People really felt let down about the fact that it just keeps biting us." How many riders are still doping? Only they know. Cycling's anti-doping programme is more believable than it was when Armstrong was cheating with impunity. Cycling teams, race organisers, the sport's governing body and even the riders fund the drug testing that is arguably more rigorous than that faced by professionals in tennis, the NBA, the NFL or Major League Baseball. Riders in the top tier were tested an average of nearly 12 times in 2012. But no one is foolish enough to say all dopers have been weeded out. In May at Italy's Grand Tour, the Giro d'Italia, Vini Fantini teammates Mauro Santambrogio and Danilo Di Luca tested positive for EPO. Alexander Serebryakov also was positive for EPO in a test in March. Another Russian, Nikita Novikov, tested positive for a muscle-building drug in May.

Their teams - Euskaltel-Euskadi and Vacansoleil - are among the 22 on the Tour de France. Optimists say such incidents show cycling is now doing more than other sports to confound cheats, not that it has more cheats. "You only find what you look for," Tour director Christian Prudhomme said. "When the police catch thieves, we congratulate them. When cycling catches cheats, people say, 'There are still things going on'." Fuller said: "If I had to put numbers on it, my intuition tells me that six or seven years ago it was probably 90 per cent of the peloton [that was doping], 80 to 90 per cent. Today? I don't know, might be 20 per cent, might be 15 per cent. Is that good progress? Yes. Is it enough? No." Some sponsors have bailed out. Dutch lender Rabobank ended 17 years of sponsorship last October, pulling €15 million per year from the team that bore its name. The bank said it was no longer convinced that cycling can clean up.

Carmaker Nissan disassociated its name from another team that used to employ Johan Bruyneel, Armstrong's mentor identified by Usada and his ex-teammates as one of the organisers of systematic doping on their US Postal and Discovery Channel squads. The HTC-Highroad team folded at the end of 2011. Owner Bob Stapleton said the investigations into Armstrong and into Alberto Contador, the Spanish rider stripped of his victory at the 2010 Tour for failing doping controls, featured in all his discussions with potential sponsors. "This has been a hard period for cycling, anyone who denies that is off their rocker," said Jonathan Vaughters, a former US Postal teammate of Armstrong's who now runs the Garmin-Sharp cycling team. "The bad news has hit and hit hard, and we've had to deal with it. "It should have been dealt with a decade ago. It wasn't, so we had to deal with it now. And that's good. I think that sends the correct message, to fans, to the athletes, to the teams that, 'You know what? Even if you think you might get away with it, you won't, because it can come back 10 years later and still find you'.

"The sport has been forced to digest the reality of its past and that's good," he added. "Sometimes you need surgery to get the wound to heal and I think that's been the case here." Associated Press History - Great moments, archives - Tour de France 2013 2007 Great moments in the history of the Tour The line between insanity and genius is said to be a fine one, and in early 20thcentury France, anyone envisaging a near-2,500-km-long cycle race across the country would have been widely viewed as unhinged. But that didn’t stop Géo Lefèvre, a journalist with L’Auto magazine at the time, from proceeding with his inspired plan. His editor, Henri Desgrange, was bold enough to believe in the idea and to throw his backing behind the Tour de France. And so it was that, on 1 July 1903, sixty pioneers set out on their bicycles from Montgeron. After six mammoth stages (Nantes - Paris, 471 km!), only 21 “routiers”, led by Maurice Garin, arrived at the end of this first epic.

Having provoked a mixture of astonishment and admiration, le Tour soon won over the sporting public and the roadside crowds swelled. The French people took to their hearts this unusual event which placed their towns, their countryside and, since 1910, even their mountains, in the spotlight. Le Tour has always moved with the times. Like France as a whole, it benefited from the introduction of paid holidays from 1936; it has lived through wars, and then savoured the “trente glorieuses” period of economic prosperity while enjoying the heydays of Coppi, Bobet, Anquetil and Poulidor; it has opened itself up to foreign countries with the onset of globalisation, and now finds itself at the forefront of the debate on the malaise afflicting world sport in general. Over a hundred years after its inception, le Tour continues to gain strength from its experience. Close up © Presse Sports Bernard Hinault The French cyclist who has won the most races won his first Tour de France in 1978 while he was still a rookie in the Grande Boucle. Hinault won the Tour four times (79, 81, 82 and 85).

Nicknamed “The Badger”, this fierce rider retired after the 1986 Tour, during which he supported his team mate Greg LeMond.

Question: Which sporting event, first held in July 1903, was the idea of Geo Lefevre, a journalist on L'Auto newspaper?
Answer: TOUR DE FRANCE