A Newspaper Stunt That Became the World's Greatest Bike Race
On July 1, 1903, sixty cyclists rolled out of Paris on a desperate newspaper publicity stunt — the first Tour de France.
The greatest bicycle race on earth began as a circulation gimmick.
In 1903, the French sports newspaper L'Auto was losing a street fight. Its older rival, Le Vélo, was outselling it, and L'Auto's editors needed something spectacular to win readers back. Their young cycling writer, Géo Lefèvre, proposed something absurd: a bicycle race all the way around France. A race so grueling, so dramatic, that the whole country would have to buy the paper to follow it.
It nearly didn't happen. The race was first planned for June, but so few riders signed up that the organizers postponed it a month and raised the prize money. Finally, on the morning of July 1, 1903, sixty cyclists pushed off from Montgeron, just outside Paris, into the unknown. Ahead of them lay six stages and 2,428 kilometers (1,509 miles) — stages so long that a single day's ride could stretch from Paris to Lyon, 467 kilometers, farther than most people traveled in a year.
The pre-race favorite was Maurice Garin, a French rider of Italian birth who had already made his name in the great one-day classics. Garin won the very first stage into Lyon and simply never gave up the lead. He won the last two stages as well, finishing in Paris on July 19 with a total time of 94 hours, 33 minutes and 14 seconds — nearly three hours ahead of his closest pursuer, Lucien Pothier. Of the sixty starters, only twenty-one riders completed all six stages. They rode through the night on unpaved roads, on heavy steel bicycles with no support teams, fixing their own tires and finding their own food.
France was captivated. L'Auto's circulation soared, and its rival Le Vélo — the paper the race had been invented to destroy — was driven out of business within the year. Garin took his prize money, some 6,075 francs, and bought himself a gas station, where he worked for the rest of his life.
Why it matters: the stunt worked too well to stop. The Tour de France has now run more than a hundred editions, stopping only for the two World Wars, and it remains the most famous bicycle race on the planet — a three-week festival of endurance watched by millions, all tracing back to a newspaper's desperate bid for readers.
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