Tour de France
Local name Le Tour de France
Region France and nearby countries
Date July 7 to 29 (2007)
Type Stage Race (Grand Tour)
General Director Christian Prudhomme
History
First race 1903
Number of races 93 (2006)
First winner Maurice Garin
Most wins Lance Armstrong (7) 1999-2005
Latest winner Floyd Landis 2006 (Contested)
Most career Yellow Jerseys Eddy Merckx (96) (111 overall incl. half stages)
Most career stage wins Eddy Merckx (34)
The Tour de France is the world's best-known cycling race, a three week long road race that covers a circuit of most areas around France, and sometimes neighbouring countries. The race is broken into stages from one town to another, each of which is an individual race. The time taken by cyclists to complete each stage becomes a cumulative total in order 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 and the longest of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) calendar at three weeks each. 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, known even to those not generally interested in cycling.
As with most cycling races, competitors enter as part of a team. The race normally consists of 20-22 teams of 9 riders each. Traditionally, entry in the Tour de France is extended to teams by invitation only, with invitations being granted only to the best of the world's professional teams. Each team, known by the name of its primary sponsor, wears distinctive jerseys and assists one another, and has access to a shared 'team car' (a mobile version of the pit crews seen in auto racing). However, most scoring is individual, and no substitution is permitted.
History and background
The Tour was founded as a publicity event for the newspaper L'Auto (predecessor to the present l'Équipe) by its editor, Henri Desgrange, to surpass the Paris-Brest et retour ride (also sponsored by L'Auto).[1] The idea for a round-France stage race came from one of Desgrange's youngest journalists, Georges Lefèvre, with whom Desgrange had lunch at what is now the TGI Friday bar in Montmartre in Paris on November 20, 1902. L'Auto announced the race on January 19, 1903. It proved a great success for the newspaper; increasing circulation from 25,000 before the 1903 Tour to 65,000 after it; in 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.[2] Today, the Tour is organized 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.
The Early Tour had only 6 stages and there were not breaks for sleep. The riders were expected to ride through the night.[3]
The Tour is a "stage race" divided into a number of stages, each being a race held over one day. The time each rider takes to complete each stage is recorded and accumulated. Riders are often awarded time bonuses as well as their prizes for finishing well. Riders who finish in the same group are awarded the same time. Two riders are said to have finished in the same group if there is less than the length of a bike between them. A rider who crashes in the last three kilometres is given the time of the group in which he would have otherwise finished. The ranking of riders by accumulated time is known as the General Classification. The winner is the rider with the least accumulated time after the final day. It is possible to win the overall race without winning any individual daily stages (which Greg LeMond did in 1990). Winning a stage is considered a great achievement, more prestigious than winning most single day races. Although the number of stages has varied, the modern Tour has consisted of about 20 stages and a total length of 3,000 to 4,000km (1,864 to 2,486 miles). There are subsidiary competitions within the race (see below), some with distinctive jerseys for the best rider.
Today, the Tour is contested by teams heavily backed by commercial sponsors but the event began for individuals; slipstreaming and other team tactics were savagely condemned by Desgrange and he accepted their inevitability only during the 1920s. Even when commercial teams had become commonplace in other events, the Tour was still contested by national teams from 1930 to 1961 and again in 1967 and 1968, in both cases because the organisers felt that commercial sponsors were detracting from the sporting purity of the race.
Most stages take place in France though it is common to have stages in nearby countries, such as Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Great Britain (visited in 1974 and 1994 and start of the 2007 tour). The three weeks usually includes two rest days, sometimes used to transport riders long distances between stages.
In recent years, the Tour has been preceded by a short individual time trial (1 to 15km) called the prologue. Since 1975, the traditional finish of the Tour has been in Paris on the Champs-Élysées, the only time the city's most symbolic avenue is closed other than for the processions of July 14, the national holiday. Prior to 1975, the race finished at the Parc des Princes stadium in western Paris.
Stages of the Tour can be flat, undulating or mountainous. They are normally contested by all the riders starting together with the first over the line being accorded the victory, but they can also be run as races against the clock for individuals or teams. The time-trials often have a very significant effect on the overall outcome because they separate riders by substantial margins, whereas in some conventional stages the participants finish packed together or in a few large groups. The overall winner is almost always a master of the mountain stages and time trials, rather than the more straightforward flat stages.
The race alternates each year between clockwise and counter-clockwise circuits of France. For example, 2005 was a clockwise direction Tour — visiting the Alps first and then the Pyrenees — while the 2006 race went in the opposite direction. For the first half of its history, the Tour was a near-continuous loop, often running close to France's borders. Rules intended to restrict drug-taking have, since the 1960s, limited the overall distance, the daily distance and the number of days raced consecutively, and the modern Tour frequently skips between one city or one region and another.
A feature of the Tour almost from the start has been those stages which take place in the mountains, which are physically very arduous to ride at speed. The roads that climb them are now in good condition but at first they were no more than tracks of hard-packed earth on which riders frequently had to get off and push their bicycles. Even into the 1950s and 1960s, the road at the summit of mountains could be potholed and strewn with small rocks, and falls and serious injuries were quite common.
Mountain passes such as the Tourmalet in the Pyrenees have been made famous by the Tour de France and they attract large numbers of amateur cyclists every day in summer, anxious to test their own speed and fitness on roads used by the champions. The physical difficulty of climbs is established in a complex formula that rates a mountain by its steepness, its length and its position on the course. The easiest climbs are graded 4, most of the hardest as 1 and the exceptional (such as the Tourmalet) as unclassified, or "hors-catégorie".
Some recur almost annually. The most famous hors-catégorie peaks include the Col du Tourmalet, Mont Ventoux, Col du Galibier, the climb to the ski resort of Hautacam, and Alpe d'Huez.
From 1984 to 2003 there was a race called La Grande Boucle Féminine Internationale, often considered Tour de France for women.
Tour directors
1903 to 1939 Henri Desgrange
1947 to 1961 Jacques Goddet
1962 to 1986 Jacques Goddet and Félix Lévitan
1987 to 1988 Jean-François Naquet-Radiguet
1988 to 1989 Jean-Pierre Courcol
1989 to 2005 Jean-Marie Leblanc
2005 to present Christian Prudhomme
Overall leader
The maillot jaune (yellow jersey), which is worn by the general classification (or overall time) leader, is the most prized. It is awarded by calculating the total combined race time up to that point for each rider. The rider with the lowest total time is the leader, and at the end of the event is declared the overall winner of the Tour. Desgrange added the yellow jersey in 1919 because he wanted the race leader to wear something distinctive and because the pages of his magazine, L'Auto, were yellow.[8] Additional time bonuses, in the form of a number of seconds to be deducted from the rider's overall time, are available to the first 3 riders to finish the stage or cross an intermediate sprint (see below). As of 2005, the first 3 places to finish are awarded bonuses of 20, 12, and 8 seconds respectively, while the first 3 places at intermediate sprints are awarded 6, 4, and 2 seconds. However, these bonuses are rarely significant enough to cause major upset in the classement géneral (General Classification).
Sometimes a rider takes the overall lead during a stage and gets sufficiently far ahead of the yellow jersey wearer his current lead is greater than his time deficit to the yellow jersey in the general classification; when this happens, this rider may be referred to as being "the yellow jersey on the road". Obviously, no jerseys can be exchanged in this situation, which is why in some other languages the leading rider is referred to as the "virtual yellow".
Mass-start stages
A collected peloton in the 2005 Tour.
In an ordinary stage, all riders start simultaneously and share the road. The real start (départ réel) usually is some 2 to 5 km (1 to 3 miles) away from the starting point, and is announced by the Tour director in the officials' car waving a white flag.
Riders are permitted to touch (but not push or nudge) and to shelter behind each other, in slipstream (see drafting). The rider who crosses the finish line first wins. In the first week of the Tour, this often leads to spectacular mass sprints.
While only finishers are awarded sprint points, all riders finishing in an identifiable group (with no significant gap to the rider in front, as determined by race officials) are deemed to have finished the stage in the same time as the lead rider of that group for overall classification purposes. This avoids what would otherwise be dangerous mass sprints. It is not unusual for the entire field to finish in a single group, taking some time to cross the line, but being credited with the same time as the stage winner.
Arrival of the 2005 Tour de France in Mulhouse.
Time bonuses are awarded at some intermediate sprints and stage finishes to the first three riders who reach the specified point. These bonuses generally are a maximum of 20 seconds, and can allow a good sprinter to qualify for the yellow jersey early in the Tour.
Riders who crash within the last 3 kilometres of the stage are credited with the finishing time of the group that they were with when they crashed [1]PDF (223 KiB). This prevents riders from being penalised for accidents that do not accurately reflect their performance on the stage as a whole given that crashes in the final kilometre can be huge pileups that are hard to avoid for a rider farther back in the peloton. A crashed sprinter inside the final kilometre will not win the sprint, but avoids being penalised in the overall classification. The final kilometre is indicated in the race course by a red triangular pennant - known as the flamme rouge - raised above the road.
Some ordinary stages take place in the mountains, almost always causing major shifts in the General Classification. On ordinary stages that do not have extended mountain climbs, most riders can manage to stay together in the peloton all the way to the finish; during mountain stages, however, it is not uncommon for some riders to lose 40 minutes to the winner of the stage. The so called mountain stages are often the deciding factor in determining the winner of the Tour de France. With the exception of the now traditional finish at the Champs-Elysées all famous stages, like Alpe d'Huez and Mont Ventoux, are mountain stages, and these often bring out the most spectators who line up the roads by the thousands to cheer and encourage the cyclists and support their favorites.
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