A newspaper stunt became cycling's hardest stage race
In 1903, struggling paper L'Auto invented a multi-day bike race around France to sell copies. Maurice Garin won the first edition; cheating nearly killed the second. Today about twenty-one stages and thirty-five hundred kilometres still crown the yellow jersey.
The Tour de France is an annual men's multi-stage road race held mostly in France, the earliest of cycling’s three Grand Tours and widely treated as the premier one, beside Italy’s Giro and Spain’s Vuelta. First run in 1903 to boost L'Auto—ancestor of L'Équipe—it has returned nearly every year except wartime gaps from 1915 to 1918 and 1940 to 1946. Modern editions usually pack twenty-one day stages into twenty-three or twenty-four days, covering roughly thirty-five hundred kilometres, alternating clockwise and counterclockwise circuits, with Alps, Pyrenees, time trials, and—since 1975, save 2024—a Paris finish on the Champs-Élysées.
Cumulative time decides the general classification leader in yellow. Green marks the sprinters' points fight; polka dots crown climbers; white honors riders under twenty-six; teams race on their top three finishers each day. About twenty to twenty-three squads of eight usually start. A women's Tour lineage ran under other names from 1984 to 2009; Tour de France Femmes began in 2022 after intervening one- and two-day La Course events.
The idea surfaced at a November 20, 1902 crisis meeting when cycling journalist Géo Lefèvre, then twenty-six, proposed a six-day track-style race across France. Henri Desgrange trimmed the first plan, cut fees, and offered factory-wage daily allowances plus a twelve-thousand-franc first prize. The start left Montgeron at 3:16 p.m. on July 1, 1903. Garin averaged about 25.68 kilometres per hour; last-place Arsène Millocheau trailed by more than sixty-four hours. Circulation doubled.
Violence and fraud in 1904 made Desgrange declare the Tour finished—until a longer daylight schedule returned. He experimented with points scoring from 1906 to 1912, banned pacing help for years, resisted freewheel gears and metal rims, and in 1930 forced national teams onto plain yellow bikes. Desgrange died in 1940; Jacques Goddet took over, and racing resumed in 1947.
Source: Tour de France
