The Tour de France represents the pinnacle of the UCI WorldTour and is the race every rider dreams of winning. Yet only a few have the all-round talent and support of a team strong enough to compete in the mountains, the time trials and then handle the crashes and unexpected scenarios that three weeks of intense racing invariably includes.
Le Tour or the Grand Boucle (the big loop), as the race is affectionately known in France, is built on legend. It was first held in 1903 after being created by the struggling L'Auto newspaper to sell more copies. The drama of the early editions, when stages started in the dark and lasted hundreds of kilometres, captured the imagination of the French public, with sales of l'Auto rising year on year until they forced their rivals out of business.
The first organiser Henri Desgrange and early race director Géo Lefèvre pushed the limits of the riders year after year. The first edition consisted of six stages from Paris to Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux and then Nantes before returning to the capital. Soon after there was 11 stages and Desgrange and Lefèvre introduced mountain stages in the Alps and Pyrénées, when the roads over the Col du Galibier and the Col du Tourmalet were little more than farm tracks. The Col du Galibier was introduced as early as 1911, with only three riders reaching the top without getting off to walk. Other innovations included the introduction of a team time trial stage, with riders competing for national teams for many years until 1962.
Like every stage race, the Tour de France is a race within a race. The overall winner dons the final yellow jersey. However riders also fight for the daily stage victories, intermediate sprints for the green points jersey and the mountain points for the stand-out red polka-dot climber's jersey. A special white jersey is also awarded to the best rider aged under 25 while the last placed rider overall is known as the winner of the lanterne rouge, the light that brings up the rear of the peloton.
Following the introduction of live television coverage and global interest in the Tour de France, the event grew enormously. It is now considered the largest annual sporting event in the world and millions of people watch every stage via television, the Internet and from the roadside. A single victory is enough to consecrate the career of any rider and only four riders have gone on to win the Tour de France five times: Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain.
The Tour de France highlights the beauty of France in the summer and in recent years it has become a successful way to promote other parts of Europe, with stage visits and the so-called Grand Depart now often touching countries neighbouring France. In 2014 the race started in Yorkshire in Britain, drawing a reported crowd of four million people to the roadside for the opening three stages.
The 2015 Tour de France will start in the town of Utrecht, in the Netherlands, on Saturday July 4, before the riders return to France via Belgium to write yet another page in the history of the biggest race in professional cycling.