The Tour de France started in 1903 and is the world's largest cycle race. It is a 23-day, 21-stage bicycle road race usually run over more than 3,500 kilometres (2,200 mi). The route, which varies from year to year, traces a circuit around most areas of France, and often passes into neighbouring countries. The race is broken into stages from one town to another, each of which is an individual race. The time taken to complete each stage is added to a cumulative total for each rider, to decide the outright winner at the end of the Tour.
Together with the Giro d'Italia (Tour of Italy) and Vuelta a España (Tour of Spain), the Tour de France is one of the three major stage races. While the other two European Grand Tours are well known in Europe, they are relatively unknown outside the continent, and even the UCI World Cycling Championship is familiar only to cycling enthusiasts. The Tour de France, in contrast, has long been a household sporting name around the globe, even to those not interested in cycling.[citation needed]
As with most cycling races, competitors enter as part of a team. The race consists of 20 to 22 teams with nine riders each. Traditionally, entry is by invitation, invitations granted only to the best professional teams. The organizers recently have utilized UCI points (based upon team riders/results) to determine which teams would gain automatic entry into the tour and then typically reserve 2-4 slots to large teams or French continental teams not able to race in the tour based upon their individual team results. Each team, known by the name of its sponsor, wears a distinctive jersey, and team members assist one another and have access to a shared team car (a mobile version of pit crews in car racing).
The 2008 Tour de France began on July 5 and will run until July 27.
The dominant sports newspaper in France at the end of the 19th century was Le Vélo. Like other sports papers, it mixed sports reports with news and political comment. France was split socially over the guilt or innocence of a soldier, Alfred Dreyfus, who had been found guilty of selling secrets to the Germans. Le Vélo stood for Dreyfus's innocence while some of its biggest advertisers, notably the owner of the Dion car works, believed him guilty[1]. Angry scenes followed between the advertisers and the editor, Pierre Giffard, and the advertisers withdrew their support and started a rival paper.
It was to promote sales of the rival L'Auto, ancestor to the present l'Équipe, that the Tour de France began. It was a publicity measure to outdo the Paris-Brest et retour race organised by Giffard. The idea for a round-France stage race came from L'Auto's chief cycling journalist, 26-year-old Géo Lefèvre[2]. He and the editor, Henri Desgrange then discussed it after lunch at what is now the TGI Friday bar in Montmartre in Paris on November 20, 1902[2]. L'Auto announced the race on January 19, 1903. The plan was a five-week tour from May 31 to July 5; however, this proved too daunting, with only 15 entrants, so Desgrange cut the length to 19 days, changed the date to run from July 1 to 19, and offered a daily allowance which attracted 60 entrants, including amateur characters, some unemployed, some simply adventurous. It was these that helped catch the public imagination[2].
The demanding nature of the race (with the average length of the six stages being 400km the riders were sometimes expected to ride into the night)[3], caught public imagination. The race was such a success for the newspaper that the circulation, 25,000 before the 1903 Tour, increased to 65,000 after it[2]; by 1908 the race boosted circulation past a quarter of a million, and during the 1923 Tour it was selling 500,000 copies a day. The record circulation claimed by Desgrange was 854,000, achieved during the 1933 Tour.[4]
No teams from Italy, Germany or Spain participated in the 1939 Tour de France due to the growing political tensions preceding World War II, and the race was not held again until 1947, although several other races were held in that period, see Tour de France during the Second World War.
Today, the Tour is organised by the Société du Tour de France, a subsidiary of Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), which is part of the media group that owns L'Équipe.
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