The Tour de France exists because of the Dreyfus affair. In the late 1890s, France was torn in two by the wrongful treason conviction of the Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus, and the split ran through everything — including the sports press. France's dominant sports daily, Le Vélo, was edited by Pierre Giffard, a Dreyfusard; several of his biggest advertisers, including the industrialist Comte de Dion, were furiously anti-Dreyfus. When Giffard's politics became intolerable to them, de Dion and allies including Michelin simply founded a rival paper in 1900: L'Auto, printed on distinctive yellow paper, with the flinty former racing cyclist Henri Desgrange as editor. There was one problem. L'Auto was losing the circulation war badly, and its backers wanted results.
Salvation was proposed at a crisis lunch in Paris in November 1902 by a 26-year-old junior journalist, Géo Lefèvre, who suggested something without precedent: a cycling race around the whole of France, weeks long, dwarfing the existing city-to-city classics. Desgrange was sceptical — "if I understand you right, petit Géo, you're proposing a Tour de France" — but the accountant liked it, and in July 1903 sixty riders set out from a café south of Paris, the Réveil Matin at Montgeron. The first Tour ran 2,428 kilometres in just six titanic stages — looping through Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux and Nantes — each of them hundreds of kilometres long and ridden partly through the night. The winner, Maurice Garin, a chimney-sweep turned professional known as "the Little Chimney-Sweep", finished nearly three hours clear — still the largest winning margin in Tour history. L'Auto's circulation roughly trebled, and Le Vélo was dead within a year. Commercially, the Tour is the most successful newspaper promotion ever devised.
The year they caught the train
Then came 1904, which nearly killed it. The second Tour descended into magnificent, comprehensive cheating: riders took tows from cars, accepted lifts, and — most famously — covered sections by train. Partisan fans were worse, felling trees across roads and, on the Col de la République, physically beating rival riders until race officials dispersed the mob, by most accounts with pistol shots in the air. Months later the French cycling union disqualified the first four finishers, including Garin, the winner on the road. Victory passed to the fifth man, twenty-year-old Henri Cornet — still the youngest Tour winner ever. Desgrange despaired in print that the Tour was finished, killed by its own success and "blind passions". Naturally, he ran it again the next year, with shorter stages and tighter controls, and circulation kept climbing.
The heroic-brutal character of the early Tour is barely believable now. Riders were forbidden outside assistance: when Eugène Christophe's forks snapped on the descent of the Tourmalet in 1913, he shouldered his bike, walked kilometres down the mountain to a forge in Sainte-Marie-de-Campan and repaired them himself, watched by officials — who penalised him anyway because a boy had worked the bellows. Competitors rode drop-barred steel machines over unpaved Alpine passes, and refuelled on what the era considered performance aids: wine, brandy, ether-soaked handkerchiefs and worse, alcohol being sincerely regarded as a stimulant and painkiller. Desgrange's stated ideal was a race so hard that only one rider would make it to Paris.
Yellow paper, yellow jersey
The Tour's most famous symbol is a direct print-trade artefact: when Desgrange introduced a distinguishing jersey for the race leader in 1919, he chose yellow to match L'Auto's newsprint — a rolling advertisement woven into the race itself. The paper's heir carries the connection to this day: L'Auto, compromised under the German occupation, was shut down at the Liberation, and its presses and role passed to a new sports daily, L'Équipe, whose parent company still organises the Tour. The maillot jaune, the July dates, the deliberate cruelty of the mountains — all of it descends from a marketing scheme hatched to spite a rival editor over the Dreyfus affair. Great institutions are supposed to have nobler origins; the Tour's genius has been to transmute a circulation stunt into the most beautiful ordeal in sport, run annually, wars excepted, for more than a century. The paper that started it is gone. The advertisement is immortal.
Quiz nuggets
- The Tour de France was created in 1903 by the newspaper L'Auto to beat rival Le Vélo, in a feud rooted in the Dreyfus affair.
- The race was proposed by journalist Géo Lefèvre; editor Henri Desgrange ran it, and the first winner was chimney-sweep Maurice Garin, by a record margin of nearly three hours.
- In 1904 the first four finishers, Garin included, were disqualified for cheating — including taking trains — making 20-year-old Henri Cornet the youngest ever winner.
- The yellow jersey, introduced in 1919, matched the yellow newsprint of L'Auto; the organising role later passed to L'Équipe.
- In 1913 Eugène Christophe repaired his broken forks at a village forge and was penalised because a boy pumped the bellows.