Tour de France

The Tour de France (French pronunciation: [tuʁ də fʁɑ̃s]) is an annual men's multiple-stage road cycling race held primarily in France. It is the oldest and most prestigious of the three Grand Tours, which include the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a España.

The race was first organized in 1903 to increase sales for the newspaper L'Auto (which was an ancestor of L'Équipe) and has been held annually since, except when it was not held from 1915 to 1918 and 1940 to 1946 due to the two World Wars. As the Tour gained prominence and popularity, the race was lengthened and gained more international participation. The Tour is a UCI World Tour event, which means that the teams that compete in the race are mostly UCI WorldTeams, with the exception of the teams that the organizers invite.

Traditionally, the bulk of the race is held in July. While the route changes each year, the format of the race stays the same and includes time trials, passage through the mountain chains of the Pyrenees and the Alps, and, from 1975 to 2023, a finish on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. The modern editions of the Tour de France consist of 21 day-long stages over a 23- or 24-day period and cover approximately 3,500 kilometres (2,200 mi) total. Each year, the race alternates between clockwise and counterclockwise circuits of France.

Twenty to twenty-three teams of eight riders usually compete. All of the stages are timed to the finish, and the riders' times are compounded with their previous stage times. The rider with the lowest cumulative time is the leader of the race and wears the yellow jersey. While the general classification attracts the most attention, there are other contests held within the Tour: the points classification for the sprinters (green jersey), the mountains classification for the climbers (polka-dot jersey), young rider classification for riders under the age of 26 (white jersey), and the team classification, based on the first three finishers from each team on each stage. Achieving a stage win also provides prestige, often accomplished by a team's sprint specialist or a rider taking part in a breakaway.

A similar race for women was held under various names between 1984 and 2009. Following criticism by campaigners and the professional women's peloton, a one/two-day race (La Course by Le Tour de France) was held between 2014 and 2021. The first Tour de France Femmes was held in 2022.

The Tour de France was created in 1903. The roots of the Tour de France trace back to the emergence of two rival sports newspapers in the country. On one hand was Le Vélo, the first and the largest daily sports newspaper in France, on the other was L'Auto, which had been set up by journalists and businesspeople including Comte Jules-Albert de Dion, Adolphe Clément, and Édouard Michelin in 1899. The rival paper emerged following disagreements over the Dreyfus Affair. De Dion, Clément and Michelin were particularly concerned with Le Vélo—which reported more than cycling—because its financial backer was one of their commercial rivals, the Darracq company. De Dion believed Le Vélo gave Darracq too much attention and him too little. De Dion was rich and could afford to indulge his whims. The new newspaper appointed Henri Desgrange as the editor. He was a prominent cyclist and owner with Victor Goddet of the velodrome at the Parc des Princes.

L'Auto sales were lower than the rival it was intended to surpass, leading to a crisis meeting on 20 November 1902 on the middle floor of L'Auto's office at 10 Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, Paris. The last to speak was the chief cycling journalist, a 26-year-old named Géo Lefèvre. 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.

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 the 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 competitors had 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 to 19 July, and offered a daily allowance to those who averaged at least 20 kilometres per hour (12 mph) on all the stages, equivalent to 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, and some simply adventurous.