Tour de France Countdown

The Tour de France is the world's most famous bicycle race, a three-week summer epic that sets off around the first Saturday of July and winds some 3,300 kilometres through France and its neighbours before the traditional finale in Paris.

History

The Tour de France was born of a newspaper rivalry. In 1903 the sports daily L'Auto, seeking to outsell its competitor Le Vélo, staged an audacious multi-stage bicycle race around France, devised by the young journalist Géo Lefèvre and championed by editor Henri Desgrange. Sixty pioneering riders rolled out of Montgeron, near Paris, on 1 July 1903 to tackle six enormous stages, and when Maurice Garin led the survivors back into the capital, the paper's circulation soared. The experiment became an annual fixture almost overnight. The race quickly acquired its mythology. The high mountains entered the route in 1910 with the Pyrenees and in 1911 with the Alps, turning passes such as the Tourmalet and the Galibier into legendary arenas. In 1919 Desgrange introduced the maillot jaune — the yellow jersey worn by the overall leader, its colour echoing L'Auto's yellow newsprint — and in 1930 the publicity caravan, the festive parade of sponsors' vehicles that precedes the riders, joined the show. Only the two World Wars have interrupted the race since its founding. The modern Tour is a three-week journey of 21 stages watched by millions at the roadside and broadcast to well over one hundred countries. Since 1954, when Amsterdam hosted the first foreign Grand Départ, the opening stages have regularly begun beyond France's borders — the 2026 edition sets off from Barcelona. The finish has been staged on the Champs-Élysées in Paris since 1975, and since 2022 the Tour de France Femmes has carried the yellow jersey into a new era of women's racing.

Meaning

More than a bicycle race, the Tour de France is a three-week celebration of endurance, teamwork and landscape. Because the course changes every year, the race paints a moving portrait of France and its neighbours — villages, vineyards, coastlines and high mountain passes — that television carries to fans on every continent each July. It is also one of the world's great free spectacles: no ticket is needed to stand at the roadside, picnic on a mountain col and cheer as the peloton sweeps past in seconds. For riders, the yellow jersey represents the summit of road cycling; for millions of spectators, the Tour is simply the rhythm of July — a shared summer ritual that has endured for more than a century.