Speed Read Tour de France: The History, Strategies and Intrigue Behind the World's Greatest Bicycle Race 9780760364482, 0760364486

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
INTRODUCTION
SECTION 1 RACE STRUCTURE
The Course
The Peloton
Flat Stages
Climbing Stages
Time Trials
General Classification
Rules, Bonuses & Penalties
A Women’s Tour de France?
A Tour Racer’s Typical Day
Glossary
SECTION 2 TOUR HISTORY
Origins
Evolution
Organizers
Winners & Rivals
Famous Stages
Best Climbers
Top Sprinters
Crashes & Fatalities
Hinault & LeMond: Teammates, but Rivals
Glossary
SECTION 3 TECHNOLOGY
Bikes & Materials
Equipment
Apparel, Helmets & Glasses
Training & Equipment
Team Infrastructure
Race Communications
Radio, Film & TV
Photo Finish & Race Data
How the Tour Reaches You
Glossary
SECTION 4 TEAMS & RACING
Team Sponsors
Goals
Team Composition
Team Managers
Support Staff
Team Tactics
Attacks & Breakaways
The Story of Team Sky
Glossary
SECTION 5 CONTESTS
Yellow Jersey
Green Jersey
Polka-Dot Jersey
White Jersey
Team Race
Stage Winners
Rewards
Age Is Not a Barrier
Glossary
SECTION 6 ON THE ROAD
Le Grand Départ
Stage Towns
Logistics
Tour Caravan
Media
Spectators
Popular Riders
Nicknames
Story of Raymond Poulidor
Glossary
SECTION 7 THE DARK SIDE
Anti-Doping
Doping Scandals
Dangerous Sprinters
Drafting Vehicles
Old-Style Cheating
Collusion
Motorized Doping
The Lance Armstrong Story
Glossary
INDEX
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z

Citation preview

SPEED READ TOUR DE FRANCE

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© 2019 Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc. Text © 2019 John Wilcockson First published in 2019 by Motorbooks, an imprint of The Quarto Group, 100 Cummings Center, Suite 265D, Beverly, MA 01915 USA. T (978) 282-9590 F (978) 283-2742 www.QuartoKnows.com All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the copyright owners. All images in this book have been reproduced with the knowledge and prior consent of the artists concerned, and no responsibility is accepted by producer, publisher, or printer for any infringement of copyright or otherwise, arising from the contents of this publication. Every effort has been made to ensure that credits accurately comply with information supplied. We apologize for any inaccuracies that may have occurred and will resolve inaccurate or missing information in a subsequent reprinting of the book. Motorbooks titles are also available at discount for retail, wholesale, promotional, and bulk purchase. For details, contact the Special Sales Manager by email at specialsales@ quarto.com or by mail at The Quarto Group, Attn: Special Sales Manager, 100 Cummings Center Suite 265D, Beverly, MA 01915 USA. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN: 978-0-7603-6447-5 Digital edition published in 2019 eISBN: 978-0-7603-6448-2 LLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wilcockson, John, author. Title: Speed read : Tour de France : the history, strategies, and intrigue behind the world’s greatest bicycle race / John Wilcockson. Description: Minneapolis, Minnesota : Motorbooks, 2019. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018050940 | ISBN 9780760364475 (pbk. + flaps) Subjects: LCSH: Tour de France (Bicycle race) | Bicycle racing--France. Classification: LCC GV1049.2.T68 W555 2019 | DDC 796.6/20944--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018050940 Acquiring Editor: Zack Miller Project Manager: Alyssa Bluhm Series Creative Director: Laura Drew Cover/Page Design: Laura Drew Illustrations: Chris Rathbone Printed in China

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SPEED READ TOUR DE FRANCE THE HISTORY, STRATEGIES AND INTRIGUE BEHIND THE WORLD’S GREATEST BICYCLE RACE JOHN WILCOCKSON

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INTRODUCTION

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TOUR HISTORY Origins Evolution Organizers Winners & Rivals Famous Stages Best Climbers Top Sprinters Crashes & Fatalities Hinault & LeMond: Teammates, but Rivals Glossary

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TECHNOLOGY

SECTION 3

The Course The Peloton Flat Stages Climbing Stages Time Trials General Classification Rules, Bonuses & Penalties A Women’s Tour de France? A Tour Racer’s Typical Day Glossary

SECTION 4

SECTION 2

SECTION 1

RACE STRUCTURE

Bikes & Materials Equipment Apparel, Helmets & Glasses Training & Equipment Team Infrastructure Race Communications Radio, Film & TV Photo Finish & Race Data How the Tour Reaches You Glossary

54 56 58 60 62 64 66 68 70 72

TEAMS & RACING Team Sponsors Goals Team Composition Team Managers Support Staff Team Tactics Attacks & Breakaways The Story of Team Sky Glossary

76 78 80 82 84 86 88 90 92

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Yellow Jersey Green Jersey Polka-Dot Jersey White Jersey Team Race Stage Winners Rewards Age Is Not a Barrier Glossary

96 98 100 102 104 106 108 110 112

SECTION 7

SECTION 5

4 6

Anti-Doping Doping Scandals Dangerous Sprinters Drafting Vehicles Old-Style Cheating Collusion Motorized Doping The Lance Armstrong Story Glossary

138 140 142 144 146 148 150 152 154

INDEX

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ON THE ROAD

SECTION 6

0

THE DARK SIDE

CONTESTS

Le Grand Départ Stage Towns Logistics Tour Caravan Media Spectators Popular Riders Nicknames Story of Raymond Poulidor Glossary

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INTRODUCTION The Tour de France is the most-watched annual sports event in the world. More than half a million spectators line the roadside every day in the threeweek race, while a daily average of 166 million people watch the race on television in one hundred countries. The estimated total viewership of 3.5 billion is similar to that of the Summer Olympics and soccer’s World Cup— though their maximum viewership on a single day was 593 million for the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies and 695 million for the 2014 World Cup final in Brazil. The Tour de France, often regarded as one of the most demanding athletic contests ever invented, takes place on closed roads and has up to six hours of racing per day through some of the world’s most beautiful landscapes. The winner is the rider with the lowest accumulated time for the twenty-one separate stages of racing. The Tour was founded in 1903 by a French sports newspaper and was originally held on a course that connected six major cities in France, starting and finishing in Paris. The Tour still finishes in Paris every year, but sometimes has several days of racing in nearby countries. By visiting every part of France over the years, the Tour has become a national institution, usually attended by the French president. It has been held every year except for a four-year break during World War I and a seven-year hiatus for World War II. The Tour, held in July, is the centerpiece of the professional cycling season, which starts in January with Australia’s Tour Down Under and ends in October at China’s Tour of Guangxi. Only the very best professional teams (with eight riders per team) are selected to compete at the Tour. Its most famous competitors are the five-time winners Jacques Anquetil and Bernard Hinault of France, Eddy Merckx of Belgium, and Miguel Induráin of Spain.

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TOUR DE FRANCE 7

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RACE STRUCTURE The Course The Peloton Flat Stages Climbing Stages Time Trials General Classification Rules, Bonuses & Penalties A Women’s Tour de France? A Tour Racer’s Typical Day Glossary

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RACE STRUCTURE THE COURSE One of the greatest attractions of the Tour de France is that the course changes every year, visiting different towns, different terrain, and, sometimes, different countries. Indeed, at this point in the race’s history, the organizers like to alternate each Tour’s opening day between France one year and a nearby country the next. The only parameters for the Tour route are a maximum distance of around 3,500 kilometers, twenty-one separate stages of racing, a maximum distance of 240 kilometers for any stage, and two mandatory rest days. If you look at a map of any recent Tour, you will see that very few stages finish and start in the same place. The “gap” between stages is called a transfer, with riders being transported by their team buses from a stage finish to their overnight hotel and then to the next day’s start location—there’s a two-hour travel limit for transfers. To add variety to the race, the organizers strive for a balance between “flat” and climbing stages. In 2018, for instance, the Tour consisted of eight flat stages, five hilly stages, six mountain stages, and two time trials (races against the clock)—one for teams, one for individuals. To spice things up in the opening week, besides the flat stages suitable for sprinters, there were two stages with steep uphill finishes: one stage featuring gnarly sections of cobblestones and a time trial for teams. The one constant for the Tour route is that the final stage finishes in Paris. From 1903 to 1967, the race ended in the Parc des Princes stadium on its velodrome track (similar to an Olympic running track but with banked turns). When that track was demolished (and replaced with a soccer stadium on the same site), the Tour finish moved across Paris to another outdoor velodrome, in Vincennes, where it was held from 1968 to 1974. It was in 1975 that the final stage was relocated to the Champs-Élysées, in the center of Paris, which is now its permanent home.

FUN FACT The organizers announce the details of the following year’s Tour de France at a flashy presentation in Paris every October, but they actually start to map out the course three years ahead of its unveiling.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT The first Tour to start outside of France was in 1954, when the Dutch city of Amsterdam hosted the start of the first stage that traversed the Netherlands into Belgium and was watched by tens of thousands of spectators seeing the race for the first time.

KEY PERSON Frenchman Thierry Gouvenou, a former Tour de France racer, is the current technical director of Tour de France. Responsible for designing the course, he has added spice to the Tour by seeking out new finish locations and previously little-known climbs.

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2016 TOUR DE FRANCE

TOUR DE FRANCE 11

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RACE STRUCTURE THE PELOTON Throughout the cycling world, the French word peloton is used to describe the main group of racers. Since 2018, the Tour peloton has consisted of 22 eight-man teams—eighteen from the Union Cycliste Internationale WorldTour (the big-league teams that qualify automatically) and four from UCI ProSeries ranks (smaller teams invited by the organizers, usually including three from France)—giving a starting field of 176. For the thirty years prior to 2018, the race had nine-man teams, which made up a field of 198 riders. The biggest field at the Tour came in 1986, when there were ten-man teams, with 210 starters and 132 finishers. The recent trend to a smaller peloton is an attempt to reduce the number of crashes. Newcomers to the sport sometimes wonder why the riders generally remain in one large group. The generic answer is that being in the slipstream of others can reduce the workload by as much as 40 percent, which enables riders to conserve energy until they have to make major efforts— whether that’s working hard for the team, climbing a hill, making a finishing sprint, or any number of other tasks. Regardless of how riders finish each day—together or many minutes apart—they all start in one peloton the following day. To become a Tour de France competitor takes many years. A rider first progresses through the junior (under-eighteen) and elite amateur (under-twenty-three) ranks before becoming a full professional; and only the very best riders are signed by teams that compete at the Tour. To obtain a UCI WorldTour license, teams have to follow strict regulations on administrative capability, financial solvency, competitive eligibility, and ethical conduct. To remain in the top flight, the teams have to do well in the annual UCI WorldTour point rankings—in which points are awarded to the top sixty finishers in all of the thirty-seven WorldTour races; the Tour de France is the highest-scoring event, with 1,000 points going to the winner.

FUN FACT Although only a select few professional riders compete in the Tour de France, thousands of amateur cyclists each year ride L’Étape du Tour, which is contested over a single Tour mountain stage one week before the main event.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Five years after Jonathan Boyer was the first American to ride the Tour (in 1981), a team sponsored by the US convenience store chain 7-Eleven became the first USbased squad to take part. For its 1986 debut, the team was made up of eight Americans, a Canadian, and a Mexican.

KEY PERSON The late Dutch cycling official Hein Verbruggen, who was president of the UCI from 1991 to 2005, created the financial and logistical structure for the UCI WorldTour and its elite teams.

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TOUR DE FRANCE 13

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RACE STRUCTURE FLAT STAGES Among the most dramatic moments of any Tour de France are the fulltilt, near-50-miles-per-hour mass sprints at the end of the “flat” stages. Most of the teams have a designated sprinter who can contest these maddash efforts, with the fastest finishers given super-star status for their often-spectacular victories. The most prestigious flat stage is the final one on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, but winning any of the Tour’s eight or nine flat stages brings media glory. Most of these stages are in the Tour’s opening week, with fewer such days in the second and third weeks; and even flat stages can feature a few short climbs, so the heavier-built sprinters (and their teams) have to work hard even to contest the final sprint. Yet even completely flat stages are no guarantee that all the top sprinters will remain in the peloton until the finish. In fact, some flat stages—when crosswinds or crashes can shred the peloton—have had a major influence on the outcome of the Tour. That was the case with the opening road stage of the 2015 Tour, which started in the Netherlands and was very flat. The highest point on the 166-kilometer course across the Dutch polders was just 6 meters (20 feet) above sea level. Halfway through the stage, a rainstorm blew in from the North Sea, several riders crashed on the slick roads, and strong crosswinds combined with a fierce pace set by two of the sprinters’ teams split the peloton apart. Of the day’s 198 starters, only twenty-four finished together at the front, including pre-race favorite Chris Froome; there was a gap of almost 90 seconds to the sixty-strong chase group, which included Nairo Quintana and four other favorites. Three weeks later, Froome won the Tour over runner-up Quintana by just 72 seconds— which meant that the race was effectively decided on the flattest stage.

FUN FACT In the mad dash to the finish line of flat stages, sprinters have been clocked at speeds as high as 75 kilometers per hour (or 47 miles per hour) over the final 200 meters.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT The fastest road stage in Tour history came in 1999, when the 194.5-kilometer (121-mile) stage 4 from Laval to Blois, in the Loire Valley, was raced at an average speed of 50.355 kilometers per hour (31.289 miles per hour) and won by Italian sprinter Mario Cipollini.

KEY PERSON Great Britain’s Mark Cavendish has won more flat stages than any other Tour de France sprinter. By 2018, he had won thirty stages, which is eight more than the previous record held by Frenchman André Darrigade, who took twenty-two bouquets in the 1950s.

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TOUR DE FRANCE 15

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RACE STRUCTURE CLIMBING STAGES The mountain stages of the Tour de France are the most exciting ones for cycling fans, and the most grueling ones for the riders. On mountain passes that can take up to an hour to climb, the peloton splits and the strongest contestants emerge at the front, giving roadside fans a close-up view of riders battling the steep grades. France has five mountain ranges: the Alps in the southeast, the Pyrenees in the southwest, the Massif Central in the middle of the country, and the Jura and Vosges in the northeast. This is where most of the Tour’s climbing stages take place, although the race sometimes has summit finishes on outliers, such as Mont Ventoux in the south, the Belgian Ardennes to the north, or the hills of Brittany to the west. A climbing stage in the Alps or Pyrenees is traditionally about 200 kilometers (125 miles) in distance over four major passes, with the finish in a valley town. Such stages favor riders who not only have climbing strength but also great bike-handling skills that help them gain time on the long, tortuous downhills. The modern trend is for a mountaintop finish preceded by a couple of other major climbs. And, most recently, the organizers have included one or two much shorter mountain stages. In 2018, for example, stage 17 in the Pyrenees was only 65 kilometers (40 miles) in length, but featured over 3,000 meters (almost 10,000 feet) of vertical climbing on three mountain passes, with the finish at 2,215 meters (7,267 feet) above sea level. Thinner air at high altitudes makes the climbing even more challenging for riders needing oxygen to fuel their efforts. On summit stage finishes, a team leader’s strongest teammates will take turns in setting a fierce pace on the lower slopes, putting the other competitors under pressure, before their leader attacks in the final kilometers in a bid to win the stage and/or gain time on his opponents.

FUN FACT On the steepest sections of long mountain descents, riders with the best bike-handling skills have been clocked at speeds as high as 120 kilometers per hour (75 miles per hour).

HISTORICAL TIDBIT On the first high mountain stage to take place in the Pyrenees, in 1910, while pushing his 40-pound bike up the Col d’Aubisque, a leading rider, upset with what was the day’s fourth mountain pass in a 14-hour stage, shouted at the race organizers: “Assassins! You are assassins!”

KEY PERSON Italian superstar Fausto Coppi dominated the climbing stages of the 1952 Tour, the first one to feature mountaintop stage finishes. Coppi won on all three summits, at L’Alpe d’Huez, Sestriere, and the Puy-de-Dôme, to clinch the overall title.

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TOUR DE FRANCE 17

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RACE STRUCTURE TIME TRIALS A time trial is called “the race of truth,” because it’s a pure test of athletic ability, power, and speed, in which individuals (or teams) race unassisted against the clock. The Tour has three types of time trials at the Tour: the prologue, an opening-day time trial of less than 8 kilometers (5 miles); the regular individual time trial that can be as long as 60 kilometers (37 miles) but is more generally between 20 and 40 kilometers (12 to 25 miles); and the team time trial, of a similar distance, in which each team’s eight riders start together and pace each other, with the time of their fifth rider across the line given as the team’s stage time. Except for prologues, when riders start at one-minute intervals, riders in longer individual time trials start up to three minutes apart. For these stages, riders start in reverse order of general classification, so the race leader (the Yellow Jersey) is the last one to start. If a rider is caught by one starting behind him, the slower rider is not allowed to sit in the other’s slipstream but is obligated to ride at least 25 meters behind him. Special aerodynamic bikes are used for time trials, usually with a full-disc rear wheel and triathlon-style handlebars that point forward to narrow the rider’s profile and improve the bike’s penetration through the air. Air resistance is the largest force a time trialist has to overcome, so teams do extensive wind-tunnel testing to ensure their riders’ positions on the bike are as aerodynamic as possible. Time trials are of great importance in determining the outcome of the Tour. For instance, in 2011, the day before the finish, Australian Cadel Evans was third overall, almost a minute behind race leader Andy Schleck of Luxembourg. Then, in stage 20, a 42.5-kilometer (26.4-mile) time trial, Evans defeated Schleck by 2 minutes, 38 seconds to win the Tour.

FUN FACT The fastest average speed in an individual time trial, 55.446 kilometers per hour (34.452 miles per hour), was set by Australian Rohan Dennis in the 13.8-kilometer (8.6-mile) opening stage of the 2015 Tour in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The fastest team time trial speed was also set by Australians, riding for the Orica-GreenEdge team—57.841 kilometers per hour (35.940 miles per hour)— on a 25-kilometer (15.5-mile) course at Nice in 2013.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT The Tour’s first-ever individual time trial, in 1934, was a 90kilometer (56-mile) stage from La Roche-sur-Yon to Nantes, won at an average speed of 35.5 kilometers per hour (22 miles per hour) by overall race winner Antonin Magne.

KEY PERSON Spanish cyclist Miguel Induráin won five consecutive Tours from 1991 through 1995, mainly thanks to his time-trial dominance.

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TOUR DE FRANCE 19

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RACE STRUCTURE GENERAL CLASSIFICATION All twenty-one stages of the Tour de France are separate races—with tremendous prestige attached to winning a stage—but the nucleus of the Tour is the General Classification (GC). After each stage, every rider’s finish time (less any time bonuses won and after any time penalties incurred) is added to his accumulated time from the previous stages to calculate his GC time. The rider with the lowest overall time is the overall leader, who wears the yellow jersey. When riders finish a stage in a separate group, they are given the same time as that group’s first man across the line. Should any rider be delayed in the final 3 kilometers (roughly 2 miles) of a stage by a mechanical problem or crash, he is given the same finishing time as the group he was with when the incident occurred. Riders who have dropped behind have to finish within a strict time limit or they are eliminated from the Tour. The time limits are based on the difficulty of the course and the average speed. For instance, on a flat stage raced at 45 kilometers (about 28 miles) per hour, the time limit is 10 percent of the stage winner’s time; it can be as high as 20 percent for a fast mountain stage, while it’s 25 percent for all time trials. All these calculations may sound somewhat complicated—and in the pre-computer age the judges could take a long time to finalize the GC—but today’s technology makes this process almost instantaneous. Sometimes, especially in the early stages of the Tour, two or more riders may have an identical lowest overall time. In that case, to identify the race leader, the judges factor in the hundredths of a second recorded in any preceding time trial or (prior to a time trial taking place) add up the stage placings of each of the riders, with the one having the lowest number being awarded the yellow jersey.

FUN FACT The fewest-ever number of finishers in the Tour was just ten riders (from sixty-seven starters) in 1919. The last rider on GC, Jules Nempon of France, had an accumulated time more than twenty-one hours behind winner Firmin Lambot of Belgium.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT The smallest-ever winning margin in the Tour was just eight seconds, recorded in 1989 by American Greg LeMond in his victory over Frenchman Laurent Fignon after 3,285 kilometers (2,041 miles) and twenty-one stages of racing.

KEY PERSON Géo Lefèvre was a French cycling journalist and race official who oversaw the judging and timing of the first Tour de France. He created the time-based GC system that was used for the first two Tours and then for every Tour since 1913.

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TOUR DE FRANCE 21

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RACE STRUCTURE RULES, BONUSES & PENALTIES The sport’s international governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), sets the rules and regulations for all road cycling stage races, including the Tour de France. The UCI also appoints the race judges and officials (known as commissaires, their French name) who form the race jury and make the key decisions at the Tour. The judges interpret the photo-finish results for all the road stage finishes (where time bonuses of ten, six, and four seconds are awarded to the top three each day) and the intermediate sprints (which carry bonuses of three, two, and one second in the opening week). They also have to tabulate each stage result and the overall standings in the individual and team general classifications, the points competition, the King of the Mountains contest, and Best Young Rider award. More than three dozen penalties can be applied for different infractions. Most of them involve paying monetary fines, but a few also add time penalties, usually starting at ten or twenty seconds per infraction, for things such as using a hand-sling to benefit another rider, sprinting dangerously, or taking a feed from a team car within the final 20 kilometers (12 miles) of a stage. Some penalties, such as riding through a closed rail crossing or drafting for an extended period behind a motor vehicle, result in instant disqualification. Riders can also be thrown out of the race if they break French laws, infringe the Tour’s code of ethics, use indecent clothing or behavior, or commit an act of vandalism. Other decisions made by the race jury include weather-related items, such as neutralizing the racing during windstorms and shortening (or canceling) stages under the UCI’s extreme weather protocol in cases of snow-covered roads, freezing rain, poor visibility, or extreme temperatures (heat wave or below freezing).

FUN FACT In 1982, the team time trial stage from Orchies to Fontaine-au-Pire in northern France was cancelled because a protest by striking steelworkers blocked the path of one of the teams, and thus obviated that team’s stage time.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT World road race champion Peter Sagan of Slovakia was disqualified from the 2017 Tour after he was judged to have caused fellow sprinter Mark Cavendish of Britain to crash heavily. Months later, after an appeal, Sagan was exonerated by an arbitration panel that reviewed TV images that did not confirm the original decision.

KEY PERSON The Tour’s top race official, the chief commissaire, is currently a Belgian, Philippe Mariën, who makes the final decision on any major rules violation.

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RACE STRUCTURE A WOMEN’S TOUR DE FRANCE? Women’s bike racing has a much shorter history then men’s. It wasn’t until 1984 that female cyclists first competed at the Olympic Games— ninety-eight years after the first men’s Olympic races. Coincidentally, the first Tour de France for women, the Tour Féminin, was held a month before the 1984 Olympics. That inaugural Tour Féminin, contested by amateur riders, not professionals, was held in conjunction with the men’s Tour. Most stages, raced a few hours before the men, finished in the same towns after the women raced the final 50 to 75 kilometers of the men’s course. The total distance for the eighteen stages was 1,066 kilometers (662 miles, compared with the men’s 4,021 kilometers [2,499 miles]) and was won by American Marianne Martin, three minutes ahead of runner-up Helene Hage of the Netherlands. The Tour Féminin was held six times, with the final event in 1989 won by French star Jeannie Longo, but it was then dropped by the Tour organizers because of logistical and sponsorship problems. The race was revived by various other organizers in different formats, usually between five and ten stages, until 2009. After pressure from the cycling community to restore the women’s event, the Tour organizers inaugurated “La Course by Le Tour de France” in 2014 as a one-day race of 80 kilometers (50 miles), taking place a few hours before the men’s final stage on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. That short circuit race was repeated in 2015 and 2016. In 2017 and 2018, La Course was held prior to a Tour mountain stage in the French Alps—and there are hopes that a true multi-day women’s Tour will be revived at some point. Today, women’s racing is on the rise, thanks to several professional teams (still poorly sponsored compared with the men’s teams) and TV coverage of a few women’s races around the world.

FUN FACT The first Tour Féminin winner, Marianne Martin, shared the 1984 podium in Paris with that year’s men’s champion Laurent Fignon of France. She went on to become an advertising executive for US cycling magazine VeloNews and then a portrait and wedding photographer, in Boulder, Colorado.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Frenchwoman Jeannie Longo, who won the women’s Tour three times, raced competitively for thirty-eight years from 1975 to 2012, winning fifty-nine national championships and thirteen world titles, and scored an Olympic gold medal at the Atlanta Games in 1996.

KEY PERSON The longtime Tour de France co-director, French journalist, and race official Félix Lévitan took a gamble to stage the first Tour Féminin in 1984, even though the organizers would ditch the race after six editions.

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A TOUR RACER’S TYPICAL DAY Because Tour de France stages don’t typically finish until around 6:00 in the evening, riders are rarely asleep before 11:00 p.m. That’s why they don’t appreciate the occasional early-morning wake-up call when anti-doping officials come to team hotels and take samples of the riders’ blood or urine for drug testing. Normally, they are up by 7:30 a.m. to check email and social media before breakfast. Their main pre-race meal comes about three hours before the stage start. Back in their rooms, they put together their kit—bib shorts, undershirt, jersey (with bib numbers attached), socks, shoes, gloves, helmet— and get their main suitcases repacked, ready for team helpers to take them to the van that transports luggage to the next hotel. On the team bus driving to the start, the riders relax with their teammates, discuss the day’s challenges, perhaps drink a fruit smoothie, and then participate in the team strategy meeting. After the bus parks in the start area, they ride their bikes to the sign-in podium, get introduced to the crowd, and answer a few reporters’ questions, while some may visit the “village départ” to chat with VIPs and have a coffee or a haircut, before returning to the bus. Back on their bikes for the peloton’s ceremonial start, they ride slowly for some 15 minutes in the so-called neutral zone before the race director’s flag drops to begin actual racing at Kilometer 0. A rider’s typical five-hour stage includes team duties, carrying water bottles (a.k.a. bidons) from the team car to teammates in the peloton, catching their shoulder bag (a.k.a. musette) handed up at the feed zone, perhaps racing in a breakaway and riding hard for the team’s leader or designated sprinter, and maybe working in a back group to make sure they finish within the day’s time limit. At the finish, they likely talk to reporters on the way to the team bus, where a protein-heavy recovery drink and a shower await. Winners attend the prize presentations and media interviews before the bus heads to a new hotel. After a massage, a high-calorie dinner, and some downtime, they maybe chat with a roommate, read a book or stream a video, and end the day in a deep sleep.

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GLOSSARY BEST YOUNG RIDER: A competitor aged 25 or under qualifies for this competition, which is based on general classification times. BIDON: The French word for a water bottle, commonly used by cyclists. COMMISSAIRES: The Tour’s race officials (not “commissioners”), who referee the race from cars and motorcycles. FEED ZONE/FEEDING STATION: The protected area where team helpers hand up shoulder bags containing food and drinks to their riders roughly halfway through the stage. GENERAL CLASSIFICATION (GC): The overall standings calculated by adding the finishing times of every rider on every stage; the one with the lowest total time is the race leader. GRAND TOURS: The world’s only three-week-long stage races: the Tour de France, Italy’s Giro d’Italia, and Spain’s Vuelta a España. INTERMEDIATE SPRINT: A sprint point set up partway through every stage, except in the time trials, where the first three riders score points toward the points competition. KING OF THE MOUNTAINS (KOM): The winner of the best climber competition; the KOM is also the sprint point at the tops of mountain passes where climbers sprint for KOM points. LA COURSE: A one-day women’s professional race held during the Tour on the same course as a stage of the men’s race (officially called “La Course by Le Tour de France”). MAIN BUNCH: The main body of riders (a.k.a. the peloton). MOUNTAINTOP FINISH: A stage finish on the summit of a mountain pass. MUSETTE: A light cotton shoulder bag containing food and drinks. PARCOURS: The French word for “course” sometimes used by English-language writers. PELOTON: The French word for the main group of cyclists in a road race.

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POINTS COMPETITION: The contest for sprinters in which points are awarded to the top finishers in every stage; the rider with the most points wins the competition. PROLOGUE: An individual time trial shorter than 8 kilometers (5 miles) held on the first day of the race; in a Tour with a prologue, the next stage is called stage 1. ROAD RACE: The normal format for Tour de France stages in which all the riders start together and the first across the finish line is the winner. SIGN-IN: The official start sheet that every rider has to sign before the start of a stage. STAGE RACE: A multi-day event, such as the Tour, made up of several separate stages. TIME BONUS: Awards of up to 10 seconds, given to the first three finishers on every stage, that are subtracted from riders’ GC times. TIME LIMIT: The time gap, based on speed and difficulty of the stage, within which the last riders must finish behind the stage winner, varying from 5 percent for a slow, easy stage to 25 percent for time trials. TIME TRIAL: An individual (or team) race against the clock in which riders start at one- to three-minute intervals. TOUR FÉMININ: The now defunct Tour de France for women. TRANSFER: The time spent in team buses between stages. UNION CYCLISTE INTERNATIONALE (UCI): World cycling’s governing body. WORLDTOUR: The calendar of the world’s major races that’s headed by the Tour de France. YELLOW JERSEY: The racing jersey worn by the Tour’s race leader.

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TOUR HISTORY Origins Evolution Organizers Winners & Rivals Famous Stages Best Climbers Top Sprinters Crashes & Fatalities Hinault & LeMond Glossary

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TOUR HISTORY ORIGINS At the turn of the nineteenth century, in the era known as La Belle Époque, France was the envy of the world. The Impressionists Degas, Monet, and Renoir had revolutionized art; the Eiffel Tower, constructed in 1889, was the tallest building in the world; the French newspaper Le Petit Journal had the world’s largest circulation; and the French rail system was the most extensive anywhere. In sports, though, France had yet to establish events as epochal as Britain’s Open golf tournament (1860), the United States’ Kentucky Derby (1875), or England’s Wimbledon Championships (1877). But it was a Frenchman, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who founded the International Olympic Committee that organized the first Modern Olympics (1896)—in which the “new” sport of cycling was a major element. French cycling had already established two long-distance, pointto-point road races, Bordeaux–Paris and Paris–Roubaix. These so-called “classic” races were promoted by the largest daily sports newspaper, Le Vélo, run by Pierre Giffard, a former news director of Le Petit Journal. Upset by Giffard’s political views, a group of advertisers, mostly right-wing bicycle manufacturers, helped start a rival daily, L’Auto-Vélo, which also covered the growing automobile industry. Its first editor was Henri Desgrange, a cycling enthusiast and director of the Parc des Princes velodrome. After he was forced to change the publication’s name to L’Auto, the paper struggled in a circulation battle with Giffard. So, at a November 1902 editorial meeting, Desgrange said, “We have to invent something to shut Giffard up. Any ideas?” “Why not a cycling tour of France?” his cycling editor Géo Lefèvre replied. “A race of several days, longer and harder than any that exists.” Two months later, under the headline, “Le Tour de France,” L’Auto wrote: “The greatest cycling event: Paris–Lyon–Marseille–Toulouse–Bordeaux– Nantes–Paris, 20,000 francs in prizes, starts June 1, finishes July 5 at the Parc des Princes.”

FUN FACT Before Henri Desgrange became the boss at the sports newspaper L’Auto and guided the Tour de France through its infancy, he was a racing cyclist. In 1893, he set the first World Hour Record by riding 35.325 kilometers (21.950 miles) on the Buffalo velodrome in Paris.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Why is the Tour held in July? When the first Tour de France was planned, the professional cyclists already competed in major races in April, May, and August, so June/July was open.

KEY PERSON Besides suggesting the idea of a Tour de France, L’Auto’s cycling editor Géo Lefèvre became the main race official, acting as a referee on his bike, and using the train to get to the finish as timekeeper and judge—before writing his stage report!

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TOUR HISTORY EVOLUTION All but one of the six ultra-long stages in the first Tour of 1903 generally started at night, with the peloton soon splitting into ones and twos. Though the winners finished in daylight, some of the back markers came in up to twenty hours later. To give everyone a chance to recover, repair their bikes, and get ready for the next stage, there were two or three rest days between each stage. The total distance was 2,428 kilometers (1,508 miles) over nineteen days. The Tour was such a success that circulation of Henri Desgrange’s L’Auto newspaper grew exponentially, and by 1904 had put Paul Giffard’s Le Vélo out of business. The overall winner was race favorite Maurice Garin, who’d already won the French classics, Paris–Roubaix and Bordeaux–Paris. Garin repeated his win in 1904, but he and the next three finishers were later disqualified for breaking several rules, leaving victory to fifth-place finisher Henri Cornet, who, at age twenty, remains the Tour’s youngest winner. Because of the irregularities, including riders being attacked by fans, Desgrange threatened to kill the Tour. Instead, the course was changed for 1905, with eleven shorter stages and the first “easy” mountain climbs. True mountain stages in the Pyrenees came in 1910, while the high Alps were added in 1911. By 1914, the race had grown to fifteen stages, 5,380 kilometers (3,343 miles), and twenty-nine days. After World War I, the Tour continued to grow, but its popularity plateaued. The longest Tour was in 1926: seventeen stages, 5,745 kilometers (3,570 miles), and twenty-nine days. Until 1929, the Tour was contested by roughly fifty bicycle-sponsored professionals along with about one hundred amateurs; from 1930 to the 1960s, that formula was replaced by a combination of national teams (put together just for the Tour) and French regional teams. Since 1969, all the Tours have been contested by trade teams, which compete in races throughout the year.

FUN FACT When assistant organizer Alphonse Steinès reconnoitered the Tour’s first mountain stage in the Pyrenees, snow blocked the top of the 7,000-foot-high Tourmalet, so he continued on foot, stumbling through the snow in the dark. After recovering from his ordeal, he sent a telegram to his boss: “Crossed the Tourmalet. Very good road. Perfectly practicable. Signed: Steinès.”

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Australians Don Kirkham and “Snowy” Munro were the first non-Europeans to ride the Tour, placing 17th and 20th in 1914. Canadian Pierre Gachon was the first North American, competing in 1937. Jonathan Boyer was the first American, finishing 32nd in 1981.

KEY PERSON As the chief organizer for four decades, Henri Desgrange took the Tour from an idea to being the world’s dominant cycling event.

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TOUR HISTORY ORGANIZERS In the Tour’s 115-year history, it has had only five long-term organizers: Henri Desgrange, Jacques Goddet, Félix Lévitan, Jean-Marie Leblanc, and Christian Prudhomme. All five were journalists. Desgrange was an authoritarian who created a race that was both spectacular and demanding. But his Tours began to get too long and, for many critics, overly dominated by the bike-sponsored teams. By 1930, he realized that a major transformation was needed. In the previous fourteen Tours, there’d been only one French victory. Winners from Belgium, Italy, and Luxembourg didn’t help sell his French newspaper, so Desgrange hit on a new idea. He replaced teams owned by bicycle manufacturers with national squads, so the best French riders could race together. The idea worked: the French won the next five Tours. Also, because the ultra-marathon flat stages were producing monotonous racing, he split them into two or three separate races on the same day, or turned them into team time trials. When Desgrange grew sick prior to his death in 1940, his protégé, Goddet, took the reins of L’Auto (and the Tour); and when France emerged from World War II, Goddet converted L’Auto into an all-sports newspaper, L’Équipe. The less-strident Goddet was always looking to globalize cycling. Oxford-educated, Goddet commanded the Tour in a colonial uniform of pith helmet, khaki shirt, Bermuda shorts, and long stockings. In 1957, Goddet’s L’Équipe joined with Lévitan’s Le Parisien Libéré newspaper, and the more business-oriented Lévitan became Goddet’s deputy at the Tour (and co-director in 1962). Their partnership lasted another twenty-five years. Goddet’s successor was Leblanc, a former Tour racer and cycling editor at L’Équipe—by then part of the Amaury media group. Leblanc helped modernize the Tour that, in 1992, became part of Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), the current owner. When Leblanc retired in 2007, ASO hired television journalist Christian Prudhomme as the race organizer.

FUN FACT ASO is a global sports promoter that, besides the Tour de France, organizes dozens of events in seven sports and twelve countries, including the sailing Tour de France and the Dakar motorsport rally. ASO’s current Tour partners include the French banking corporation LCL, Czech auto manufacturer Skoda, and French mineral water brand Vittel.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT In 1930, Henri Desgrange thought up a plan to increase revenue and entertain the spectators—the publicity caravan, a parade-like line of colorful vehicles.

KEY PERSON Longtime race director Jacques Goddet, who died in 2000 at the age of ninety-five, was the son of Victor Goddet, the original financial director of L’Auto.

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TOUR HISTORY WINNERS & RIVALS Five-time Tour winner Eddy Merckx once said, “When you are the strongest, the Tour is the easiest race to win, because it is the hardest race of all.” What the Belgian was saying is that because the Tour is so physically demanding, only the very strongest riders will stay in contention on the mountain stages and time trials. But Merckx didn’t mention the unforeseen incidents—crashes, injuries, or untimely mechanical problems—that can stymie even the strongest rider. Before his winning spell (1969-70-71-7274), Merckx was preceded by three others who won at least three Tours: his fellow Belgian Philippe Thys (1913-14-20) and the Frenchmen Louison Bobet (1953-54-55) and Jacques Anquetil (1957-61-62-63-64). Since Merckx’s reign, four others have had dominant periods: Frenchman Bernard Hinault (1978-79-81-82-85), American Greg LeMond (1986-89-90), Spaniard Miguel Induráin (1991-92-93-94-95), and the Kenyan-born Briton Chris Froome (2013-15-16-17). There have been twelve two-time winners, from French rider Lucien Petit-Breton (1907–08) to Spain’s Alberto Contador (2007–09). Gino Bartali was the only rider to win the Tour at ten-year intervals, taking his victories in 1938 and 1948. The most exciting Tours were those when some of these champions faced strong challengers. Perhaps the greatest rivalry was that between Anquetil and countryman Raymond Poulidor in 1964. Several times, Anquetil was on the point of cracking, but the younger, more popular “Poupou” suffered terrible bad luck and, though he pulled within fourteen seconds with a day to go, he had to be content with second place. For all his brilliance, even Merckx was pushed to the limit in 1971, when Spanish climber Luis Ocaña took a near-ten-minute lead in the Alps—though he was forced to pull out four days later after crashing on a steep mountain descent in a thunderstorm. The closest-ever Tour was in 1989, when LeMond and Frenchman Laurent Fignon fought a race-long battle, exchanging the yellow jersey four times before the American came from behind in the final-day time trial to win by just eight seconds.

FUN FACT Seven men have won the Tour without winning a stage in that Tour: Firmin Lambot (1922), Roger Walkowiak (1956), Gastone Nencini (1960), Lucien Aimar (1966), Greg LeMond (1990), Oscar Pereiro (2006), and Chris Froome (2017).

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Dutchman Joop Zoetemelk, who won the Tour in 1980, was the only rider to place second to three different Tour champions: Eddy Merckx (1970–71), Lucien Van Impe (1976), and Bernard Hinault (1978-79-82).

KEY PERSON Frenchman Jacques Anquetil was the first rider to truly focus his racing season on the Tour; he raced it in a calculating manner, winning the time trials and defending his gains in the mountain stages. His methods worked, as he was the first five-time winner.

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TOUR HISTORY FAMOUS STAGES The Tour has seen thousands of stages, many of them memorable, but few have also had a major impact on the final outcome. These are four stages that did have an impact: Starting stage 16 of the 1949 Tour, Italian favorites Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi were in ninth and tenth places overall, more than twelve minutes behind the yellow jersey. But in that day’s 275-kilometer slog over three mountain passes through the Alps, they outlasted all eight riders above them, to finish first and second on the stage and take the overall 1-2. After two hours of flat-out racing on stage 6 of the 1960 Tour, four team leaders—Roger Rivière of France, Gastone Nencini of Italy, Jan Adriaenssens of Belgium, and Hans Junkermann of Germany—broke clear from the pack and in the remaining 112 kilometers gained fourteen minutes on the field; Nencini went on to win that Tour after French favorite Rivière crashed out. Belgian Lucien Van Impe was a pure climber who’d won the Tour’s King of the Mountains (KOM) title three times going into the 1976 race. No one believed he could win the overall title, but on stage 14, in the Pyrenees, his team director persuaded him to attack 80 kilometers from the finish over three climbs. He won the stage by three minutes and went on to win the Tour. Time trials (TTs) often shape the outcome of a Tour, but there’s never been a more dramatic one than in 2007. On the penultimate stage, a 55kilometer TT from Cognac to Angoulême, race leader Alberto Contador faced challenges from superior time trialists Cadel Evans and Levi Leipheimer, respectively 1:50 and 2:49 behind the Spanish climber on GC. Into the final kilometers, it looked as though Contador was about to lose the yellow jersey, but he surged in the last few kilometers to keep twenty-three seconds on Evans and thirty-one seconds on Leipheimer—the closest-ever 1-2-3 podium in Tour history.

FUN FACT The major alpine stage in 1996 was cut to just 46 kilometers because of freezing weather and high winds over the Iseran and Galibier climbs; the much-shortened stage over the Montgenèvre and Sestriere climbs resulted in a stage win for Bjarne Riis, who took the yellow jersey and kept it all the way to Paris.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Thanks to a virtually uncontested 200-kilometer-long breakaway with Jens Voigt on the flat stage 13 of the 2006 Tour, Oscar Pereiro regained the half hour he’d lost in the Pyrenees and went on to win the Tour.

KEY PERSON Frenchman Jean Robic, in 1947, became the only rider to come from a deficit going into the final road race stage and win the Tour on the last day.

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TOUR HISTORY BEST CLIMBERS Few sights are more inspiring in the Tour than a solo rider stomping on the pedals and accelerating away from the opposition up a steep mountain road. Usually, that rider is a pure climber in search of a prestigious stage victory or some KOM points at a mountain summit. Sometimes, it’s the man in search of overall victory in Paris who needs to make time on his rivals. Such a rider, over the course of history, is the one who’s remembered as the best climber. Perhaps the most elegant climber ever was two-time Tour winner Fausto Coppi, whose long solo breakaways in the mountains were his hallmark. In the same era, Charly Gaul cemented his place in history with a 100-kilometer-long breakaway through a torrential rainstorm over four mountain passes to win the 1958 Tour. The following year, Federico Bahamontes dominated an uphill time trial before he made a long breakaway with Gaul on another mountain stage to pencil in his overall victory. Raymond Poulidor never won the Tour, but he scored eight podium finishes between 1963 and 1976 because of his brilliant climbing performances. Lucien Van Impe’s Tour-winning breakaway is recounted on page 40. Another brilliant climber, and the first Colombian to win a Tour mountain stage, was Lucho Herrera, who didn’t win the Tour because his team wasn’t strong enough to guide him safely through the flat stages; fifth overall was his highest finish. In 1987, Italy’s Marco Pantani, who still holds the hill-climb record up to L’Alpe d’Huez, won the 1998 Tour thanks to a 50-kilometer breakaway over the Col du Galibier that saw him defeat overnight race leader Jan Ullrich by nine minutes. In this century, the most dominant climber (but also an excellent time trialist) has been Chris Froome, who targets mountaintop finishes to gain time on rival climbers, such as Nairo Quintana, Romain Bardet, and Vincenzo Nibali.

FUN FACT On stage 17 of the 1954 Tour, after topping the Col de Romeyère in first place, Spanish climber Federico Bahamontes stopped, got an ice cream from a vendor, and ate it before continuing.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Frenchman Louison Bobet struggled in his early Tour appearances, abandoned twice, and even his third place in 1950 was twenty minutes behind the winner. But he gradually improved his climbing ability, and in his late twenties won the Tour in three consecutive years by wide margins.

KEY PERSON Spanish climber Vicente Trueba did so well on the mountain climbs—but lost time on the descents—that in 1933 the Tour created the KOM competition, with a 10,000-franc prize, so he wouldn’t go home empty-handed.

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TOUR HISTORY TOP SPRINTERS “Are these guys crazy?” That’s a question fans ask about the daredevil sprinters who take their lives in their hands when they race centimeters apart at 70 kilometers an hour toward a Tour de France finish line. The answer is, “No, they know exactly what they’re doing.” In recent years, lighter bikes, higher gearing, and power-related training have increased the speeds (and inherent dangers) in sprint finishes, but the same type of athletes come out on top. Before World War II, the most successful (and most popular) sprinter was Charles Pélissier, who won sixteen stages in six Tour appearances between 1929 and 1935, including a record eight stage victories in 1930. Pélissier was not just a sprinter; he was also capable of featuring in long breakaways. He even placed ninth overall in the 1930 Tour. His fellow Frenchman, André Darrigade, was a similar rider and the most successful sprinter of the immediate postwar years, when he won twenty-two stages in fourteen tours between 1953 and 1966. He failed to win a stage in only three of those Tours. One of the fastest sprinters was Belgian Freddy Maertens, who won twelve sprint stages (and three time trials) in just three Tour appearances (1976, 1978, and 1981)—winning the sprinters’ green jersey each time. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, four riders with contrasting styles dominated the Tour sprints: risk-taker Djamolidin Abdujaparov of Uzbekistan, who won nine stages; and three twelve-stage winners, the solid Erik Zabel of Germany, the flamboyant Mario Cipollini of Italy, and Australia’s “pocket rocket” Robbie McEwen. In this century, Britain’s Mark Cavendish has won thirty road stages—a Tour record, because though Eddy Merckx took thirty-four stage wins, fourteen of those came in time trials. Cavendish has battled year after year with German sprinters André Greipel and Marcel Kittel (twenty-five stage wins between them) and Slovakia’s Peter Sagan, who from 2012 to 2018 won eleven stages and six green jerseys.

FUN FACT Italy’s Mario Cipollini won twelve stages of the Tour de France in six appearances but never won the green jersey of sprint champion. That’s because he was a poor climber and always quit the race before the finish.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Ireland’s Sean Kelly started his Tour career as a pure sprinter, winning five stages and three green jerseys in the 1980s; he then morphed into a yellow jersey contender and twice finished in the top five (while also winning Spain’s grand tour, the Vuelta).

KEY PERSON Today it’s accepted that sprinters have teammates dedicated to helping them; the first one to have such a lead-out train was Belgian Rik Van Looy, whose “red guard” helped him win four stages and the green jersey in 1963.

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TOUR HISTORY CRASHES & FATALITIES The Tour de France is often cited as one of the world’s most dangerous sporting events. And it’s true that every Tour sees spectacular crashes and pileups, usually on flat stages and in sprint finishes—but few result in serious injuries. The following are among the more frightening accidents in Tour history. 1935: The first-ever rider to die in the Tour was Spaniard Francisco Cepeda, who fell into a gorge descending the Col du Lautaret, fractured his skull, and died in the hospital three days later. 1957: The motorcycle of pioneer sports reporter Alex Virot of Radio Luxembourg skidded on gravel and plunged over a precipice on a Spanish stage; both he and his driver were killed. 1958: During the sprint finish of the final stage at the Parc des Princes in Paris, velodrome director Constant Wouters stepped onto the track and was hit by André Darrigade as the French rider was heading to the finish line at full speed; both fractured their skulls, with Wouters later dying from his injuries. 1960: In contention for the overall victory, Frenchman Roger Rivière crashed into a ravine while descending the Col du Perjuret on stage 14, fractured his spinal column, and never raced again. 1967: While climbing Mont Ventoux on stage 13, Englishman Tom Simpson collapsed from heat stroke and died of cardiac arrest; an autopsy revealed traces of alcohol and amphetamines. 1994: Perhaps the Tour’s most terrifying crash happened on the opening road stage in Armentières, when a gendarme with a camera stepped into the road during the finish sprint; Belgian Wilfried Nelissen crashed into him and a dozen others fell, including French star Laurent Jalabert, who was covered in blood from severe facial injuries. 1995: On the steep, curving descent of the Col de Portet d’Aspet in the Pyrenees, Italy’s Fabio Casartelli skidded into a concrete post, hit his head on the road, and died from a fractured skull.

FUN FACT On Mont Ventoux at the 2016 Tour, a TV camera moto suddenly stopped because of tightly packed spectators, and three top riders crashed into it; race leader Chris Froome’s bike was incapacitated so he ran without it for several hundred meters before getting a spare bike.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT At the 1910 Tour, on a rest day in Nice, French rider Adolphe Hélière went for a swim in the Mediterranean with two fellow riders . . . and drowned.

KEY PERSON Dutch rider Wim van Est, wearing the 1951 Tour’s yellow jersey, left the road and fell 75 meters (250 feet) down a cliff face on the Aubisque mountain pass. He broke no bones and, traumatized and hyperventilating, was helped back to the road with a string of bicycle tires.

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HINAULT & LEMOND: TEAMMATES, BUT RIVALS In Tour history, there’s never been a rivalry quite like the one between French veteran Bernard Hinault and American upstart Greg LeMond. That’s because they were teammates. Hinault, the son of a railroad worker, grew up in rural Brittany. He was used to getting his own way. LeMond, the son of a real estate broker and six years younger, grew up in California and Nevada. As a talented amateur racer, LeMond turned pro at nineteen and became the second US cyclist to start the Tour, placing third in his first Tour (1984). By that time, Hinault had won the Tour four times and was expected to win a fifth in 1985. LeMond, his La Vie Claire teammate, was expected to help him achieve that goal. All was on target after thirteen of the twenty-two stages, with Hinault five minutes clear of second-place LeMond. Then, during a sprint finish in Saint-Étienne, the Frenchman crashed and crossed the line with blood pouring from a broken nose. Three days later, because of troubled breathing, Hinault struggled on the tough climbs of the Pyrenees. LeMond stayed ahead with the stronger climbers and looked capable of taking the yellow jersey. Instead, his team manager told him to slow down. His chance gone, the ambitious LeMond was furious. But after winning the Tour by two minutes, Hinault said he’d help the American in 1986. LeMond believed him—until the first mountain stage. Hinault went on a long-distance breakaway with Spanish climber Pedro Delgado before a perplexed LeMond took up the chase. Though he took third place that day and moved up to second overall, LeMond had a 5:25 deficit on his teammate. Things looked more desperate the next day when Hinault, who just said he was having fun, went on the rampage in a solo breakaway. But this time, the French rider ran out of gas. LeMond won the stage on a summit finish, regained five minutes, and went on to become the first non-European to win the Tour. Hinault still insists that he only rode aggressively to provoke LeMond into winning, but most critics agree that he really wanted to become the first man to win the Tour six times.

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GLOSSARY AMPHETAMINES: These synthetic stimulants were routinely used by Tour riders from the 1940s to the late 1960s before the Tour organizers introduced formal anti-doping tests in 1968. BREAKAWAY: A tactical move by one or more riders when they accelerate clear of the peloton (“break away”) and sustain a substantial lead for many kilometers (sometimes to the stage end) in an attempt to win the stage and/or gain time on their GC rivals. CLASSIC: A single-day professional bike race, usually held on a course between two cities (such as Paris to Roubaix), that becomes more prestigious year by year. COBBLESTONES: Sometimes called Belgian bricks or pavé, cobblestoned roads in northern France are occasionally included on Tour stages and always produce spectacular racing, especially when rain increases the risk of crashes and mechanical failures. GRANDE BOUCLE: This French expression, sometimes used by English speakers, literally means the “Big Lap” and describes the Tour’s loop around France. HILLTOP FINISH: The finish of an otherwise flat or rolling stage located at the top of a short, steep hill, usually in an urban area.

L’ÉQUIPE (FORMERLY L’AUTO): The French daily sports newspaper that founded, owned, and organized the Tour; it is now part of the Amaury media group that includes ASO, the current Tour owner and organizer. MOUNTAINTOP FINISH: The finish of a mountain stage that’s located at the top of a long mountain climb, usually after one or two other mountain climbs in the same stage.

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NATIONAL TEAMS: Like those selected for the Olympic Games, national teams are made up of riders from a single country who, for the rest of the year, ride for their own trade teams. PUBLICITY CARAVAN: Made up of almost 200 colorfully decorated vehicles from 35 companies, with total personnel of 600, the publicity caravan every year distributes almost 20 million publicity items (including hats, snacks, and product samples) to roadside spectators; the 12-kilometer-long caravan takes about 35 minutes to pass any one point on the Tour course, about an hour before the peloton arrives. REGIONAL TEAMS: When the Tour was contested by national teams from 1930 to 1968, the field also included French teams representing different regions of the country, including Paris-Northeast, Center-South, and West-Southwest. TRADE TEAMS: Since 1969, every Tour has been contested by trade teams, which are sponsored by various entities (currently including such different sponsors as Belgian flooring manufacturer Quick-Step, French insurance company AG2R La Mondiale, and Spanish telecommunications brand Movistar). The teams, which compete in races all year long, are composed of up to thirty riders, eight of whom are selected to ride the Tour. VELODROME: Through the first seven decades of the Tour, many stages finished on outdoor velodromes—oval-shaped tracks from 400 to 666 meters around, with banked turns, surfaced with concrete or asphalt—watched by thousands of spectators in the stadium bleachers. The last time a Tour stage finished on a velodrome was at Bordeaux in 1975, won in a mass sprint finish by Englishman Barry Hoban.

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TECHNOLOGY Bikes & Materials Equipment Apparel, Helmets & Glasses Training & Equipment Team Infrastructure Race Communications Radio, Film & TV Photo Finish & Race Data How the Tour Reaches You Glossary

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TECHNOLOGY BIKES & MATERIALS For the first seven decades of the Tour, riders used just one bike for all the stages. In the early years, riders were obligated to ride the same bike; they even had to fix any mechanical problems without outside help. That was the case in 1913 when the race leader, Eugène Christophe, snapped his forks descending the Col du Tourmalet in a solo breakaway. He had to jog/carry his bike down the mountain before finding a blacksmith’s forge to make the repair. Things started to change in the 1960s, when some riders used a lighter bike for the mountain stages and/or time trials. To make his bike lighter for time trials, 1969 Tour winner Eddy Merckx had holes drilled in his chainrings, brakes, and other accessories, while 1983 winner Luis Ocaña had a bike made from titanium instead of alloy steel for the climbing stages. Aerodynamics started to be an important part of bike design in the 1980s, when bikes used only for time trials became common, featuring “cow-horn” handlebars, down-sloping top tubes, and “solid” disc wheels. The turning point in aero technology came in 1989 when the US team 7-Eleven and American star Greg LeMond first fitted bolt-on aero bars to their TT bikes— LeMond’s resultant time gains in that Tour’s two time trials helped him win the race. Around the same time, bikes made from carbon fiber were developed, first as tubes, then as fully molded frames. Today, all the bike frames and most of the accessories are carbon—which is not only much lighter than steel but also has a far greater stiffness-to-weight ratio. Bikes used for regular racing have also become lighter, stiffer, and more aero thanks to a trend, started in the 1990s, of making the top tube slope downward from the front, rather than being horizontal.

FUN FACT In 1903, bikes had a single gear and weighed around 18 kilograms (40 pounds); today, Tour bikes have up to twenty-four gears and weigh 6.8 kilos (15 pounds).

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Italian bike manufacturer Pinarello has won the most Tours, thanks to Pedro Delgado (1988), Miguel Induráin (1991–1995), Bjarne Riis (1996), Bradley Wiggins (2012), Chris Froome (2013, 2015–2017), and Geraint Thomas (2018), for a total of thirteen victories, ahead of French bikes Peugeot (ten wins) and Gitane (nine wins).

KEY PERSON John Burke, founder and CEO of American bike manufacturer Trek, whose company developed in 1992 the first mass-production ultra-lightweight, carbon-fiber frame. Lance Armstrong used Trek bikes with their light frames in seven Tour de France victories (which were later annulled).

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TECHNOLOGY EQUIPMENT The Tour’s reputation as the toughest, most prestigious bike race gives manufacturers a perfect platform on which to display their products. Even in the Tour’s early years, advertising placed by the industry helped the race get established. Bikes and equipment barely changed through the Tour’s first four decades, but innovations, such as the quick-release hub (replacing screwed-on nuts), derailleur gears (replacing shifting by hand), and cotterless cranks (replacing the crude cotter-pin method), brought more sophisticated technology after World War II. Until the 1960s, most Tours were won on French-made components, including Stronglight cranks, Simplex gears, and Mavic wheels. The biggest change in componentry came from Italian manufacturer Campagnolo, which in the 1960s began producing complete groupsets— bottom brackets, cranks, chainrings, derailleurs, pedals, brakes, and hubs. Since 1948, a record thirty-one Tour victories have been won on Campagnolo components, including those of five-time winners Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, and Miguel Induráin. The Italian brand’s major rival, Shimano of Japan, has scored most wins in the current century, including those by Chris Froome. From the ten-speed bikes of the 1960s (five cogs on the freewheel combined with two chainrings), gearing has gradually increased thanks to lighter, narrower cogs and chains to the current maximum of twenty-four speeds (twelve cogs and two chainrings). Electronic gear-shifting has been used at the Tour since 2009. Old-style spoked wheels have been replaced by manufactured carbon wheelsets, and rim brakes are being replaced by more efficient disc brakes. Pedals evolved from the traditional toe-clips-and-straps style to clipless pedals, first used in 1985 by Hinault. Since then, the lightest pedals have decreased in weight from around 600 grams (21 ounces) to 150 grams (5.3 ounces) per pair. Saddles were made of leather, mostly by Brooks of England and Idéale of France, until the 1970s, when Italian companies began producing saddles from synthetic materials.

FUN FACT The first British winners of the Tour, Brad Wiggins and Chris Froome, both used unusual, asymmetric chainrings in their victories. There’s no proof that these chainrings improve a rider’s power, but they possibly take advantage of the strongest part of a rider’s pedal stroke.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Before derailleurs were allowed at the Tour, in 1937, the riders had to stop to shift gears by removing the rear wheel and turning it around to use a different-size sprocket fitted to the opposite side of the hub.

KEY PERSON Tullio Campagnolo, an Italian amateur bike racer and inventor who patented the quick-release skewer on bicycle hubs and founded the company that perfected derailleur gears and manufactured the high-end equipment used by Tour champions, such as Fausto Coppi and Eddy Merckx.

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TECHNOLOGY APPAREL, HELMETS & GLASSES In the first decades of the Tour, riders wore baggy wool shorts, sometimes with leggings or long socks, wool jerseys (usually long-sleeved), perhaps a light jacket, cloth caps, and goggles. A leather bag attached to the handlebars contained tools and food, while spare tires were strapped under the saddle or looped over shoulders. Although changes in race regulations allowed riders to dispense with the bags and spare tires, their look hadn’t change a lot by the 1950s, when a typical uniform was wool shorts with leather chamois, suspenders to keep the shorts up, a cotton or wool undershirt, a wool jersey with pockets front and back and button-down collar, mesh-backed leather gloves, a peaked cotton cap, and leather shoes with nailed-on metal cleats. Outfits became more streamlined (and more comfortable!) in the late 1970s when the first Lycra shorts appeared (soon with integral bibs and padded chamois, to which riders applied butt cream for extra comfort). Wool jerseys were replaced by synthetics, with zips and rear pockets, while leather shoes were replaced by synthetic ones, with rigid carbon soles and integrated cleats. Today, the kit is complemented by tight-fitting gloves, carbon-strengthened helmets (some with incorporated radio transmitters), radio earpieces, and sleek sunglasses. In inclement weather, breathable waterproof rain jackets, gloves, and shoe covers make life more comfortable. And riders can put on thin, windproof jackets for cold mountain descents, as opposed to the age-old ploy of shoving newspapers up their racing jerseys. All team members wear the same-design jerseys, except for national champions who have their national colors/emblems, while the defending world champion has a jersey with rainbow bands (former world champions have rainbow cuffs). Modern kits can feature UV-resistant materials; abrasion-resistant panels on shoulders, thighs, and upper back; and one-piece skinsuits for time trials and sprint stages. Other innovations include sunglasses with small magnets in the nose area to improve breathing, and aerodynamic kits and helmets.

FUN FACT One of the first riders to regularly wear a helmet was 1947 Tour winner Jean Robic, who, as a result of a previous skull injury, used a padded leather “hairnet” designed for high-speed track racing.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Very few riders used the early versions of hard-shell helmets, which were heavy and cumbersome, and they did not come into common usage until the start of this century. It wasn’t until May 2003 that the UCI made hard-shell helmets mandatory.

KEY PERSON After winning four consecutive stages of the 1999 Tour, Italian sprinter Mario Cipollini showed up the next day dressed in a Roman toga to celebrate the birthday of Julius Caesar. He’d previously worn full-body catsuits, one with tiger stripes and another depicting the body’s internal organs.

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TECHNOLOGY TRAINING & EQUIPMENT Preparing for the Tour de France has evolved from LSD training—that’s Long Slow Distance rides—and using other races as training to more scientific methods that now include altitude training camps, power-based workouts, and the use of advanced data analytics. Scientific training really began with the development of the heart-rate monitor in the late 1970s and, a decade later, the use of the SRM crank-based power meter. Knowing their heart rate while riding at different speeds allowed athletes to tackle more serious training methods, especially when the concepts of aerobic and anaerobic thresholds were documented; while monitoring their actual power output in watts enabled riders to adjust their pace both in training and racing. In the late 1990s, Tour riders, including Lance Armstrong, helped perfect training at altitudes of around 2,000 meters (6,500 feet), which increases the percentage of red blood cells in the body. (The American’s team also pioneered pre-Tour training camps in the mountains to reconnoiter the routes of the main climbing stages.) In this century, the technology revolution has given rise to tiny handlebar-mounted computers with wireless connection that can monitor all aspects of a cyclist’s physical output and every detail of his actual rides (this includes using apps such as Strava, which was first released in 2009). Also, riders’ diet and nutritional needs can be closely planned and monitored on computers, so that coaches can help bring their riders’ fitness to a peak for the Tour. When training outdoors is hampered by bad weather, riders can turn to computer-based apps (such as Zwift, launched in 2014), which can be used as a virtual training tool. The indoor training sessions are done with the bike mounted on a static turbo trainer in front of a TV screen showing images of a virtual race or training ride. Most riders also use turbo trainers at the Tour to warm up for time trials and warm-down after road stages.

FUN FACT Besides average speed, watts, and total climbing, a Strava file also shows how many calories a rider burns on a Tour stage. That total could be as much as 7,000 calories on a tough mountain stage—enough food to last most people for two or three days.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Two-time Tour winner Fausto Coppi, with guidance from his blind coach Biagio Cavanna, is regarded as the first cyclist to use advanced training methods, including motor-paced sessions, interval training, and science-based nutrition.

KEY PERSON Three-time Tour winner Greg LeMond, working with his Swiss coach Paul Köchli, pioneered the use of heart-rate monitors (1985), ski-skating for winter training (1987), and SRM power meters (1993), which brought bike training into the technological age.

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TECHNOLOGY TEAM INFRASTRUCTURE Prior to the technology revolution starting in the 1990s, life was much simpler for teams taking part in the Tour de France. A typical staff consisted of two sports directors, two mechanics, two soigneurs/masseurs, and maybe a doctor; the organizers supplied their race vehicles (two team cars and a backup), plus an equipment van. Today, a squad such as Team Sky has a full-time staff of more than sixty people, half of whom accompany the eight-rider team to the Tour. Besides the increased number of regular staff positions (a manager, three sports directors, three or four mechanics, and three or four soigneurs), a Tour team has personnel for performance monitoring, technical operations, medical (including a psychiatrist and physiotherapist besides a doctor), nutrition (including a chef to prepare the team’s meals), driving (team bus and camper van), media, and marketing, along with backup staff overseeing office and equipment operations. The team also hauls riders’ personal mattresses from hotel to hotel to give them better sleep and recovery—and some teams use icing equipment to help with post-race recovery and injury healing. The performance staff, doctors, and soigneurs also use an arsenal of small tech instruments to monitor their riders’ health and fitness. Each rider has two or three road bikes and a couple of time-trial machines, while dozens of spare wheels and tires are carried in the equipment truck. The mechanics have an array of equipment, including toolboxes, power washers, and highly accurate pumps that allow them to customize each rider’s tire pressures. Typically, front tires are inflated to 115 pounds per square inch, rear tires to 135 psi, with 10 psi extra for time trials and 10 psi less on wet stages for better control. All the team vehicles are customized for use at the Tour, with sport directors using station wagons modified to cope with up to 350 kilograms (770 pounds) of added weight from racks, bikes, wheels, cool boxes, tools, and full drink bottles.

FUN FACT Jonathan Boyer, the first American to start the Tour (in 1981), was also the first Tour rider to take an acupuncturist with him on the race; and acupuncture was a key recovery tool for 2014 Tour winner Vincenzo Nibali.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT For twenty-eight years (1961–88), French automaker Peugeot supplied a fleet of official vehicles for the Tour organizers and teams. Today, Skoda supplies vehicles for race officials, VIPs, and neutral service, but teams are supplied by a variety of automakers, including Ford, Toyota, and Volvo.

KEY PERSON Dave Brailsford, the general manager of Team Sky, has used the skills learned as performance director of British Cycling (winning twenty-four Olympic titles in his tenure) to modernize team infrastructure, organization, and training methods.

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TECHNOLOGY RACE COMMUNICATIONS Because the Tour de France is always on the move, with its “stadium” measuring tens of kilometers from end to end and moving at an average speed of 40 kilometers an hour, getting timely information about the race is a unique challenge. In the Tour’s first half-century, all the race reporters and officials traveled with the race, either in cars or on motorcycles, watching the race firsthand. After World War II, technicians developed the Tour’s now indispensable communications channel, Radio Tour, which connects via a private radio frequency to all race vehicles (organizers, commissaires, team directors, media, and VIPs) and personnel at stage finishes. The hub of this information network is the organizer’s red car that sits immediately behind the peloton, with the speaker giving information in French and English (plus the language of the country the race is in). Among the details constantly updated by Radio Tour are bib numbers of riders in breakaways and chase groups, time gaps between groups, sprint and KOM results, riders dropped (or abandoned), mechanical problems, danger spots coming up, crash details and riders involved, current distance of the race, town names, and the race director’s announcements. Radio Tour officials who ride on motorcycles, taking time checks and reporting race details, operate on a different radio band. There are also separate wavebands for the publicity caravan, the medical team, and race commissaires. Team radios operate on different wavebands for communication between the riders (who have taped-in earpieces) and the transceivers in their team cars, where the sports directors and mechanics also have Radio Tour and live TV images to monitor the racing. Some experts allege that team radios adversely affect the tactics and outcome of races. Others say that the radios improve safety in the peloton by warning riders of potential danger spots coming up. A partial ban on team radios was implemented in 2011, but since 2016, they are used in all elite races.

FUN FACT In its formative years, Radio Tour had a limited range, so press cars had to travel within a few kilometers of the race to hear it. That changed when a plane was used to boost the range—though Radio Tour cut out when the plane had to refuel on long stages.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT The race organizers said before the 2009 Tour that, as an experiment, they were banning the use of team radios on two stages. The teams protested, but when the ban remained for one stage, the riders soft-pedaled and it ended in a bunch sprint.

KEY PERSON The American team manager, Jim Ochowicz, obtained his team sponsorship from the Motorola electronics company in 1990 and subsequently helped pioneer Motorola’s team carto-rider and rider-to-team-car radio communication system.

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TECHNOLOGY RADIO, TV & FILM For the Tour’s first twenty years, newspaper reports were the only way to follow the race. The first radio broadcasts didn’t come until the mid-1920s, while the first live commentary was in 1930. But the Tour didn’t truly come to life for European cycling fans until after World War II, when Belgian, French, and Luxembourg radio stations broadcast updates every hour and live commentary from the stage finishes. As for television, the first live images came from fixed cameras at the Parc des Princes velodrome at the finish of the 1948 Tour. The first filmed images from the route came in 1952—but at that point only 24,000 homes in France had a TV set. That number had increased to 700,000 by the time direct images (still from fixed cameras) were beamed from the summit of the Col d’Aubisque in 1958 and the following year from the Puy-de-Dôme time trial won by Federico Bahamontes. The first rolling live images didn’t come until 1960, when a French TV unit had cameras mounted on a Citroën station wagon, a motorcycle, and a helicopter to cover two stages—one in the Pyrenees, the other in the Alps. That number increased to four stages in 1961, and, by 1962, the last 10 kilometers of every stage was televised—but with unreliable images. In the evening, fans could watch black-and-white newsreel of the day’s racing (and the previous day’s stage in color). More memorable was the 1965 documentary film, Pour un Maillot Jaune, made by French director Claude Lelouch. The first time that TV coverage came to other European countries was in 1968; and true live television, filmed from motos in the race, didn’t come until the 1970s. Even then, it was just the final hour of racing that was broadcast. The first time a full day was televised, an alpine stage to L’Alpe d’Huez, came in 1990, while complete wire-to-wire coverage of every stage didn’t happen until 2017.

FUN FACT Since 2014, France TV has used drones to pre-film major architectural sights and natural wonders on the Tour route to insert in live broadcasts when the race is passing such sites. It’s not possible to use drones for live images.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Hollywood stars have been infrequent guests at the Tour. Orson Welles was the starter of the 1950 Tour and Dustin Hoffman attended several stages in 1984 when a film he was due to star in, The Yellow Jersey, was at a planning stage. Even though Danish director Jørgen Leth shot 35-millimeter film at the Tour for that film, the movie was never made.

KEY PERSON Former French racer Robert Chapatte was the pioneer of TV broadcasting, commentating at the Tour for twenty-three years between 1957 and 1985.

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TECHNOLOGY PHOTO FINISH & RACE DATA Just as the Tour has evolved from a battle of raw individual endurance to a contest of speed, teamwork, and climbing skills, so has officiating the race progressed from the very basics to state-of-the-art technology. Stages in the first Tours were timed by one official who set the riders off from the start and then traveled by bike and train to the finish, where he’d record the riders’ order of finish and their times. Judging finishes became more difficult when large groups began to contest sprint finishes; the judges had to write down bib numbers as riders crossed the line, rarely getting more than the first dozen finishers (and giving the rest of the peloton an equal placing). This was still happening through the 1950s, despite the use of tape recorders and the first photo-finish cameras—which were developed by Omega for the 1952 Olympics, though film took half an hour to develop. And the Tour’s photofinish camera sometimes malfunctioned, forcing the judges to use the old-school methods. The digital age has transformed the tabulation of results. The FinishLynx timing system currently used at the Tour—one camera at intermediate sprints, two (including a backup) at the finish line—captures up to 10,000 frames a second. Transponders clipped below the saddle of every bike give instant finish positions, but the camera has to confirm results, because riders sometimes take a spare bike or switch bikes with a teammate. The transponders, which weigh 100 grams, contain a global positioning system chip, a radio-frequency chip, and a rechargeable battery with enough power to last the longest stages. For help with judging and making difficult decisions, the Tour now uses a mobile unit that houses two EVS Xeebra multi-angle review systems that lets officials review incidents through a touchscreen linked to as many as sixteen live cameras. Officials can narrow their view from all feeds to one full-screen view and zoom in with a touchand-pinch gesture.

FUN FACT Electronic timing wasn’t functioning for a 51-kilometer time trial at the 1984 Tour, so it was hand-timed. Irishman Sean Kelly sensationally recorded 1:07:19.283, well clear of favorites Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond. When race leader Laurent Fignon finished in 1:07:19.215, neutrals felt a 0.062-second margin wasn’t possible and that French timekeepers favored their countryman.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT In the pre-digital age, stage 7 of the 2017 Tour would have been a dead heat, but the digital camera showed that Marcel Kittel out-sprinted Edvald Boasson Hagen by 0.0003 of a second.

KEY PERSON Australian Peter Gray, senior director at ASO technology partner Dimension Data, processes information generated by riders’ transponders to give instant race details through television, digital, and social media channels.

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HOW THE TOUR REACHES YOU About 500 people work on the television production team that’s controlled by Euro Media France and France Télévision, which create a single feed for the other broadcasters, including NBC. Live footage comes via VHF wireless cameras from five motorcyclemounted cameramen who ride alongside the cyclists and two helicopters equipped with Cineflex gyro-stabilized camera systems. The motorcycle and helicopter images are sent via VHF link to relay helicopters, flying at around 2,000 feet, which then send the combined feed to two high-frequency airplanes that fly above the helicopters at an altitude of between 10,000 and 25,000 feet. The planes have to circle at slow speeds to remain above the race, with their signals being relayed to two or three trucks that are sited along the racecourse. The signals are relayed from the last of these intermediate points to four dishes mounted on a 150-foothigh crane set up in the technical area at the finish. Euro Media France decodes the signals from the various cameras and sends them to the mobile studio of France Télévision, whose producers select the images sent for live transmission. This is where the twenty-strong Dimension Data technology team (five on site, the rest working remotely in Australia, South Africa, the UK, and the US) comes into the picture. The Tour’s so-called Race Center, developed with race organizer ASO, is a web-based application hosted on Dimension Data’s cloud platform that incorporates machine learning (an artificial intelligence application) and complex algorithms to combine live and historical race data, photographs, social-media feeds, race commentary, and video. Data includes GPS positioning, route-gradient tracking for each rider, and live wind speed and direction tracking. In North America, besides regular live coverage, NBC Sports has a commercial-free, live-streaming option that’s available on such devices as Amazon Fire TV, Android, Apple iOS, Google’s Chromecast, and Roku. Also available to fans are highlights provided by Velon, a group of UCI WorldTour teams, which includes images from tiny GoPro cameras mounted on their riders’ bikes—though these images are yet to be included in the live television feed.

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GLOSSARY AEROBIC THRESHOLD: This is a training effort at about 70 percent of an athlete’s maximum heart rate, a relatively low level of exercise that can be maintained for several hours. ANAEROBIC THRESHOLD (a.k.a. lactate threshold): This is the point at which aerobic exercise transitions to anaerobic exercise (where stored carbohydrates become the athlete’s dominant fuel); a Tour de France rider can sustain this level of effort for at least one hour. BOTTOM BRACKET: The cylindrical “box” at the foot of the bicycle frame containing an axle, running on ball bearings, to which the cranks are attached and which enables the chainrings to turn when the rider pedals. CHAINRING: One of the two large “wheels” attached to the bicycle’s right-side crank; a combination of fifty-three- and thirty-nine-tooth chainrings is usually fitted to Tour bikes, though larger (up to fifty-six-tooth) outer rings can be used to race at higher speeds in time trials, and smaller (down to thirty-two-tooth) inner rings for extremely steep climbs. COG (a.k.a. sprocket): One of the small “wheels” on the rear hub whose perimeter teeth engage with the chain to turn the rear wheel when the rider pedals; cogs can have as few as eleven teeth (for the highest gearing) or as many as thirty-four teeth (for the lowest gearing). COTTER PIN: A steel pin (with a screwed-on nut) used to fasten cranks to the bike’s bottombracket axle in the Tour’s early days. DERAILLEURS: The mechanisms mounted on the frame that facilitate shifting gears, with the chain being lifted and moved from one chainring to the other (at the front) and from one cog to another (at the rear). DISC BRAKES: Brakes that have thin, stainless steel discs (or rotors) attached to the front and rear hubs, actuated by cables that squeeze two pads together; they were only fully approved for use at the Tour in 2018.

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DISC WHEEL: A spoke-less rear wheel, which is essentially two full carbon fiber discs connected to the wheel rim and hub, and used to make a time-trial bike more aerodynamic. FREEWHEEL (a.k.a. cogset or cassette): The mechanism on the rear hub that’s fitted with up to twelve cogs that engage with the chain and allows the bike to coast when the rider stops pedaling. OVAL CHAINRING: An asymmetrically shaped chainring that, in theory, allows the rider to make better use of his strongest leg muscles when turning the pedals. SRM: Abbreviation for Schoberer Rad Messtechnik (or “Schoberer bike measurement technology”), a mobile ergometer that uses strain gauges to calculate the power, in watts, being expended by the rider when turning the cranks. STRAVA: A website and mobile app that tracks via GPS a racer’s training ride (or race route), showing a map of the roads taken, elevation gained and lost, speed (maximum, minimum, and average), timing (sections, KOMs, and total), and power output. TRANSCEIVER: A radio device that transmits and receives communications, including those used by Tour teams for two-way chats during the race. TRANSPONDER: A device that receives satellite radio communications over a range of uplink frequencies, amplifies them, and re-transmits them on a different set of downlink frequencies. TURBO TRAINER: A mechanism that consists of a metal frame, a clamp to secure the bicycle, a roller on which the rear wheel turns, and a mechanism (the turbine) providing resistance when the rider pedals; used at the Tour for warming up before stages or warming down after them.

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TEAMS & RACING Team Sponsors Goals Team Composition Team Managers Support Staff Team Tactics Attacks & Breakaways The Story of Team Sky Glossary

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TEAMS & RACING TEAM SPONSORS Commercial interests have always played a major role in the Tour de France. Indeed, French bicycle manufacturers were central to the founding of the newspaper that created the Tour, while those same companies/advertisers poured money into the teams that then contested the race. When those teams became too powerful, often dictating how the race was won, race organizer Henri Desgrange decided to change the formula. Starting in 1930, he banned the commercial teams, replacing them with national and regional teams, and supplied all the starters with anonymous, yellow bicycles. That formula remained for almost four decades, partly because fans liked supporting “their” team—whether it was France, Belgium, or one of the regional squads. Post–World War II, riders raced all year for commercially sponsored teams, and in 1969 these trade teams replaced the Tour’s national teams. Like many modern-day sports, including motor racing, cycling’s major teams are named for their sponsors. Over the years, these teams have evolved from having riders from just one or two countries to become truly multinational. For example, Britain’s Team Sky has historically had a thirty-man squad with riders from thirteen countries. Among the longest-running sponsors are Lotto (the Belgian national lottery, sponsoring teams since 1985), AG2R La Mondiale (a French insurance and retirement fund group, since 1992), and Cofidis (a French consumer credit corporation, since 1996). Other teams have been in existence for similar periods with different sponsors, but with the same basic management team. These include the Spanish team Movistar, which was formed in 1980 as Team Reynolds; French team Groupama-FDJ, founded in 1997; and US team Education First-Drapac, founded in 2003. Sponsors are as diverse as CCC, a Polish shoe manufacturer, to Astana Pro Team, named for the capital of Kazakhstan and sponsored by a consortium of state-owned companies. To compete at the elite level, these teams have annual budgets of between $15 million and $45 million.

FUN FACT Perhaps the strangest sponsor of a Tour de France team was a wealthy Paris cabaret singer, Myriam De Kova. Her team, De Kova-Lejeune, raced the 1973 Tour, with its leader Lucien Aimar, the 1966 Tour champion, finishing in seventeenth place.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Before alcohol sponsorship was banned in French cycling, Pelforth beer, Margnat wines, and St. Raphaël aperitif sponsored longstanding Tour teams through the 1950s and ’60s.

KEY PERSON Italian racer Fiorenzo Magni, a three-time world champion who won seven stages of the Tour de France and wore the yellow jersey on nine days in his five participations, introduced the first non-cycling sponsor to the sport in 1952: Nivea, the German skincare company.

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TEAMS & RACING GOALS Unlike most other sports events, the Tour de France has multiple awards on offer throughout the three weeks. Every day (except when there are time trials), riders have a chance of shooting for the stage win or the most aggressive rider (or combativité) award, along with scoring points in the King of the Mountains or sprint competitions and gaining time to wear the race leader’s yellow jersey or best young rider’s white jersey. Then there are the long-term goals of winning the overall titles in all of those categories, including the best team award. Because of all these potential accolades, each of the twenty-two Tour teams starts the race with very different ambitions and goals. Normally, only half of the teams have a leader who has the potential to win the Tour or finish on the podium in Paris. Those dozen teams will focus on racing for their leader in the hope that he can compete for the final yellow jersey, so they see winning stages as a bonus rather than a priority—unless the team leader drops out of contention through injury, illness, or bad luck. The initial goals of the other teams will focus on attempting to win stages and/ or contesting for one of the lesser classifications: points, mountains, young rider, or team. All these different priorities are at play every day, a fact that makes the Tour and the teams’ different goals so fascinating. Even teams that don’t have a true GC contender, sprinter, or climber can have a successful Tour by racing aggressively and putting riders in long-range breakaways; that’s because in this digital era of wire-to-wire TV coverage and live streaming, simply having the sponsors’ names visible in a breakaway for a few hours is enough to make the Tour a success for a team.

FUN FACT The Tour organizers give all the team leaders bib numbers ending in 1, with the defending champion (or his current team’s leader) always given No. 1, followed by the next two finishers from the previous Tour with No. 11 and No. 21. So, with eight-man teams, there are no numbers 9, 10, 19, 20, etc.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT The luckiest bib number in Tour history is No. 51—used by Eddy Merckx to win his first Tour in 1969, Luis Ocaña in 1973, Bernard Thévenet in 1975, and Bernard Hinault in 1978.

KEY PERSON Co-race director Félix Lévitan saw the need for multiple awards that gave exposure to race sponsors by introducing the green jersey in 1953 and the white jersey and polka-dot jerseys in 1975.

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TEAMS & RACING TEAM COMPOSITION One of the most difficult tasks faced by a team manager is selecting the eight riders he wants at the Tour de France. UCI WorldTour teams have a minimum of twenty-three and a maximum of thirty riders on their payroll, so careful thought has to be put into deciding which men can best achieve the team’s goals. Those teams with top-five GC ambitions base their selections around their leader (or leaders); a typical choice would be two or three climbers to pace their leader in the high mountains, two or three all-arounders to also help in the hilly stages, and one or two strongmen for the flatter stages—the support riders are collectively called domestiques. Teams that have a top sprinter who can win flat stages will select three or four riders to support him in the field sprints, along with those who can help chase down breakaways and/or go into breakaways, to help guarantee a sprint finish. Sometimes, a top rider doesn’t get selected—that was the case in 2018 with the Mitchelton-Scott team, when its ace sprinter Caleb Ewen was left out so that the team could focus on the GC chances of climber Adam Yates. Most of the teams don’t have potential yellow or green jersey winners, so they pick a selection of rouleurs capable of winning stages from breakaways and climbers who have a chance of contesting the KOM title. Pure climbers rarely win the Tour, as they can lose too much time in the time trials or the flat stages—especially when strong crosswinds make it tough for lightly built riders to match the power needed to hold their place in echelons. But whatever a team’s composition, they all have a road captain—usually a senior rider who has ridden several Tours—who oversees team matters in the peloton, constantly communicating with his sports director (a.k.a. directeurs sportifs) and making decisions on which tactics to employ.

FUN FACT In his first season as a professional, 1965, Felice Gimondi was not selected by his Salvarani team to start the Tour. At the last minute, teammate Bruno Fantinato fell ill and Gimondi started the race for experience—and he won it!

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Only eight pure climbers have won the Tour in the seventy-odd years since World War II: Jean Robic (1947), Charly Gaul (1958), Federico Bahamontes (1959), Lucien Van Impe (1976), Pedro Delgado (1988), Marco Pantani (1998), Alberto Contador (2007, 2009), and Carlos Sastre (2008).

KEY PERSON In his Tour debut, 1969, twenty-four-year-old Eddy Merckx won the yellow jersey, green jersey, and polka-dot jersey—and if today’s rules for best young rider applied (age twenty-five and under), he would have won the white jersey too!

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TEAMS & RACING TEAM MANAGERS Tour de France winners receive all the accolades, but through race history it’s often been their team managers who made victory possible. In the four decades that the Tour was contested by national teams, the manager/ coach had to select his riders from several different trade teams and get them to work together. That wasn’t an easy task when, in all the other races, those riders would be competing against each other. For instance, before the 1949 Tour, Italian national coach Alfredo Binda had to sit down with the country’s two stars, Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi, and get them to put their rivalry aside and promise to cooperate. His diplomacy worked, and the two stars finished first and second in the Tour. A decade later, French national coach Marcel Bidot had a similarly difficult job getting cooperation between such strong, ambitious riders as Jacques Anquetil, Louison Bobet, and Roger Rivière. When the Tour returned to a trade-team formula, the team manager’s job became a year-round task (with the Tour being its pinnacle), so he was an even more important figure in grooming and coaching his riders. That was the case with three famed French team managers: Maurice De Muer (Peugeot), Raphaël Geminiani (Bic), and Antonin Magne (Mercier). Through the 1970s and ’80s, the most successful managers were Dutchman Peter Post (TI-Raleigh), Frenchman Cyrille Guimard (Renault-Elf), and Swiss Paul Köchli (La Vie Claire)—who were also excellent coaches. Since then, trade teams have become 50 percent larger and require a more corporate structure to be successful. As a result, the team manager is more like a CEO, who delegates most of the tasks to sports directors, performance coaches, and business managers. The most successful team managers in this twenty-first-century techno age have been Spain’s Eusebio Unzué (Movistar), Belgium’s Patrick Lefevere (Deceuninck-Quick-Step), and Britain’s Dave Brailsford (Team Sky).

FUN FACT Jacques Anquetil’s directeur sportif, Raphaël Geminiani, often bent the rules. In 1964, a rider could not swap a bike unless it had a mechanical problem, but “Gem” told his mechanic to surreptitiously cut Anquetil’s derailleur cable and hand him a replacement bike— which he used to win the stage (and the yellow jersey).

HISTORICAL TIDBIT French directeur sportif Bruno Roussel paid a heavy price for turning a blind eye to his Festina team’s use of banned drugs: he was thrown out of the 1998 Tour, jailed for three weeks, given a one-year suspended sentence, and fined 50,000 francs.

KEY PERSON In 1976, first-year sports director Cyrille Guimard, twenty-nine, guided Lucien Van Impe to his only Tour victory. He also led Bernard Hinault and Laurent Fignon to their debut Tour victories.

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TEAMS & RACING SUPPORT STAFF When a rider wins a stage of the Tour de France, there’s usually a Champagne celebration at his team’s hotel. Typically, the whole team will pose for a photo. Not just the riders, team manager and sports directors, but also the behind-the-scenes staff that have helped make the win possible, including the mechanics, soigneurs, and medical staff. The work of the mechanics is the most time consuming. Their work starts well before the Tour at the team’s so-called service course, a warehouse-type building where all the riders’ bikes are put together, along with assembling wheels, tires, and spare equipment. At the race, most teams have three or four mechanics, with one driving the equipment truck between hotels, while two others ride in the team cars, ready to change wheels, make emergency repairs, or hand riders replacement bikes. At the team hotels, they power-wash all the bikes, replace parts, check tires for damage, and replace anything defective. The soigneurs (a.k.a. carers) are each responsible for two or three riders on the team. In the morning, they prepare food bags and fill water bottles, take suitcases to the team truck, drive the team’s backup vehicles to the feed zone(s), or other strategic points on the course, where they hand up food bags and/or bottles. They then get to the finish where they hand riders towels, recovery drinks, and extra clothing; and at the hotel they massage their riders and treat injuries. In the days before rigorous anti-doping controls, soigneurs would take care of all a rider’s physical needs, including the treatment of saddle sores and providing minerals, vitamins, and more sinister products. Today, the coaching and medical staffs (including a sports psychiatrist) have become vital elements in riders’ preparation and recovery, monitoring their health and fitness all year long and being on hand to help them at the Tour.

FUN FACT Among the reasons why bike racers shave their legs are to make it easier to apply oils during massage and avoid ripping hair from the skin when removing Band-Aids.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT A team mechanic cost Frenchman Raymond Poulidor his chance of winning the 1964 Tour because of two botched bike changes. First, when Poulidor stopped to change a buckled wheel, the mechanic, in getting him restarted, pushed him off the bike. Second, when Poulidor flatted when winning a vital time trial, the mechanic, jumping from the team car with a new bike, fell to the ground with the bike, twisting the handlebars.

KEY PERSON Biagio Cavanna, the blind soigneur of two-time Tour champion Fausto Coppi, was a pioneer in correct nutrition, adequate rest, and motor-paced training.

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TEAMS & RACING TEAM TACTICS It’s often said that the Tour de France is like playing chess on wheels. But that’s a poor analogy. With twenty-two teams each having differing goals on every stage, there can be an infinite combination of tactics being used at any given moment. So it can be confusing. When you see riders take turns riding at the head of the peloton, they could be riding at a high tempo to chase down a breakaway, at a medium tempo to “control” a breakaway (i.e., keep it within a “catchable” distance before a late acceleration), or a slow tempo when, perhaps, there has been a crash and riders are trying to chase back to the peloton. The team of the race leader is expected to set the peloton’s pace every day—at least until the stage finale when, on flat stages, the sprinters’ teams will ride hard to catch any breakaways and set up their sprinters. If there are crosswinds in open country, one or two teams may try to break up the peloton (and put other teams, and their leaders, in difficulty) by forming echelons. In the right wind conditions, the peloton will split into several echelons that can result in the back groups losing minutes to the riders in the front. On flat stages ending in mass sprints, the sprinters’ teams will form lead-out trains, with individuals riding as hard as they can before peeling off, until the last support rider leads his sprinter to within 200 meters (0.124 miles) before unleashing him for the sprint to the line. On stages with mountaintop finishes, team leaders can benefit from a similar strategy, with one teammate gradually winding up the pace on the lower slopes of a climb before giving way to a colleague, who then climbs even faster before giving way to others and then to the leader in the final kilometer or so.

FUN FACT On stage 13 of the 2013 Tour, aggressive racing in strong crosswinds caused the peloton to split into echelons, with race leader Chris Froome losing over a minute to his rivals.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT In 1990, when Greg LeMond was eight minutes behind race leader Claudio Chiappucci by stage 13, he sent a high-placed teammate into a breakaway, forcing Chiappucci’s team to chase. When the break was caught, LeMond counterattacked, forcing Chiappucci to chase once more—the Italian ran out of steam and conceded almost five minutes. LeMond went on to win the Tour a third time.

KEY PERSON The infamous Red Guard of Belgian sprinter Rik Van Looy, who won four stages and the green jersey in 1963, was the first well-organized lead-out train seen at the Tour.

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TEAMS & RACING ATTACKS & BREAKAWAYS Unlike marathons and other running races, in which a few elite athletes and their teammates congregate at the front and take turns setting a fast pace to leave the rest behind, riders in the Tour de France generally stay together for most of the multi-hour stages. That’s because riding in a pack is far easier than riding alone at the speeds they average (around 45 kilometers (28 miles) an hour on flat stages), and drafting off other riders can save up to 40 percent of their energy output, or as much as 90 percent in a tightly packed group. When the peloton is moving faster, especially in the first and final hours, it can be tough to just hang on. A casual observer might wonder why some riders make huge efforts to get into breakaways, particularly on flat stages, knowing they’ll most likely be caught before the end and probably dropped. There are many reasons for getting into breaks: a genuine attempt to win the stage (or win points at an intermediate sprint or KOM climb); a defensive move to mark a rival team (or to help a teammate bridge up later); or just a publicity move to give a team sponsor stage-long exposure. To make a winning attack (either from the break or the peloton), a rider has to choose an opportune moment (perhaps when he sees weakness or fatigue on his competitors’ faces) or a strategic location (a tight turn, short uphill, or section of cobbles), where a sharp acceleration can give him a jumpstart on riders who hesitate. Because it’s so much easier for a group to race at high speeds, solo breakaways are the most difficult to sustain. Over long distances, a rider has to pace his effort perfectly, fuel constantly, and not overextend himself. Over a short distance—a kilometer or two—his focus is selecting the correct gearing so he can use maximum power to maintain the highest possible pedal cadence.

FUN FACT On stage 3 of the 2007 Tour, Fabian Cancellara attacked solo in the final kilometer and held off all the best sprinters to win. He made his move on a stretch of cobblestones in Compiègne, near the start of Paris–Roubaix, the cobbled classic he won three times.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT The longest successful breakaway since World War II was made in 1947 by Albert Bourlon, who rode solo for 253 kilometers (157 miles) on stage 14 between Carcassonne and Luchon, to win by more than sixteen minutes.

KEY PERSON In 1951, Hugo Koblet singlehandedly held off a peloton led by Tour greats Fausto Coppi, Gino Bartali, and Louison Bobet for 135 kilometers (84 miles) between Brive and Agen to win stage 11 by almost three minutes—before going on to win the Tour.

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THE STORY OF TEAM SKY Before the UK-based Team Sky made its racing debut in 2010, team manager Dave Brailsford said the goal was to win the Tour de France with a British rider within five years. That statement was greeted with great skepticism, because his was the first-ever major British professional cycling team and, at that point, the highest finish by any British rider at the Tour was fourth. Remarkably, in the team’s third Tour (2012), it placed first and second with two British riders: Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome. Team Sky went on to win the Tour five more times before announcing that 2019 would be its final season under Sky’s sponsorship. How did this happen so fast? The answer lies with Brailsford, previously the performance director of British Cycling, who led his athletes to eight gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and he used the same “marginal gains” philosophy at Team Sky. Sponsored by telecommunications giant BSkyB and partnered by 21st Century Fox and Sky Italia, the team worked closely with a slew of top cycling manufacturers, headed by Pinarello bikes, Castelli clothing, and Shimano equipment. And its performance staff used the latest technical help, including advanced analytics. With an annual budget of $45 million, a staff of sixty-five, and a roster of thirty riders, Team Sky revolutionized cycling, a tradition-bound sport that relied on word-of-mouth experience rather than science-based practices. In that sense, four-time Tour winner Froome is cycling’s first tech-age champion. Born to British parents in Kenya, he had a private education in South Africa, completing two years of an economics degree course before moving to Europe to seek a pro cycling contract. In a 2007 lab test at age twenty-two, he showed great athletic potential, with a high VO2max of 80.2, the maximum rate at which the body consumes oxygen, and threshold power of 420 watts. From weighing just over 75 kilograms (166 pounds), the 6-foot-1 Froome slimmed to 67 kilograms (147 pounds) by the time he repeated the physiological testing in 2015—and his VO2max had increased to 84.6, giving him the extremely high power-to-weight ratio needed to become a multiple-Tour winner.

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GLOSSARY CLIMBER: Usually a short, skinny cyclist who can climb long mountain roads faster than heavily built riders because of his high power-to-weight ratio. DIRECTEUR SPORTIF (a.k.a. the DS, or sports director): The French title is traditionally used for the team official who decides team tactics, often coaches the riders, and helps recruit new riders. DOMESTIQUE (a.k.a. a team worker or water carrier): This French word is used to describe a team rider who works hard for his team leader and other teammates, by riding tempo at the head of the peloton or pacing delayed teammates back to the peloton; by giving his bike or a wheel to a colleague after a crash or mechanical problem; and by dropping back to the team car to carry water bottles up to his teammates in the peloton. DRAFTING: Riding in the slipstream of other riders, obtaining less air resistance, and reducing the needed power output. ECHELON: A double line of riders angled into a crosswind and riding at top speed; the riders in the echelon take brief turns at setting the pace before slipping into the shelter of those moving forward to take their turn. Because of the speed and the limited width of the road, slower riders have to form separate echelons, with the risk of losing major time to those ahead. LEAD-OUT TRAIN: A long line of teammates, one behind the other, being “pulled” by the rider in front at great speed until he moves to the side and is replaced by the rider behind him. The last rider in the train is the team’s sprinter, who makes his finishing effort after his last teammate has peeled off in the final straightaway. PACELINE: Similar to a lead-out train, this happens at a steadier tempo during a stage, with each rider connecting to the back of the line after making his effort at the front.

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ROULEUR: A rider who is not a specialist climber or sprinter, but can maintain a strong, steady pace for a long time, and is particularly valuable helping chase breakaways or pulling hard in team time trials. SOIGNEUR (a.k.a. carer): The French word for a team helper who massages riders and generally cares for their physical needs at the Tour. SPRINTER: A rider with fast-twitch muscles who is proficient at accelerating and maintaining speeds of around 70 kilometers (43 miles) per hour for a few hundred meters at the end of a stage; he also has to be highly skilled at positioning himself against sprinters from other teams and negotiating sharp turns in the final kilometers. TEAM CARS: Tour teams have two main team cars, each driven by a directeur sportif, with a mechanic in the back seat and spare bicycles and wheels on the roof rack; the first car stays behind the main peloton and may move up behind a breakaway that contains one of its team members. The second car can move up to the peloton to replace the first or remain in reserve some distance behind to follow team riders who are dropped. TEAM LEADER: A team’s main hope to win the Tour or place high in the general classification. TEAM CAPTAIN: Usually a team’s most experienced rider who helps decide tactics on the road while communicating with his sports directors and teammates. TEMPO: The steady pace, usually between 40 and 45 kilometers (25 to 28 miles) per hour on flat roads, maintained by riders at the head of the peloton—either riding to keep a breakaway at a constant distance or ensuring that their team leaders remain in the “safe zone” near the front of the race.

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CONTESTS Yellow Jersey Green Jersey Polka-Dot Jersey White Jersey Team Race Stage Winners Rewards Age Is Not a Barrier Glossary

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CONTESTS YELLOW JERSEY To wear the yellow jersey at the Tour de France is a highlight in any cyclist’s career—even if it’s just for a day. The yellow jersey is awarded at the end of each stage to the rider with the lowest overall time (see “General Classification” in Chapter 1 to see how this is calculated). Why is it a yellow jersey? Well, the organizing newspaper, L’Auto, was originally printed on yellow newsprint, so when organizer Henri Desgrange decided to give the leader a distinctively colored jersey he decided on yellow. That choice also fit in with his goal of making the race leader more visible to the roadside spectators. The very first yellow jersey, knitted from wool, was awarded to Eugène Christophe in 1919, following that Tour’s stage 10 from Nice to Grenoble. Counting the years before the race leader wore yellow, close to 300 riders have led the Tour de France. The highest number of yellow jersey holders in a single Tour is eight. That happened in 1956, when Roger Walkowiak took the final lead at the end of the final mountain stage, four days from the finish, and 1987, when Stephen Roche took the final yellow jersey in a time trial, twenty-four hours before the end. The only times that the winner of the opening stage has defended the yellow jersey for the remainder of the Tour came before World War II: Ottavio Bottecchia in 1924, Nicolas Frantz in 1928, and Romain Maes in 1935. Today, to give the race maximum interest, the organizers plan the course with the goal that the final winner doesn’t emerge until near the end of the final week—though that plan often goes awry. It’s possible to win the Tour without winning a single stage. That has happened seven times, including Greg LeMond’s third overall victory in 1990 and Chris Froome’s fourth win in 2017.

FUN FACT The yellow jersey sponsor, LCL bank, was founded in the city of Lyon—whose symbol is a lion, which also became associated with Crédit Lyonnais, LCL’s original name. As a result, a toy yellow lion is presented to the yellow jersey holder every day, while a larger stuffed lion is presented to the final winner in Paris.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT In honor of the Tour’s founding race director Henri Desgrange, the initials “HD” are featured on the front of every yellow jersey.

KEY PERSON In his seven participations at the Tour de France, Eddy Merckx wore the yellow jersey a record 111 times. After him in the record books come four other multiple winners: Bernard Hinault (seventy-nine), Miguel Induráin (sixty), Chris Froome (fifty-nine), and Jacques Anquetil (fifty-two).

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CONTESTS GREEN JERSEY There have always been fast finishers in the Tour de France, but they didn’t get their chance for full recognition until 1953, when the points classification (with a green jersey for its winner) was introduced to mark the Tour’s fiftieth anniversary. The goal of the competition was to reward the sprinters who could ride consistently throughout the three weeks, but had no chance of winning the overall title. That formula worked well until five-time Tour winner Eddy Merckx took both the yellow and green jerseys in 1969, 1971, and 1972. Bernard Hinault pulled off the same feat in 1979. Since then, the organizers have modified the contest so that a far greater number of points is awarded on the flat stages than the climbing stages. Currently, points are awarded for the top fifteen finishers on every stage, with fifty points going to winners of flat stages, thirty points for medium-mountain stages and on hilltop finishes, and twenty points for high-mountain stages and individual time trials. And on every road stage—even in the mountains—there are twenty points on offer to the first rider across the line at that day’s intermediate sprint. Through 2018, the most successful riders in the points competition have been Germany’s Erik Zabel and Slovakia’s Peter Sagan (both with six green jerseys) and Ireland’s Sean Kelly (with four), followed by the Netherlands’ Jan Janssen, Belgium’s Eddy Merckx and Freddy Maertens, and Uzbekistan’s Djamolidin Abdujaparov (each with three green jerseys). French sprinter André Darrigade won twenty-two Tour stages, all of them in field sprints, but he won the green jersey only twice (in 1959 and 1961). Had there been a points competition prior to 1953, among the winners would have been the French riders Jean Alavoine (who won seventeen Tour stages, including five in 1919), Charles Pélissier (who won sixteen stages, half of them in 1930), and André Leducq (twenty-five stage wins, including six in 1930, when he also won the Tour itself).

FUN FACT Why is it a green jersey? Well, green was the corporate color of the jersey’s first sponsor in 1953: the Belle Jardinière custom-clothing store in Paris.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT From 1905 to 1912, the Tour itself was decided on points by the addition of each rider’s finish places on every stage, so the man with the lowest points total in Paris was the overall winner.

KEY PERSON Germany’s Erik Zabel is the only rider to win the green jersey six years in succession (1996–2001); but Peter Sagan, already co-record holder with six green jerseys, is likely to surpass Zabel’s total in upcoming years. Ironically, Mark Cavendish, who has won a record thirty sprint stages, has taken only one green jersey (2011).

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CONTESTS POLKA-DOT JERSEY FUN FACT Before the 1971 Tour’s stage 19 in Blois, home of Chocolat Poulain, KOM winner Lucien Van Impe sat on a giant scale, balanced by boxes of chocolate on the other end. His prize: 58 kilos (127 pounds) of chocolate. Twenty-one years later in Blois, on the same scale, Tour winner Miguel Induráin scored 80 kilos (176 pounds).

HISTORICAL TIDBIT When no KOM jersey was awarded (1933–74), the leader wore a red marker on his jersey.

KEY PERSON Lucien Van Impe, the first rider to wear polka dots, was KOM a record six times. Federico Bahamontes also won six times, but before the jersey was awarded; Richard Virenque was KOM seven times, but he admitted to the use of banned drugs after his first four wins (1994–97).

In French, it’s called le maillot à pois rouges (literally, “the jersey with red spots”), but in English it’s always been known as the polka-dot jersey, which is awarded to the leader of the King of the Mountains competition. Why does it have a spotted design? In 1975, when the organizers were looking for something distinctive to stand out against the traditional yellow and green jerseys, co-race director Félix Lévitan, who was also a journalist, remembered a track racer he’d written about who wore a polka-dot jersey. The choice of red spots caused the then KOM sponsor, Chocolat Poulain, to change its corporate color to red. Although the KOM competition started in 1933 to reward the Tour’s best climber, the winner has not always been the very best. Only five men have won the KOM title and the Tour in the same year: Gino Bartali (1938 and 1948), Fausto Coppi (1949 and 1952), Federico Bahamontes (1959), Eddy Merckx (1969 and 1970), and Chris Froome (2015). But since 1975, when the polka-dot jersey was first awarded, the KOM contest has rarely been won by the fastest climber. That’s because the points formula favors a rider who focuses on scoring points on the early climbs of mountain stages, rather than the last one or two, when the race favorites come to the fore. Currently, points are awarded in five separate categories: the easiest climbs (Cat. 4) give just 1 point to the first rider; the next easiest (Cat. 3) gives 2 and 1 points to the top two; climbs of between 5 and 10 kilometers (3.1 and 6.2 miles) and around 5-percent grade (Cat. 2) give 5, 3, 2, and 1 to the top four; climbs of over 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) and steeper than 7 percent (Cat. 1) give 10, 8, 6, 4, 2, and 1 to the top six; and the very hardest and longest climbs (Hors-Catégorie, or above-category) give 20, 15, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, and 2 to the top eight.

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CONTESTS WHITE JERSEY FUN FACT Germany’s Jan Ullrich won the young rider competition in three consecutive years: 1986, 1987, and 1998; but he wasn’t presented with a single white jersey— because no jersey was awarded from 1989 to 1999. The only other three-time winner, Andy Schleck of Luxembourg, did get the white jersey for his victories in 2008, 2009, and 2010.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT To date, only one rider has won the young riders’ white jersey and the climbers’ polka-dot jersey the same year: Colombia’s Nairo Quintana, in 2013.

KEY PERSON The first white jersey winner, in 1975, Francesco Moser, went on to become one of Italy’s greatest-ever cyclists. However, he never competed in the Tour de France a second time because he focused on his own grand tour, the Giro d’Italia.

The Best Young Rider competition was created in 1975 to give riders in their early twenties the chance of competing against each other for their own general classification prize. The leader of the competition is awarded a white jersey at the end of each stage, based on the same time parameters as the general classification. At first, it was open to any riders in their first two years as professionals; that was changed in 1983 to any rider competing in his first Tour; and the current formula—riders ages twenty-five and under—was adopted in 1987. The organizers stopped awarding a white jersey through the 1990s, but it was restored by popular demand in 2000. The white jersey has become a prestigious prize for riders on the way up, and it was an important career step for the Australian Phil Anderson, who took the young rider award in 1982 (fifth overall), for the Mexican Raúl Alcalá in 1987 (ninth overall), and for the Americans Greg LeMond in 1984 (third overall), Andy Hampsten in 1986 (fourth overall), and Tejay van Garderen in 2012 (fifth overall). Amazingly, four winners of the white jersey also won the yellow jersey the same year. They were Frenchman Laurent Fignon (1983, at age twenty-two), German Jan Ullrich (1987, at twenty-three), Spaniard Alberto Contador (2007, at twenty-four), and Luxembourger Andy Schleck (2010, at twenty-five). In contrast, the worst-placed rider on GC to win the white jersey was French rider Fabrice Philipot, who finished twenty-fourth overall in 1989. Twin brothers from England, Adam and Simon Yates, won the white jersey in consecutive years, 2016 and 2017, respectively. Over the competition’s five decades, there have been eight different sponsors of the white jersey; since 2015, it has been sponsored by Krys, a chain of French opticians. For the dozen years before that, it was automaker Škoda, which now sponsors the green jersey.

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CONTESTS TEAM RACE FUN FACT At only two Tours has the team race been won by a truly underdog trade team: the French workingman’s favorite squad Pelforth-SauvageLejeune in 1964 and America’s fan-popular Garmin-Cervélo team in 2011.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT The biggest surprises in the national team competition were in 1953 (when the Dutch won) and 1968 (when the Spanish came out on top); those were the only years that those underdog nations won the competition.

KEY PERSON Henri Desgrange, the founding Tour director, began the team competition for nations in 1930. His goal was to take away the dominance of teams sponsored by the major bicycle manufacturers—he even made all the riders use anonymous yellow bikes supplied by the organizers.

It’s said that cycling is a team sport won by an individual. That’s true. But at the Tour de France, it’s almost always the individual who gets all the attention, whether it’s winning a stage, taking one of the jerseys, or even finishing last on GC. But every day at the Tour, there’s also a team prize, which was first incorporated into the race in 1930. It’s computed by adding together the stage times of each team’s top three finishers, with the lowest combined time taking the day’s honors. The overall leader is the team with the lowest accumulated time over the completed stages. No distinctive jerseys are awarded, but the leaders in the team race go to the podium after every stage, usually for the day’s final presentation. In the race, the team race leaders wear yellow helmets and yellow bib numbers. It is truly an award for team consistency and all-around ability, with different riders contributing to the team time each stage. The most valuable contributions come from the riders who get into long-distance breakaways, particularly in the second half of the Tour when the breakaways do not pose a threat to the individual GC and big time gains can be made for the team. The battle between the top teams frequently affects tactics in the latter stages, when squads in contention for the overall team prize try to put three riders into the day’s main breakaway. Despite its relatively low priority, the team race has its own prestige among the riders and it gets high marks from the team sponsors. For example, the Spanish-based Movistar team raced hard to win the team prize three times between 2015 and 2018, after its goal of individual honors faded. For the general public, the team race was a more prestigious competition from 1930 to 1968, when national teams competed in the Tour. France and Belgium each won the team race a record ten times.

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CONTESTS STAGE WINNERS FUN FACT Every stage, a jury chooses the day’s most aggressive (or most combative) rider—usually one who has attacked from a long breakaway. The daily winner is honored on the podium and wears a red bib number the next day. The most aggressive rider of the whole Tour receives the super-combativité prize.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT The first American to win a road stage of the Tour was Davis Phinney, from Boulder, Colorado, who in 1986 won stage 3 at the head of a seven-man breakaway. Greg LeMond was the first US rider to win a Tour time trial: stage 21, in 1985.

KEY PERSON Peter Sagan, the multi-time green jersey winner, is the poster boy of stage-win celebrations. His victory salutes include impersonations of The Hulk and Forrest Gump.

Not many people win the Tour de France. In fact, fewer than seventy have won the race in its one hundred–plus-year history. But, on average, fourteen different riders win at least one stage of the Tour every year. And, because of the enormous media presence, winning a Tour stage can be as prestigious as winning one of professional cycling’s standalone classics, such as Milan–San Remo or Paris–Roubaix. There are many ways of winning a stage. For a mass sprint, a rider has to rely on his teammates to chase down breakaways and pace him to the front of the peloton with strong lead-outs before he can unleash his sprint in the final straightaway. Now and then, the sprinters’ teams get their timing wrong and a solo rider may surge in the final kilometer to win the stage. More commonly—especially in the third week of the Tour, when most riders are too far behind on GC to threaten the top 10—a large breakaway can gain several minutes. In that circumstance, a small group usually survives until the end to contest a final sprint—unless a lone rider manages to get clear. But a single rider rarely makes a successful long-distance breakaway. In time-trial stages, the rider with the fastest time at any point sits in an actual “hot seat” until displaced by a faster finisher. The most successful stage winner in a single Tour was Charles Pélissier, who, in 1930, won eight of the twenty-one stages (and placed second seven times)—but finished just ninth overall. While winning the 1970 Tour, Eddy Merckx also won eight stages (with three of those wins coming in individual time trials), while, in 1976, Freddy Maertens won eight stages and the green jersey. Eddy Merckx is the all-time record holder for Tour stage victories with thirty-four. The current runner-up is sprinter Mark Cavendish, who won thirty stages between 2008 and 2018.

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CONTESTS REWARDS When you consider the top prizes in sports such as soccer ($45 million for the Champions League winner), baseball ($22 million to the World Series winner), or golf ($10 million to the FedEx Cup winner), then the prize money at the Tour de France looks paltry. The overall champion gets just $600,000, while the combined total of all the prizes for every stage and the overall classifications comes to less than $3 million. A stage winner gets just $13,000. What’s more, the cash earned by each Tour team goes into a pool that is divided between all of its riders and staff. And the Tour winner doesn’t even claim his share of the prize pool, because he can benefit from lucrative starting fees at post-Tour exhibition races, a big bump in his team salary, and increased endorsement fees. The highest paid pro cyclists in 2018 were multi-time green jersey winner and world champion Peter Sagan and four-time Tour champion Chris Froome, whose team salaries were around $7.5 million. However, even these top salaries are tiny compared with those in other major sports, such as soccer’s Cristiano Ronaldo ($60 million), basketball’s LeBron James ($55 million), Formula 1’s Lewis Hamilton ($40 million), and baseball’s Mike Trout ($34 million). In fact, in baseball, the average salary is $4.5 million, with 130 players earning more than $10 million. The main reason for cycling’s relatively low salaries and prize money is lack of a true business model. Teams don’t have paying customers in stadiums, because all the races take place on public roads—where the Tour’s millions of roadside spectators do not pay a cent. Tour organizer ASO derives most of its revenue from the Tour’s television fees, and, across all its many sports events, it makes a profit of around $35 million on income of $150 million. None of its profits are shared with the twenty-two teams that take part in the Tour.

FUN FACT When Texan Lawson Craddock, bib No. 13, crashed and fractured his scapula on stage 1 of the 2018 Tour, he pledged that for every stage he finished he’d donate $100 to renovate Houston’s Alkek Velodrome, where he first raced. Others joined in, and when Craddock finished the Tour in 145th (last) place, he’d raised over $230,000.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT When Englishman Barry Hoban won a 1968 mountain stage in the French Alps, the local organizers presented him with a cow; Hoban sold the cow, but kept the cowbell hanging from its neck.

KEY PERSON Five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil was the first rider to truly cash in on his notoriety, earning so much in post-Tour criteriums that he bought a French château where he entertained guests with Champagne at all-night parties.

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AGE IS NOT A BARRIER Tour de France riders usually peak in their late twenties or early thirties. The exceptions have been highly talented individuals who have won their debut Tours at a much younger age, including (since World War II) Jacques Anquetil (twenty-three in 1957), Felice Gimondi (twenty-three in 1965), Eddy Merckx (twenty-four in 1969), Bernard Hinault (twenty-four in 1978), and Laurent Fignon (twenty-three in 1983). More typical are men who rode the Tour several times before they won the overall title. That was the case with Miguel Induráin, who won the first of his five consecutive yellow jerseys at age twenty-seven on his seventh appearance at the Tour, after not finishing his first two Tours and then placing ninety-seventh, forty-seventh, seventeenth, and tenth. Frenchman Henri Cornet, age twenty, was the youngest to win the Tour in 1904. That second edition of the Tour was held in confusion, with crowd protests, barricades across the road, and even shots fired to break up protests. In the end, four months after the finish, the riders who won all the stages and took the top four places on GC were all disqualified for violating the rules. That left fifth-placed Cornet, who actually finished three hours behind the original winner, as the 1904 champion. That same Tour saw the oldest man to ever start the race: fifty-year-old Henri Paret from Saint-Étienne. As for the oldest winner, that honor remains with Belgium’s Firmin Lambot, who was thirty-six when he won the 1922 Tour, three years after his first Tour victory. The next oldest Tour winners were all age thirty-four: Henri Pélissier in 1923, Gino Bartali in 1948, and Cadel Evans in 2011. The oldest rider to win any of the three-week grand tours was American Chris Horner, who was a month short of his forty-second birthday when he won the Vuelta a España in 2013. The closest anyone came to achieving that feat at the Tour was Raymond Poulidor, who at age forty in 1972 finished in third place—only beaten by Tour legends Eddy Merckx and Felice Gimondi. The oldest rider to win a Tour stage was Italian-Belgian Pino Cerami, who won stage 9 of the 1963 Tour at age forty-one.

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GLOSSARY CATEGORIZED CLIMBS: For the King of the Mountains competition, the organizers divide the hill and mountain climbs into five categories. The easiest, Cat. 4, is shorter than 3 kilometers (1.86 miles) at an average grade less than 5 percent; Cat. 3 is shorter than 5 kilometers (3.1 miles), steeper than 5 percent; Cat. 2 is longer than 5 kilometers and steeper than 6 percent (or as steep as 8 percent if it’s less than 5 kilometers); Cat. 1 is longer than 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) and steeper than 6 percent; and, the most difficult, Hors-Cat (above category) is up to 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) long and as steep as 9 percent average grade. HORS-CATÉGORIE (a.k.a. Hors-Cat, or above category): The longest, steepest climbs in the Tour that the organizers deem the most difficult in the whole race. HOT SEAT: In time-trial stages, when the first starters ride several hours before the GC leaders, the rider who has the fastest time at any point in the day sits in the so-called hot seat near the stage finish. As soon as another rider beats his time, he takes the other man’s place. LCL: The name of the bank (and insurance company)—short for Le Crédit Lyonnais— which sponsors the yellow jersey competition at the Tour. MASS SPRINT (a.k.a. field sprint or bunch sprint): The most common type of finish on the flat stages of the Tour when most of the day’s starters come into the final kilometers together and contest a high-speed sprint finish. MEDIUM-MOUNTAIN STAGE: This is a hilly stage, not in the high mountains, where all the climbs are Cat. 2, Cat. 3, or Cat. 4. MILAN–SAN REMO: This prestigious one-day classic race is held in mid-March on a rolling 300-kilometer (186.4-mile) course between the Italian cities of Milan and San Remo. Most of the Tour’s top sprinters make this classic an early season goal.

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MOST AGGRESSIVE RIDER: This award is given every day, usually to a rider who has been the most active at the front of the race, either making solo attacks or working hard at the head of breakaway groups. PARIS–ROUBAIX: Another springtime classic, usually 255 kilometers (158.5 miles) in length, that includes more than 50 kilometers (31 miles) of narrow, cobblestone farm roads in northern France. POST-TOUR CRITERIUMS: In their heyday of the 1960s and ’70s, French towns put on a monthlong series of these almost daily exhibition races, held over multiple laps of short circuits, which drew thousands of paying spectators. The Tour’s stars competed in these usually two-hour criterium races, with the top riders receiving large starting fees that paid them far more than their annual salaries. Today, a handful of these criteriums remain in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. SUPER-COMBATIVITÉ: This award is given to the rider that a race jury decides has been the most aggressive rider over the full length of the Tour. TRACK RACER: This is a cyclist who competes almost exclusively on banked velodromes, specializing in short sprints, 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) pursuit races, or mass-start events of up to 50 kilometers (31 miles) in length. Tour riders sometimes get invites to compete against track specialists in wintertime six-day races.

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ON THE ROAD Le Grand Départ Stage Towns Logistics Tour Caravan Media Spectators Popular Riders Nicknames The Story of Raymond Poulidor Glossary

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ON THE ROAD LE GRAND DÉPART FUN FACT A team time trial was part of the 1991 Grand Départ in Lyon, France. Prior to starting, 1987 Tour champion Stephen Roche had to use a Porta-Potty . . . and his Tonton Tapis teammates set off without him. The Irishman chased alone for the 36.5-kilometer (23-mile) stage and finished six minutes outside the time limit. His Tour was over before it really began.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT An estimated 2 million spectators watched the 2007 Grand Départ in London, England, with a prologue time trial at Buckingham Palace and a road stage that headed to Canterbury.

KEY PERSON Félix Lévitan, then co-race director, negotiated a handsome fee to start the Tour in West Berlin in 1987—two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

To host the start of the Tour de France is a huge deal for cities or regions that make bids to the organizer for what is now called Le Grand Départ (or “the Big Start”). In its early years, the Tour always started in Paris, completed a giant loop (La Grande Boucle in French) around the country, and finished in Paris. The race still ends in the capital, and it was many years before the organizers moved the start location. The first experiment came in 1926, when the start was in the eastern spa town of Evian. But starting so far from Paris and then making a counterclockwise lap of France resulted in the longest-ever Tour: a gigantic 5,745 kilometers (3,570 miles)—thus extending the race to thirty days for seventeen marathon stages. And only forty-one of the 124 starters finished. The organizers didn’t try a similar move until 1951, when they chose to start the race in Metz, also in eastern France; but it was 1,000 kilometers (6.21 miles) shorter than the 1926 Tour. Since then, Paris has seen the start only twice: for the Tour’s fiftieth edition in 1963 and its one hundredth anniversary in 2003. The first time it started outside of France was in 1954, in the Dutch city of Amsterdam. Currently, Le Grand Départ alternates between France and abroad: 2011: Vendée, France; 2012: Liège, Belgium; 2013: Corsica, France; 2014: Yorkshire, UK; 2015: Utrecht, the Netherlands; 2016: La Manche, France; 2017: Düsseldorf, Germany; 2018: Vendée, France; 2019: Brussels, Belgium; 2020: Nice, France. These cities/regions pay as much as 13 million euros ($15 million) for Le Grand Départ because of the huge international publicity for the area’s tourist attractions and business opportunities. Besides the actual racing, publicity comes from the months-long buildup to the Tour and a week of associated events, including pop concerts, press conferences, and a spectacular team presentation—usually in an arena or historic site.

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ON THE ROAD STAGE TOWNS FUN FACT The smallest community to host the Tour was LaissacSévérac-l’Église, a village in the Aveyron department of southern France, population 2,064, where stage 15 started in 2017. The nearby city of Rodez hosted the previous day’s finish.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT By 2018, 693 communities had hosted stage starts or finishes in Tour history. After Paris, which had seen all of the Tour’s 105 finishes, the top five stage towns had been: Bordeaux (eighty times), Pau (seventy), Luchon (fifty-eight), Metz (forty-one), and Grenoble (forty).

KEY PERSON The mayor in every town where the Tour has started or ended stages is the one who instigates hosting the Tour, negotiates a fee with ASO, and then heads a local organizing committee to make it happen.

Every time race organizer ASO begins planning a new Tour de France—up to three years in advance—it has a list of between 250 and 300 towns and regions that have applied to host a stage start or finish. Over the 115-or-so years since the first Tour, all ninety-four of the departments on the French mainland have hosted at least one stage—while the two departments on the island of Corsica had to wait until 2013, when the Tour’s hundredth edition started there. Before selecting which towns the Tour will visit, the organizers know the location of the start (Le Grand Départ is selected two to three years ahead of time) and finish (Paris); and they then have to decide which direction the race will go—clockwise (visiting the Alps before the Pyrenees) or counterclockwise around France. Once the course has been drafted, ASO looks more closely at the candidate towns. Getting selected depends on the size of the community and whether it can host a finish and/or start. Hosting fees range from the lower five-figures (for a start in a small town) to medium six-figures (for a finish and start in a large city). The benefits of hosting the Tour are considerable, including the business generated for shops, hotels, and restaurants by the Tour’s moving entourage of almost 5,000 people, and the tens of thousands of spectators. Before a stage town is confirmed, ASO has to pay a few visits to assess that the roads are wide enough to host a finish (especially in the final kilometer, between the flamme rouge marker and the line), the finish has an area suitable for staging the television “city,” and the town has a building large enough to house the media center. The Tour didn’t select finishes away from major population centers until 1952, when there were mountaintop finishes at the Alpe d’Huez and Sestriere ski resorts, and on the isolated Puy de Dôme peak.

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ON THE ROAD LOGISTICS FUN FACT On the first day of the 2013 Tour, in Bastia, Corsica, the Orica-GreenEdge team bus got wedged under the finish-line gantry shortly before stage 1 was due to finish. Luckily, with 5 km (3.1 miles) still to race, the organizers figured out how to get it unstuck.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Until 1986, Tour teams traveled to and from each stage in team cars. The first team to have a custom bus was the Dutch squad PDM (sponsored by tape manufacturer Philips DuPont Magnetics).

KEY PERSON The French Minister of the Interior—currently Gérard Collomb, a former senator and mayor of Lyon—authorizes the closing of the Tour roads in France, giving responsibility for the riders’ and spectators’ security to ASO and the prefects of each department.

Since the early Tours de France, when most of the riders were amateur athletes and fended for themselves and the officials used trains to get from town to town, the race has turned into a moving city of almost 5,000 people. They travel in some 2,500 accredited vehicles (all connected to Radio Tour), including team vehicles; media cars and motorcycles; ASO’s fleet of official and VIP vehicles; the publicity caravan’s 150-or-so often-bizarre-looking, parade-style vans and trucks; the 120 TV broadcast trucks and mobile studios; and the 130 giant logistics trucks that transport hundreds of crowd barriers, finish-line gantries, and pop-up bleachers. The setup is so vast that the broadcasting zone, with its 60 kilometers (37.3 miles) of coaxial cables and temporary metal flooring, takes up several acres adjacent to the finish area. Because of the size of the installations, stage finishes on dead-end mountain roads such as the Puy de Dôme—which witnessed some of the Tour’s greatest moments in its thirteen appearances between 1952 and 1988—have not been practicable recently (though there’s talk that a Puy de Dôme finish is now feasible thanks to the efficiency of digital communication from remote locations). The organizers also have to make sure that the semitrucks and lengthy team buses can negotiate the narrow, winding roads of rural France. As for the route itself, the organizers have greatly reduced the number of vehicles permitted on the racecourse—an action taken to improve the safety of spectators waiting on the open road. As a result, the official road book marks an alternative route, mostly on major highways, for team buses and the hundreds of media vehicles. To secure the route, the French government delegates 13,000 officers from the national police force, along with 10,000 gendarmes, while another 3,000 regional officers are assigned by the departments through which the race passes. Logistically, it is the most complicated sporting event in the world.

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ON THE ROAD TOUR CARAVAN FUN FACT Yvette Horner, a French accordionist, became world famous through spending eleven years (from 1953 to 1963) as a major part of the Tour de France publicity caravan, playing her accordion atop a vehicle on every day of the Tour, and at stage finishes. Her fame helped her sell 30 million records.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT The publicity caravan was invented in 1930 by Tour de France owner Henri Desgrange to help raise funds for the race. It is now one of the Tour’s greatest spectator attractions.

KEY PERSON The commandant of the Tour’s motorcycle gendarmes, currently Guillaume Chanudet, oversees the Garde Républicaine squad that ensures the safety of the riders and spectators over the three weeks.

Viewed from above, the Tour de France resembles a giant snake, moving between 15.5 and 18.6 kilometers (25 and 30 miles) per hour stretched out over some 100 kilometers (60 miles). This is the order of vehicles: • A national police van and motorcycles signal that the road is closed. • Publicity caravan of 150-plus vehicles. • Race vehicles heading to the finish between the publicity caravan and the race. • A squad of thirty-five Garde Républicaine motos keep roads clear, some leapfrogging the peloton before stopping to signal potential hazards. • Media and VIP cars precede the peloton, some following breakaway groups. • Neutral-service vehicles also follow breakaway groups • Commissaires’ motos ride with and behind the peloton to signal when it is safe for vehicles to pass the riders. • A dozen photographers’ and commentators’ motos. • One moto has a race official with a blackboard to show time gaps to riders. • Neutral-service motos carry fresh water bottles for riders in breakaways or chase groups. • Live TV motos ride with each breakaway group and the peloton. • ASO’s race director, deputy director, technical director, and race jury president drive ahead of or behind the peloton. • The twenty-two team cars form a line on the right side of the road behind the peloton, while media and VIP vehicles form a line on the left. • Medical team vehicles and ambulances follow the peloton and groups that fall behind. • A second line of team cars rides a minute or so behind the peloton, ready to relieve lead vehicles that move up behind breakaway groups. • The broom wagon follows the last cyclists to “sweep up” any riders who quit. • The very last vehicle, bearing a Fin de Course sign, is a police van, preceded by a tow truck.

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ON THE ROAD MEDIA FUN FACT From 1931 to 1982, famed French cartoonist René Pellos gave a humorous touch to the Tour, depicting the mountains as fierce-looking humans, each of which he dubbed “the Man with the Hammer,” ready to knock down a fading rider.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Besides acting as the Tour’s first race official in 1903, French journalist Géo Lefèvre rode his bike in the race until he reached the first rail station, took the train to the stage town, pedaled to the finish, performed his official duties, and then typed his story of the day’s racing.

KEY PERSON French journalist Pierre Chany reported on forty-nine Tours, won frequent awards for his literate, informative work, and authored several books on the history of the Tour.

In many ways, newspaper and magazine journalists made the Tour de France what it is today. Until the 1930s, when the first radio reports began, reading newspaper and magazine articles was the only way that fans could find out what was happening at the Tour—other than being at the roadside when the race passed. Over the Tour’s first eight decades, longtime race directors Henri Desgrange and Jacques Goddet were both writers for the organizing newspaper, L’Auto (later L’Équipe), and at the end of every stage they wrote eloquent, literary stories about the racing, giving the inside scoop on what they’d observed from the lead vehicle directly behind the race leaders. Their legacy continued into the twenty-first century under race director Jean-Marie Leblanc, who also wrote for L’Équipe. Some of the most influential stories about the Tour between the mid-1930s and the late1990s came from French scribes Albert Londres, Pierre Chany, and Antoine Blondin, who all made strong connections with the stars. At the same time, photographers for magazines such as But-et-Club and Miroir du Cyclisme provided memorable images of the Tour, mostly in black-and-white or sepia prints. Among the most influential Tour photographers since the 1960s have been the French brothers Henri and Marcel Besson of the now defunct Miroir du Cyclisme, Belgian Aldo Tonnoir of Sport magazine (who covered Eddy Merckx’s entire career), Dutch freelancer Cor Vos (a technical innovator), and British freelancer Graham Watson (who spent forty years shooting the Tour). In France, the “Voice of the Tour” for thirty-eight years until 2014 was the official race speaker, Daniel Mangeas, who took over from FrancoArgentine Mario Cotti. Mangeas introduced riders at stage starts, commentated at the finish, and emceed the prize presentations. Several speakers have since taken over his various tasks. The best-known Tour commentator on English-language TV since the 1960s has been Phil Liggett, who’s known as the “Voice of Cycling.” For thirty-three years, he teamed with fellow Englishman Paul Sherwen, who died unexpectedly in December 2018.

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ON THE ROAD SPECTATORS FUN FACT In recent times, the President of France visits the Tour every year, usually following a mountain stage in official vehicle No. 1 alongside the race director.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Twenty spectators were killed at the 1964 Tour when a tanker truck hit a bridge parapet lined with spectators and plunged into a river, on the stage from Bordeaux to Brive in central France.

KEY PERSON The best-known spectator since 1993 has been the German fan Didi Senft, now in his seventies, who’s known as the Devil; he dresses in a red jumpsuit, with black top and horned hat, and shakes a trident fork when the race passes him at a point in the final kilometers of every stage.

An estimated 12 to 15 million people—that’s an average of 600,000 spectators a day—come to the Tour route. The most enthusiastic fans drive in camper vans to watch several stages, parking their vehicles on the biggest climbs. They’re the best places to get a close-up view of the racers, because on long climbs they’re moving more slowly, stretched out over many minutes, as opposed to flashing by in a few seconds on a flat stage. Typically, roads are closed to regular traffic three or more hours before the race is due, so fans often park their camper vans the day before the Tour is due on a mountaintop finish, such as L’Alpe d’Huez. Most fans like to be on the sections of road where they get closest to the racers, while others like to stand behind the crowd barriers that line the final few kilometers before the tops of major climbs or stage finishes. With so many thousands at the roadside, there’s the constant risk of accidents—spectators are at greatest risk when vehicles in the publicity caravan or other advance vehicles are speeding through areas where fans are picnicking or running for freebies thrown out by publicity personnel. Gendarmes encourage excitable fans to not run alongside riders on climbs, risking riders being impeded or knocked down. Besides the roadside fans, the organizers claim a worldwide TV audience of 3.5 billion over the twenty-one stages, or an average of 166 million viewers per day, in about one hundred countries. The Tour’s daily audience is bigger than that of the Super Bowl, which had 103 million viewers in 2018. As for the world’s other major sports events, soccer’s World Cup attracts 3.4 billion viewers over the competition’s three weeks—with the final watched by a claimed 695 million—while the Summer Olympics has an average daily audience of 593 million, with a claimed 3.5 billion seeing at least one minute of the Games coverage.

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ON THE ROAD POPULAR RIDERS FUN FACT Despite losing his seven Tour titles to doping, Lance Armstrong remains the most-followed ex-cyclist, with 3.4 million Twitter followers. That’s less than other stars, such as FI’s Lewis Hamilton (5.3 million), basketball’s LeBron James (41 million), and soccer’s Cristiano Ronaldo (74 million).

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Several brothers have succeeded at the Tour, including the Pélissiers (Henri, Francis, and Charles) in the 1920s; the Simons (François, Jérôme, Pascal, and Régis), who competed from 1980 to 2002; the Schlecks (Fränk and Andy); and the Yates twins (Adam and Simon).

KEY PERSON The most popular rider in Tour history is five-time winner Eddy Merckx, whose hometown of Brussels was selected for 2019’s Le Grand Départ to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his first Tour victory.

Throughout Tour history, riders who haven’t won the Tour, nor been great sprinters or climbers, still have grabbed the public’s attention. A list of such riders could number several hundred, but here’s a snapshot of some: • French rider Hippolyte Aucouturier, who was second in the 1905 Tour, favored wearing black tights, a hooped rugby-style jersey, and flat cap; a favorite at the first Tour, food poisoning forced him out on the opening stage. • Eugène Christophe, who was second overall in 1912, lost his chance winning the Tour when his bicycle frame cracked in 1913, 1919, and 1922. • Roger Hassenforder, who won eight stages of the Tour in the 1950s, was known as the clown prince of cycling for his antics. • Another Frenchman, Raphaël Geminiani, who was second in the 1951 Tour, often grabbed headlines with his outrageous anecdotes and outbursts. • The German rider Rudi Altig, who won eight stages in four separate Tours in the 1960s, often used yoga techniques to relax before races. • Dutch sprinter Gerben Karstens, the winner of six Tour stages, was a joker who (for fun) once jumped onto the back of another rider during the race. • Portuguese champion Joaquim Agostinho, who twice placed third at the Tour in the 1970s, didn’t turn pro until age twenty-five after fighting for the army in a colonial war in Angola. In more recent times, television and social media have greatly influenced the popularity of individual riders. One of the first to benefit was German rider Jens Voigt, who won two stages in the 2000s and was best known for his long-distance breakaways and interviews—including his famed “Shut Up Legs” motto. Despite retiring in 2014, Voigt has retained a Twitter following of some 250,000 fans. That compares with the most-followed active riders: Chris Froome, 1.5 million; Mark Cavendish, 1.4 million; and Rigoberto Urán, 1.2 million.

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ON THE ROAD NICKNAMES FUN FACT Italian sprinter Mario Cipollini, who won twelve stages of the Tour in the 1990s, was a largerthan-life character whose nicknames—besides The Lion King (or Il Re Leone)—included Cipo, Super Mario, and Mooie Mario (“Pretty Mario”).

HISTORICAL TIDBIT There was a saying in the 1980s Tour peloton to describe a rider who was exceptionally tough: C’est un blaireau! (“He’s a badger!”). When a reporter overheard two riders use that description for their teammate Bernard Hinault, the writer thought he heard: “He’s the Badger.” That’s been Hinault’s nickname ever since.

KEY PERSON Maurice Garin, winner of the first Tour de France, whose pre-bike racing job sweeping chimneys in Italy and northern France fashioned his nickname: Le Petit Ramoneur (“the Little Sweep”).

An unusual feature of cycling is that nearly all the Tour de France winners, and many other prominent racers, are given nicknames by the media, the fans, or fellow riders. Here’s a selection of Tour champions and how they acquired their nicknames, starting with the first winner: • Jean Robic: Leather Head (he wore a leather helmet after a brain injury). • Fausto Coppi: Il Campionissimo (“champion of champions” in Italian). • Hugo Koblet: Pedaler of Charm (for his elegant riding style). • Charly Gaul: Angel of the Mountains (for his heavenly climbing skills). • Federico Bahamontes: Eagle of Toledo (his hometown and how he flew up mountains). • Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (for gobbling up his opponents). • Laurent Fignon: The Professor (wore spectacles and his intellectual look). • Greg LeMond: LeMonster (his prodigious athleticism). • Pedro Delgado: Perico (a common diminutive of Pedro—“parrot” in English). • Miguel Induráin: Big Mig (tall for a cyclist at 6-foot-2). • Bjarne Riis: Mister 60 Percent (his allegedly highest hematocrit test result). • Jan Ullrich: The Kaiser (German heritage). • Marco Pantani: Il Pirata (“the Pirate,” as he usually wore bandanas). • Lance Armstrong: Big Tex (Texas is his home state). • Alberto Contador: El Pistolero (a victory salute like a gunman shooting). • Cadel Evans: Cuddles (play on his first name). • Bradley Wiggins: Wiggo (an English-ism). • Chris Froome: Froomey (another English-ism). • Vincenzo Nibali: Shark of Messina (for his coastal hometown). • Geraint Thomas: G (what his teammates call him). Others with distinctive sobriquets are Fabian Cancellara: Spartacus (for his gladiatorial build); Djamolidin Abdujaparov: The Tashkent Terror (his hometown); Mario Cipollini: The Lion King (his mane of long hair); Mark Cavendish: The Manx Missile (he’s from the Isle of Man); and André Greipel: The Gorilla (his bulky build).

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THE STORY OF RAYMOND POULIDOR Among the most popular all-time sports stars in France are skiing’s Jean-Claude Killy, tennis’s Yannick Noah, F1’s Alain Prost, and soccer’s Zinedine Zidane. But also high in the popularity polls is cyclist Raymond Poulidor—who garners even more support than the country’s five-time Tour winners, Jacques Anquetil and Bernard Hinault. Why is Poulidor so loved by the French? It’s a long story. Born into a tenant farming family in 1936, Poulidor grew up in a remote area of central France, where bike racing was popular. Two older brothers took up racing before him, but Raymond proved the strongest. He was at a high amateur level before he did his military service in Germany and Algeria, and so was a late starter in pro cycling. He didn’t start his first Tour de France until he was twenty-six and, indicative of the bad luck that would follow, he started that Tour with his wrist in a cast. He lost eight minutes on opening day, but worked his way up, won the final mountain stage, and finished third overall. Poulidor’s underdog status endeared him to the fans, who enthusiastically followed him the fourteen times he competed at the Tour. Untimely mechanical problems and flat tires hampered him in 1964, but he still challenged Anquetil and finished second, less than a minute back. Poulidor—affectionately named “Poupou” by the public—would finish second to two other super-champions: Italy’s Felice Gimondi in 1965 and Belgium’s Eddy Merckx in 1974—when he out-climbed Merckx to win the mountain stage at Pla-d’Adet in the Pyrenees. Poulidor holds the record of eight times finishing on the Paris podium, but he never once wore the yellow jersey. He twice came very close: getting within fourteen seconds of Anquetil after their infamous duel on the Puy de Dôme mountain climb in 1964 and losing the opening-day prologue time trial by less than a second to Dutchman Joop Zoetemelk in 1973. Ironically, since 2001, Poulidor has worked the Tour as an ambassador for the yellow jersey sponsor, LCL, in the publicity caravan. Now in his eighties, Poulidor is more popular than ever, thanks to his underdog status, his humble nature, and his continued simple life in the countryside where he grew up.

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GLOSSARY BROOM WAGON (voiture balai in French): The last race vehicle on the road that picks up riders who have to quit. In practical terms, few competitors get to ride in this van in recent times. But it also serves the task of following the last rider on the road, giving him encouragement, drinks, and any mechanical help he needs. COMMISSAIRE: A French title that’s used as an English word in cycling for a race official—a judge, umpire, or referee—who travels in an official race car or on a moto, observing the riders and making any necessary decisions on race rules and the movement of vehicles in the caravan. FLAMME ROUGE: The red kite marking the final kilometer of every stage (first used in 1906 as a “red flag” at the roadside); today, the kite hangs from the underside of an inflatable archway. (Flamme Rouge is also the name of a cycling website and a cycling board game.) GARDE RÉPUBLICAINE: The “Republican Guard” is an elite branch of the French National Gendarmerie that provides guards of honor for the French state and security for military ceremonies, parades, and the Tour de France. GENDARME: The French word for a member of a body of soldiers, serving as an armed police force, for the maintenance of public order and safety. LE GRAND DÉPART: The French term that’s used in English, rather than the literal translation (the “Big Start”), for the several days before and during the actual start of the Tour de France. GRANDE BOUCLE: Another French term, commonly used in English, to describe the Tour as the “Big Loop.”

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LANTERNE ROUGE: Literally the “taillight,” this French term is used to describe the last rider on General Classification. In times past, photographers would get the Lanterne Rouge to hold a red taillight from a train caboose to get an evocative image. NEUTRAL SERVICE: When a team car is not available to provide a spare wheel or bike to a rider stopped by a mechanical problem or flat tire, the neutral service vehicle (a car or moto) will help out. Since 1977, the Tour’s neutral service has been provided by bikeaccessory manufacturer Mavic, whose contract with ASO was recently extended to 2022. PUBLICITY CARAVAN: The line of some 150 parade-style vehicles—some resembling giant animals, insects, or cyclists—that precedes the race by two hours and takes about forty-five minutes to pass any one point on the racecourse. PUY DE DÔME: The extinct volcano in central France accessed by a corkscrew, dead-end road that climbs at an average grade of 12 percent for the final 4.2 kilometers (2.6 miles). It hasn’t been used as a stage finish since 1988. RADIO TOUR: The citizen-band-style radio system that broadcasts race updates, safety information, and official communiqués from the race director’s car to all the accredited vehicles in the race caravan.

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THE DARK SIDE Anti-Doping Doping Scandals Dangerous Sprinters Drafting Vehicles Old-Style Cheating Collusion Motorized Doping The Lance Armstrong Story Glossary

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THE DARK SIDE ANTI-DOPING FUN FACT In 1978, after winning the Alpe d’Huez stage and taking the yellow jersey, Belgium’s Michel Pollentier was caught cheating the drug control. He secreted a rubber bulb of clean urine in his armpit so he could pump it through a tube into the collection flask. He was thrown out of the race that evening.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT A month after Alberto Contador won the 2010 Tour, he was told that traces of a banned substance, clenbuterol, were found in one of his urine samples. He claimed it was due to contaminated beef he’d eaten, but his appeal was eventually rejected.

KEY PERSON Dr. Pierre Dumas, the Tour de France race doctor from 1952 to 1969, uncovered the prevalence of drug use in the peloton.

For the first six decades of the twentieth century, it was accepted that athletes (whatever their sport) used some form of fortifier to enhance their performance. Even products such as strychnine and morphine were used in low doses as stimulants. After soldiers in World War II were issued amphetamine pills for their performance-enhancing effects, it became the go-to drug for athletes, including Tour de France cyclists, in the 1950s and ’60s. As a result, the French government passed a law banning the use of stimulants in sports competitions, and the police made a first anti-doping control at the 1966 Tour in Bordeaux. Before then, there was no drug testing in any sport. Today, elite cyclists are subject to a sophisticated anti-doping program. All the riders who compete at the Tour are drug-tested throughout the year, both in and out of competition, while the results from the tests and mandatory medical examinations, focusing on their blood parameters, are recorded on so-called biological passports. If there’s a spike or other abnormality in a rider’s red-blood percentage, they are marked as suspicious and he’s targeted for extra testing. It’s possible that a rider can be suspended for up to four years even though he may have not had a positive drug test. The UCI and World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) conduct random blood and urine tests at hotels before and during the Tour de France; and, after every stage of the race, the stage winner, the race leader, and six other riders (targeted or randomly selected) have to give urine samples at the antidoping control. Should a rider test positive, his team will immediately withdraw him from competition. The list of banned substances is regularly updated by WADA (which was set up following the Festina team scandal at the 1998 Tour), while riders who believe they have been wrongly suspended can always appeal to the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport.

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THE DARK SIDE DOPING SCANDALS FUN FACT After French police discovered a trunk-load of banned drugs, including EPO, steroids, and growth hormone, in his wife’s car as she left the 2002 Tour, third-place finisher Raimondas Rumsas claimed the drugs were to treat his wife’s sick mother in Lithuania.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT The first person to be excluded from the Tour for a doping offense was the soigneur of Jean Malléjac, after the French rider collapsed while climbing Mont Ventoux in 1955 due to an apparent overdose of amphetamines supplied by the soigneur.

KEY PERSON Lance Armstrong is the poster boy for doping at the Tour (see page 153). In January 2013, seven and a half years after he won a seventh consecutive Tour, he admitted to Oprah in an exclusive TV interview that he had doped for all those victories.

Though there was evidence of Tour riders using performance-enhancing drugs (a.k.a. PEDs) prior to the 1960s, incidents that would prove to be scandals today were not regarded as such back then. For instance, at the 1924 Tour, the Pélissier brothers said they used “cocaine for the eyes [and] chloroform for the gums” and raced “on dynamite.” And two-time Tour winner Fausto Coppi told Italian television in 1949 that he used amphetamines. But the first scandal to gain full media attention was at the 1967 Tour, when British star Tom Simpson collapsed and died while climbing Mont Ventoux. An autopsy cited heart failure, brought on by heatstroke and traces of amphetamines and alcohol in his blood. That tragedy triggered the socalled Good Health Tour of 1968, when daily drug testing was implemented for the first time. Over the next two decades, it was known that riders used steroids in their preparation, but the first to be implicated was 1988 Tour winner Pedro Delgado. He tested positive for a steroid-masking agent, probenecid, but wasn’t disqualified, because the drug had yet to be added to the UCI’s banned list. Things got far worse when erythropoietin (EPO), a drug developed to increase red-blood cells in cancer patients, went on the market. It wasn’t detectable in drug tests, because it mimicked the body’s natural hormones. EPO’s widespread use was fully revealed at the 1998 Tour, when the French team, Festina, was excluded after its soigneur, caught with a carload of banned drugs, was arrested and its team manager admitted to team-wide use of EPO. An EPO test was perfected in 2000. Then, in 2006, after Spanish police uncovered a vast blood-doping conspiracy, Operación Puerto, nine riders were pulled from the Tour—and the event’s reputation was further tarnished when “winner” Floyd Landis was disqualified after testing positive for artificial testosterone. There were further doping scandals at the 2007 and 2008 Tours (including detection of a third-generation EPO, called CERA).

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THE DARK SIDE DANGEROUS SPRINTERS FUN FACT On stage 11 of the 2010 Tour, two lead-out men got in trouble at Bourg-lès-Valence. After Tyler Farrar’s support rider Julian Dean elbowed Mark Renshaw, Mark Cavendish’s right-hand man, Renshaw banged his helmet into Dean’s shoulder three times. Neither fell, but Cavendish won the stage, Farrar was third, and Renshaw was disqualified.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT On stage 19 of the 1997 Tour, two breakaway riders, Bart Voskamp and Jens Heppner, sprinted out the finish in Dijon, with Voskamp winning. The judges decided they both made “irregular sprints” and disqualified them, awarding the stage win to Mario Traversoni, who led home a nine-man chase group.

KEY PERSON Djamolidin Abdujaparov, winner of nine Tour stages in the 1990s, was an erratic sprinter who often swerved and banged into opponents.

When a field of one hundred–plus riders is sprinting at over 64 kilometers (40 miles) per hour toward the finish line of a Tour de France stage, there’s an inherent danger of crashes when two wheels touch and perhaps a dozen riders splatter to the ground in a bone-crunching pile of bikes and bodies. Sometimes, a rider’s dangerous antics are also illegal. For example, in the mass sprint finish of stage 6 at the 1997 Tour, Belgian Tom Steels threw a water bottle at Frenchman Frédéric Moncassin during the sprint and was ejected from the race for “violent behavior toward others”; and Erik Zabel, who “won” that stage in Marennes, was relegated to last place for “irregular sprinting.” The German was said to have head-butted the unfortunate Moncassin—who a few weeks earlier was said to have head-butted one of Zabel’s teammates at another race. On stage 1 of the 1994 Tour, a massive crash at the finish in Armentières was caused by a gendarme on crowd-control duty 100 meters before the finish line. With the pack in full cry, the officer pulled out a camera to take a head-on photo of the sprint finish. As a result, Belgian national champion Wilfried Nelissen collided with the gendarme’s elbow and crashed at high speed, bringing down French star Laurent Jalabert and Ukraine’s Alexander Gontchenkov—all three were so badly injured they could not continue in the Tour. In the final stage of the 1991 Tour on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, the notoriously dangerous Uzbek sprinter Djamolidin Abdujaparov was sprinting flat out alongside the barriers when he clipped a 3-foot-high glass-fiber replication of a Coca-Cola can (one of the race sponsors) and crashed to the pavement. Concussed, and with a broken clavicle, Abdu was helped across the line 20 minutes later so that he was an official finisher and could be awarded the green jersey as winner of the points competition.

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THE DARK SIDE DRAFTING VEHICLES FUN FACT When a rider hangs on to a water bottle being handed up to him from a team car and takes a slingshot forward, that maneuver is known as a “sticky bottle.” Should he get a similar benefit from a mechanic holding the bike while adjusting the seat, that’s known as a “magic wrench.”

HISTORICAL TIDBIT The 2015 Tour de France winner Vincenzo Nibali was disqualified from the 2016 Vuelta a España after a helicopter shot showed him holding onto his team car at speed after being delayed in a big pileup.

KEY PERSON From the 1960s to mid-’90s, Albert Bouvet was the Tour’s assistant director, mostly working from a moto in the peloton, and wielding a red baton as he fiercely barked orders to riders and drivers.

When watching TV coverage of the Tour de France, new viewers often wonder what is going on when they see a rider, who’s chasing back through the caravan after being delayed by a crash or a mechanical problem, tuck in behind a team car to gain some momentum. Is he cheating? Or is this okay with the commissaires? By the rules, a rider can be given a fine or a small time penalty for drafting behind a vehicle; but officials generally turn a blind eye to such assistance—unless he drafts for an excessive period, for which they could even disqualify him. Sometimes the delayed rider may hold onto a water bottle held by someone in the team car to get a slingshot forward; but, again, that rarely merits a penalty. Sometimes, viewers will see a rider drop back from the peloton and sit alongside his team car, either holding on to the car or taking a water bottle handed to him, and at the same time chatting with his team director. Or perhaps a mechanic, hanging out of the back door with a wrench in his hand, is holding the rider’s bike and apparently tightening a seat bolt or straightening a derailleur—even if neither of those things is needed. Well, it’s not against the rules for a team to hand up a bottle; sometimes a rider drops back from the peloton and collects half a dozen bottles that he’ll stuff in his pockets or down the back of his jersey to take up to his teammates. Occasionally, riders are disqualified for hanging onto team vehicles, especially if it’s up a mountain climb, but they are more likely to receive a time penalty—for a first offense, it’s ten seconds added to your overall time. A rider can even be fined if a spectator runs next to him, pushing him up the hill.

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THE DARK SIDE OLD-STYLE CHEATING Getting athletes to follow the rules is a problem in any sport, not just cycling. But while doping, dangerous sprinting, or drafting vehicles still remain in the modern Tour de France, it used to be far worse. Skulduggery was not something the organizers expected when they launched the Tour in 1903, at a time when sportsmen were expected to follow Olympian ethics. The inaugural Tour saw minimal rule-breaking, thanks to a system of control points—fixed controls, where riders stopped to have their route cards stamped, and flying controls, where officials noted the bib numbers of riders as they passed. There were also secret controls—usually during the nighttime when stages started in the early hours—where officials would ride bikes among the racers to watch for any cheating. The 1903 Tour was deemed a big success. That wasn’t the case the following year. On the second stage, from Lyon to Marseille, an open-top touring car drove alongside the leaders, with its passengers insulting defending champion Maurice Garin, threatening to kill him if he didn’t let local rider Alfred Faure win. Then, at 3 a.m., on the climb out of St. Étienne, after Faure sprinted over the summit, his fans blocked the road. Stones were thrown at the riders, one hitting Garin’s brother, while shots were fired to disperse the mob. On the next stage, a local rider’s fans scattered carpet tacks, causing his opponents to stop with flat tires. The rule violations were so frequent that a week after the 1904 Tour finished, three race commissaires met to review complaints and allegations. Their report was submitted to the French cycling federation, which announced their decision four months later. It was devastating. All four top finishers were disqualified for breaches of two regulations: one banning pacemaking, the other forbidding the use of support vehicles. As a result, the fifth-paced rider, twenty-year-old Henri Cornet, who actually finished three hours back, was declared the winner.

FUN FACT After the 1904 race, organizer Henri Desgrange wrote: “The Tour de France is over, and its second edition, I truly believe, was also the last. It has died from its success, the blind passions it has unleashed . . .” Desgrange did change his mind . . . and the Tour hasn’t looked back since.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT Desgrange remained a stickler for the rules throughout his four decades as the boss. He kept his credo of wanting his Tour to be a contest between the riders and the elements, and not allowing them to benefit from innovations such as derailleur gears.

KEY PERSON Jacques Goddet, who took over from Desgrange, was more forward-looking and allowed the use of derailleurs from his first Tour as race director (1937) and established its reputation for fairness and security.

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THE DARK SIDE COLLUSION FUN FACT In a 2001 book, former Festina team director Bruno Roussel said his team leader Richard Virenque paid 1997 Tour yellow jersey Jan Ullrich $16,000 to let him win an alpine stage.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT When Frenchman Raphaël Geminiani started the final mountain stage 15 minutes up on Luxembourg’s Charly Gaul, the 1958 Tour looked over. But Gaul attacked early, Geminiani ran out of teammates, and none of his friends would help. At the finish, the yellow jersey lost, Geminiani protested: “They’re traitors, my old buddies on the national team, all traitors!”

KEY PERSON Five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil was the peloton’s first patron. By cooperating with him at the Tour, riders might get contracts for the lucrative post-Tour criteriums— of which he was the king.

The dictionary definition of collusion is “a secret agreement or cooperation.” And that’s what defines some of the deals made between riders or teams at the Tour, particularly in the third week. By that time in the race, the outcomes of the various competitions are usually penciled in, so all sorts of secret (perhaps illicit) partnerships and/or agreements can be made. Perhaps the race leader has lost some of his teammates to injury or illness and needs a few more riders to help set the tempo on a long stage to control dangerous breakaways. In such a case, his team may make an unofficial deal with a team that isn’t winning anything in the Tour and could benefit from helping out. The payback might come with the leader’s team returning the favor in a later race, or perhaps the deal involves a payment. It’s difficult to prove that anything underhand has taken place; it’s just part of the peloton’s secret world. A more common form of “collusion” happens in a breakaway group. One of the men in the group, Rider A, has a high place in the overall standings and wants to gain time, but he’s not getting much help from the others in the break. One of them though, Rider B, might see an opportunity of winning the stage and agrees to help Rider A. Over the years, there have been countless rumors of money exchanging hands in situations such as this. On the final stage of the 1947 Tour, in a breakaway with rival Frenchman René Fachleitner, Jean Robic needed to gain three minutes on the race leader to win the Tour. In a later interview, Robic said, “Fach saw I wasn’t too fresh and laid his cards on the table: ‘Give me 50,000 francs and I’ll ride for you!’ I said okay.” The breakaway succeeded, Robic won the Tour, and Fachleitner finished second.

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THE DARK SIDE MOTORIZED DOPING FUN FACT In 2017, there were two instances of amateurs using hidden motors, one at a race near Brescia, Italy, the other near Bordeaux, France. The French racer, forty-three-year-old Cyril Fontayne, was competing in a road race for over-forties and under-eighteens. He was banned from racing for five years and served sixty days of community service for attempted fraud.

HISTORICAL TIDBIT A female Belgian under-23 racer, Femke Van den Driessche, was suspended from racing for six years in the first case of mechanical doping. A bike in her pit area at the 2016 world cyclocross championships had a motor and cables in the seat tube.

KEY PERSON Jean-Christophe Péraud, a former Tour podium finisher, is the UCI’s manager of equipment in the fight against technological fraud.

Much like the technology that operates the electric bicycles (or e-bikes) we see on city streets, it’s well known that tiny, battery-operated motors can be concealed within the tubes of a bicycle frame to help power the pedals. The technology was developed in the late 1990s by Hungarian engineer Istvan Varjas, using motors that can deliver up to 140 watts of power and batteries that last for up to three hours. The equipment adds about 800 grams (1.75 pounds) to the bike’s overall weight. Varjas says he has provided these e-bikes to war veterans who’ve lost legs and claims that pro bike racers are also among his clientele. But, as of 2018, there had been no examples of what the UCI calls technological fraud at the Tour de France—though the former head of the French anti-doping agency, Jean-Pierre Verdy, once estimated that a dozen bikes with electric motors might have been used at the 2015 Tour. That claim has never been proven; but, because of the possibility that some riders and/or teams may be tempted to use e-bikes, millions of dollars have been spent in developing methods of preventing such a dangerous form of cheating. Every Tour bike is tested before the race and others are tested at random throughout the three weeks. And after experimenting for two years, and performing 42,000 tests with an iPad-based detection machine, the UCI introduced in 2018 a mobile x-ray unit mounted in a van that examines bikes before and after every stage of the Tour. The potential problem is being taken so seriously because a next generation of mechanical doping could feature motors that could turn on automatically once a rider’s heart rate reaches a critical point (rather than the current need of the rider operating a handlebar-mounted switch), while magnetically powered wheels are also a possibility.

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THE LANCE ARMSTRONG STORY “If Lance’s story is true, it’s the greatest comeback in the history of sports. If it’s not, it’s the greatest fraud.” Thus spoke America’s three-time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond after the 2004 Tour. The “greatest comeback” was Lance Armstrong’s return from stage IV testicular cancer in 1996–97 to winning the Tour two years later. The “greatest fraud” referred to rumors that the Texan used performance-enhancing drugs. Armstrong was born in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas in 1971. His parents divorced within two years, and he took his adopted father’s surname. They lived in Plano, a northeastern suburb of Dallas, where Armstrong took up triathlon in his mid-teens before moving to Austin. He was a national triathlon champion and then became the country’s best amateur cyclist. Armstrong turned pro after the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and within a year became US pro champion, won a stage of the Tour, and at age twenty-one was the first American to win the world pro championship. Over the next three seasons, he was the first American to win a European classic, won another Tour stage, and twice won the longest US stage race, the Tour DuPont. Then came cancer—and his comeback. He was feted as the Tour winner seven years in succession (1999–2005) before retiring . . . and then made a second comeback to place third in the 2010 Tour at age thirty-eight. After two of Armstrong’s former US Postal Service teammates revealed they had doped when they all raced together, the US Anti-Doping Agency began an investigation that resulted in its “reasoned decision” of October 2012. Based on the testimony of eleven ex-teammates and fifteen other witnesses, Armstrong was banned for life from competing in any Olympic sport, and all seven of his Tour victories were annulled after it showed that he and his teammates used EPO and other blood-doping methods throughout his winning streak. None of the men who placed second to Armstrong in those seven Tours has been promoted to winner, because the runners-up (Switzerland’s Alex Zülle, Germany’s Jan Ullrich and Andreas Klöden, Spain’s Joseba Beloki, and Italy’s Ivan Basso) admitted to doping or were involved in doping scandals. And so Armstrong, the Tour’s most prolific winner, also became its greatest loser.

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GLOSSARY ARTIFICIAL TESTOSTERONE: A banned drug that can be injected, used as a gel or patch, or taken as a tablet; it can help an athlete with recovery and endurance. BIOLOGICAL PASSPORT: A Tour rider’s biological passport is an electronic record of all the biological markers from his blood and urine tests and mandatory medical checkups. The passport can help technicians determine whether an athlete is using PEDs or other doping methods—even if he doesn’t test positive at an anti-doping control. BLOOD DOPING: This is the practice of artificially increasing the number of red blood cells in the bloodstream by transfusing an athlete’s own blood that has been previously extracted and refrigerated, to improve aerobic capacity and endurance. It should be noted that increasing the number of red blood cells by sleeping/living in a chamber that simulates a low-oxygen environment is not against WADA’s regulations. CERA: This third-generation form of EPO—continuous erythropoietin receptor activator— was not detectable in anti-doping tests until the 2008 Tour, when four high-profile riders ultimately tested positive for the “new” drug: Italians Ricardo Riccò and Leonardo Piepoli, German Stefan Schumacher, and Austrian Bernhard Kohl. COURT OF ARBITRATION FOR SPORT: Founded in 1984 by the International Olympic Committee, this quasi-judicial tribunal settles disputes in all Olympic sports, including cycling, through arbitration. E-BIKE: Illegal in sports cycling, an electric bike (or e-bike) has a small battery-powered motor hidden within the seat tube of the bicycle frame to enhance the rider’s pedaling speed. EPO: The abbreviation for exogenous erythropoietin, EPO is a drug produced by recombinant DNA technology in cell culture that artificially increases the number of red blood cells in the bloodstream, dramatically improving a rider’s performance. It was undetectable in anti-doping tests from its introduction in 1988 until a foolproof analytical test was made practical in 2000.

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FESTINA AFFAIR: The series of doping scandals that took place during the 1998 Tour de France, triggered when Belgian police intercepted a Festina team car headed for the Grand Départ with a trunk-load of banned substances, including EPO. French police raids of team hotels during the Tour searching for illegal drugs, along with the overnight incarceration of the nine Festina riders, led to two rider protests and seven teams leaving the race. Only 96 of the 189 starters finished that Tour. MAGIC WRENCH: The colloquial name for a team mechanic leaning from a team car, pushing a rider’s bike, as he makes a mechanical adjustment with a wrench. OPERACIÓN PUERTO: The code name for the May 2006 Spanish police sting against the blood-doping network of Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes that involved cyclists from ten Tour de France teams, along with unnamed tennis and soccer players. PEDS: The abbreviation for performance-enhancing drugs that are banned by the UCI and WADA. STICKY BOTTLE: The colloquial term for a rider getting a pacing boost from a team official who is leaning from a team car window while holding a water bottle that the rider holds onto for a few seconds. USADA: The US Anti-Doping Agency, based in Colorado Springs, that was formed in 2000 to oversee anti-doping programs within the United States. WADA: The World Anti-Doping Agency—formed in 1999 as a direct result of the Festina Affair at the 1998 Tour de France—that promotes, coordinates, and monitors the fight against doping in sport.

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INDEX Abdujaparov, Djamolidin, 44, 98, 130, 142 acupuncture, 62 Adriaenssens, Jan, 40 aerodynamics, 54 AG2R La Mondiale, 76 age, 111 Agostinho, Joaquim, 128 Aimar, Lucien, 38 Alavoine, Jean, 98 Alcalá, Raúl, 102 alcohol, sponsorship and, 76 Altig, Rudi, 128 Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), 36, 108, 118, 120 amphetamines, 46, 50, 138, 140; See also doping Amsterdam, 10 Anderson, Phil, 102 Anquetil, Jacques, 38, 82, 96, 108, 111, 133, 148 anti-doping program, 138; See also doping apparel, 58 Armstrong, Lance, 54, 60, 128, 130, 140, 153 Astana Pro Team, 76 attacks, 88 Aucouturier, Hippolyte, 128 L’Auto, 32, 34, 36, 96 L’Auto-Vélo, 32 Bahamontes, Federico, 42, 66, 80, 100, 130 Bardet, Romain, 42 Bartali, Gino, 38, 40, 82, 88, 100, 111 Belle Jardinière, 98 Besson, Henri and Marcel, 124 Best Young Rider award, 22, 28 bidon, 28 Bidot, Marcel, 82 bikes, 54, 150

Binda, Alfredo, 82 biological passport, 154 Blondin, Antoine, 124 blood doping, 154 Boasson Hagen, Edvald, 68 Bobet, Louison, 38, 42, 82, 88 bonuses, 22 Bottecchia, Ottavio, 96 Bourlon, Albert, 88 Bouvet, Albert, 144 Boyer, Jonathan, 12, 34, 62 Brailsford, Dave, 62, 82, 91 breakaways, 88, 106 Brooks, 56 broom wagon, 134 Burke, John, 54 But-et-Club, 124 Campagnolo, 56 Campagnolo, Tullio, 56 Cancellara, Fabian, 88, 130 Casartelli, Fabio, 46 cassette, 73 Castelli, 91 Cavanna, Biagio, 60, 84 Cavendish, Mark, 14, 22, 44, 98, 106, 128, 130, 142 CCC, 76 Cepeda, Francisco, 46 CERA (continuous erythropoietin receptor activator), 140, 154 Cerami, Pino, 111 chainrings, 56, 72, 73 Champs-Élysées, 10, 14 Chanudet, Guillaume, 122 Chany, Pierre, 124 Chapatte, Robert, 66 cheating, 146 Chiappucci, Claudio, 86 Chocolat Poulain, 100 Christophe, Eugène, 54, 96, 128 Cipollini, Mario, 14, 44, 58, 130

clenbuterol, 138 climbers, 42, 80, 92 climbing stages, 16 cobblestones, 10, 50 Cofidis, 76 cogs, 72 cogset, 73 Collomb, Gérard, 120 collusion, 148 commissaires, 22, 28, 134 communications, 64 computers, 60 Contador, Alberto, 38, 40, 80, 102, 130, 138 contests green jersey, 98 King of the Mountains (KOM), 22, 28, 40, 42, 80, 100 most aggressive rider, 106, 113 polka-dot jersey, 100 rewards, 108 stage winners, 106 super-combativité prize, 106, 113 team race, 104 white jersey, 102 yellow jersey, 96 continuous erythropoietin receptor activator (CERA), 140, 154 Coppi, Fausto, 16, 40, 42, 56, 60, 84, 88, 100, 130, 140 Cornet, Henri, 34, 111, 146 cotter pin, 72 cotterless cranks, 56 Cotti, Mario, 124 La Course by Le Tour de France, 24, 28 course route, 10–11 Court of Arbitration for Sport, 138, 154 Craddock, Lawson, 108

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crashes, 46 Darrigade, André, 14, 44, 46, 98 Dean, Julian, 142 De Kova, Myriam, 76 Delgado, Pedro, 49, 54, 80, 130, 140 De Muer, Maurice, 82 Dennis, Rohan, 18 derailleur gears, 56, 72, 146 descents, 16 Desgrange, Henri, 32, 34, 36, 76, 96, 104, 122, 124, 146 designated sprinters, 14 directeur sportif (sports director), 92 disc brakes, 72 domestique, 92 doping, 82, 100, 138, 140, 153 drafting, 92 drafting vehicles, 144 drones, 66 Dumas, Pierre, 138

flat stages, 14 Fontayne, Cyril, 150 France Télévision, 71 Frantz, Nicolas, 96 freewheel, 73 Froome, Chris, 14, 38, 42, 46, 54, 56, 86, 91, 96, 100, 108, 128, 130

e-bikes, 150, 154 echelons, 92 Education First-Drapac, 76 EPO. See erythropoietin (EPO) L’Équipe, 36, 50 equipment, 56, 60 erythropoietin (EPO), 140, 153, 154, 155 Euro Media France, 71 Evans, Cadel, 18, 40, 111, 130 Ewen, Caleb, 80 Fachleitner, René, 148 Fantinato, Bruno, 80 Farrar, Tyler, 142 fatalities, 46 Faure, Alfred, 146 feed zone, 28 Festina team, 140, 148, 155 Fignon, Laurent, 20, 24, 38, 68, 82, 102, 111, 130 film, 66 flamme rouge, 134

Gachon, Pierre, 34 Garde Républicaine, 122, 134 Garin, Maurice, 34, 130, 146 Garmin-Cervélo, 104 Gaul, Charly, 42, 80, 130, 148 Geminiani, Raphaël, 82, 128, 148 gendarme, 134 General Classification (GC), 20, 28, 96 Giffard, Pierre, 32 Gimondi, Felice, 80, 111, 133 Giro d’Italia (Italy), 28, 102 Gitane, 54 glasses, 58 Goddet, Jacques, 36, 124, 146 Goddet, Victor, 36 Gontchenkov, Alexander, 142 Good Health Tour of 1968, 140 Gouvenou, Thierry, 10 Le Grand Départ, 116, 134 grand tours, 28 grande boucle, 50, 116, 134 Gray, Peter, 68 green jersey, 98 Greipel, André, 44, 130 Groupama-FDJ, 76 groupsets, 56 Guimard, Cyrille, 82 Hage, Helene, 24 Hampsten, Andy, 102 Hassenforder, Roger, 128 Hélière, 46 helmets, 58 Heppner, Jens, 142 Herrera, Lucho, 42 Hinault, Bernard, 38, 49, 56,

68, 78, 82, 96, 98, 111, 130, 133 history best climbers, 42 best sprinters, 44 crashes/fatalities, 46 evolution of race, 34 memorable stages, 40 multiple tour winners, 38 origins of race, 32 timing, 32 Hoban, Barry, 51, 108 Hoffman, Dustin, 66 Horner, Chris, 111 Horner, Yvette, 122 Idéale, 56 Induráin, Miguel, 18, 38, 54, 56, 96, 100, 111, 130 intermediate sprints, 28 Jalabert, Laurent, 46, 142 Janssen, Jan, 98 Junkermann, Hans, 40 Karstens, Gerben, 128 Kelly, Sean, 44, 68, 98 King of the Mountains (KOM) contest, 22, 28, 40, 42, 80, 100 Kirkham, Don, 34 Kittel, Marcel, 44, 68 Koblet, Hugo, 88, 130 Köchli, Paul, 60, 82 Krys, 102 Lambot, Firmin, 20, 38, 111 Landis, Floyd, 140 Lanterne Rouge, 135 lead-out train, 92 Leblanc, Jean-Marie, 36 Le Crédit Lyonnais (LCL) bank, 96, 112 Leducq, André, 98 Lefevere, Patrick, 82 Lefèvre, Géo, 20, 32, 124 Leipheimer, Levi, 40 Lelouch, Claude, 66

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LeMond, Greg, 20, 38, 49, 54, 60, 68, 86, 96, 102, 106, 130, 153 Leth, Jørgen, 66 Lévitan, Félix, 24, 36, 78, 100, 116 Liggett, Phil, 124 logistical considerations, 120, 122 Londres, Albert, 124 Longo, Jeannie, 24 Lotto (Belgian), 76 L’Étape du Tour, 12

Nencini, Gastone, 38, 40 neutral service, 135 newspapers, 124 Nibali, Vincenzo, 42, 62, 130, 144 nicknames, 130 Nivea, 76

Maertens, Freddy, 44, 98, 106 magic wrenches, 144, 155 Magne, Antonin, 18, 82 Magni, Fiorenzo, 76 maillot à pois rouges 100; See also King of the Mountains (KOM) contest Malléjac, Jean, 140 Mangeas, Daniel, 124 Mariën, Philippe, 22 Martin, Marianne, 24 mass sprint, 111 Mavic, 56 McEwen, Robbie, 44 mechanical doping, 150 media, 14, 66, 71, 124 Merckx, Eddy, 38, 44, 54, 56, 78, 96, 98, 100, 106, 111, 128, 130, 133 Milan-San Remo classic, 112 Miroir du Cyclisme, 124 Moncassin, Frédéric, 142 Moser, Francesco, 102 motors, 150 mountain ranges, 16 Movistar, 76, 104 Munro, “Snowy,” 34 musette, 28

paceline, 92 Pantani, Marco, 42, 80, 130 Parc des Princes stadium, 10, 32, 66 parcours, 28 Paret, Henri, 111 Paris, course finish in, 10 Le Parisien Libéré, 36 Paris-Robaix classic, 113 pedals, 56 Pelforth-Sauvage-Lejeune, 104 Pélissier, Charles, 44, 98, 106 Pélissier, Henri, 111 Pellos, René, 124 peloton, 12, 29 penalties, 22 Péraud, Jean-Christophe, 150 Pereiro, Oscar, 38, 40 performance-enhancing drugs. See doping Petit-Breton, Lucien, 38 Peugeot, 54, 62 Philipot, Fabrice, 102 Phinney, Davis, 106 photo finishes, 68 Pinarello, 54, 91 Points, 12, 29 polka-dot jersey, 100; See also King of the Mountains (KOM) contest Pollentier, Michel, 138 Post, Peter, 82

national teams, 34, 51, 76, 104 Nelissen, Wilfried, 46, 142 Nempon, Jules, 20

Ocaña, Luis, 38, 54, 78 Ochowicz, Jim, 64 Olympic Games, 24, 153 Operación Puerto, 140, 155 Orica-GreenEdge team, 18, 120

post-Tour criteriums, 113, 148 Poulidor, Raymond, 38, 42, 84, 111, 133 Pour un Maillot Jaune (film), 66 prizes, 78, 96, 108; See also contests probenecid, 140 prologues, 18, 29 Prudhomme, Christian, 36 publicity caravan, 51, 135 quick-release hubs, 56 Quintana, Nairo, 14, 42, 102 radio, 64, 124 Radio Tour, 64, 120, 135 Renshaw, Mark, 142 rewards, 108 Riis, Bjarne, 40, 54, 130 Rivière, Roger, 40, 46, 82 road race, 29 Robic, Jean, 40, 58, 80, 130, 148 Roche, Stephen, 96, 116 rouleur, 93 Roussel, Bruno, 82, 148 rules, 22 Rumsas, Raimondas, 140 saddles, 56 Sagan, Peter, 22, 44, 98, 106, 108 Sastre, Carlos, 80 Schleck, Andy, 18, 102 Schoberer Rad Messtechnik (SRM), 73 Senft, Didi (the Devil), 126 7-Eleven team, 12, 54 shaving, 84 Sherwen, Paul, 124 Shimano, 56, 91 sign-in, 29 Simplex, 56 Simpson, Tom, 46, 140

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Škoda, 62, 102 soigner, 93 spectators, 126 sponsors, 76 Sport magazine, 124 sports director (directeur sportif), 92 sprinters, 44, 80, 93, 142 stage races, 29, 106 stage towns, 118 Steels, Tom, 142 Steinès, Alphonse, 34 steroids, 140 sticky bottles, 144, 155 Strava app, 60, 73 Stronglight, 56 structure bonuses, 22 climbing stages, 16 course route, 10 flat stages, 14 General Classification (GC), 20 intermediate sprints, 28 peloton, 12 penalties, 22 rules, 22 time limits, 29 time trial, 18 super-combativité prize, 106, 113 tactics, 86, 88 team captains, 93 team leaders, 93 team managers, 82 team race contest, 104 team sponsors, 76 Team Sky, 62, 76, 91 team time trials, 18 teams composition of, 80 goals and, 78 jersey numbers and, 78 support staff, 84 tactics, 86, 88 technological fraud, 150

technology apparel, 58 bikes/materials, 54 communications, 64 equipment, 56 General Classification (GC) and, 20 mechanical doping, 150 media, 66 photo finishes, 68 team infrastructure, 62 Team Sky and, 91 training, 60 television, 66, 71, 124, 126 tempo, 93 testosterone, artificial, 140, 154 Thévenet, Bernard, 78 Thomas, Geraint, 54, 130 Thys, Philippe, 38 time limits, 29 time trials, 18 Tonnoir, Aldo, 124 tour caravan, 122 Tour Féminin, 24, 29 track racers, 113 training, 60 transceiver, 73 transfers, 10, 29 transponder, 73 Traversoni, Mario, 142 Trek, 54 Trueba, Vicente, 42 turbo trainer, 73 Ullrich, Jan, 42, 102, 130, 148 Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), 22, 29, 58, 138, 150 Unzué, Eusebio, 82 Urán, Rigoberto, 128 US Anti-Doping Agency, 153, 155 Van den Driessche, Femke, 150 Van Est, Wim, 46 Van Garderen, Tejay, 102

Van Impe, Lucien, 38, 40, 42, 80, 82, 100 Van Looy, Rik, 44, 86 Varjas, Istvan, 150 Le Vélo, 32, 34 velodromes, 51 Verbruggen, Hein, 12 Verdy, Jean-Pierre, 150 violations blood doping, 154 cheating, 146 collusion, 148 doping, 82, 100, 138, 140, 153 drafting, 144 illegal sprinting, 142 mechanical doping, 150 Virenque, Richard, 100, 148 Virot, Alex, 46 Voigt, Jens, 128 Vos, Cor, 124 Voskamp, Bart, 142 Vuelta a España (Spain), 28, 111, 144 Walkowiak, Roger, 38, 96 Watson, Graham, 124 white jersey, 102 Wiggins, Bradley, 54, 56, 91, 130 women, 24 World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), 138, 155 World Hour Record, 32 World Tour, 29 Wouters, Constant, 46 Yates, Adam, 80, 102 Yates, Simon, 102 yellow jersey, 20, 29, 96 Zabel, Erik, 44, 98, 142 Zoetemelk, Joop, 38, 133 Zwift app, 60

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