The Tour De France, The Worlds Biggest Road Bike Race.
By Alastair Hamilton, Thu Dec 8th

The Tour de France is the BIG one; it's the World cup and theOlympics all in one. It has it all, the high mountains, the windswept northern planes and the heat of the south. It also has theworld's media, all the top teams and riders and millions ofcycling mad fans watching. The other "Grand Tours" of Italy andSpain are as exciting, sometimes more so, but they don't havethe thing the Tour has, that unique Tour ness, that uniqueFrench ness.

How it started.

It all started in 1903, when the French daily paper, L'Autowanted to sell more than its competitor, Le Vélo, who at thattime was the only paper reporting on cycle racing. It wassuggested to the papers director, Henri Desgrange that theyshould organise a bike race all round France. The first race was2,428 kilometres split into six stages and was run off at 25.29kilometres per hour and out of the 60 starters 21 finished andthe race was lead from start to finish by Maurice Garin.

The Heroes.

Over the years there has been a lot of heroes in the Tour deFrance, you could say all the riders are heroes, to win the raceonce is hard, but to win it five times is phenomenal. Only fivemen have done this, and one of these has won it seven times.French rider Jacques Anquetil was the first to win the race fivetimes, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and then Spaniard MiguelIndurain all equalled him. Then the American, Lance Armstrongstarted to win in 1999 and didn't stop until he had won it arecord seven times in a row. This is all the more amazing as heis a cancer survivor and was given a 50/50 chance of life; hebeat the cancer

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and went on to beat all comers in the Tour deFrance.

The course.

The race starts in a different town every year and every otheryear it starts outside France, the choice of stage towns is acombination of money and sporting considerations, the towns willpay for a start or a finish, but they need to be near a mountainor a cobbled road or be near other town who want to host theTour. The Towns pay to be the centre of interest for a day, theTour also brings in a lot of money in tourism and the Townscollect much more than they pay and the world will remember thename of the Town, for at least a day.

The riders.

All the best riders want to win the Tour de France, but theycant, from the 200 or so starters there is a possible five orsix riders who can win, the rest are either helping their teamleaders or sprint or mountain specialists who want to win stagesor points or mountain jerseys, this keeps the race active andinteresting from beginning to end.

The BIG Tour.

The Tour is the biggest, but that has its problems, some Townsare not big enough, hotels etc., the television needs morespace, the journalists need more phone lines and computers, moreand more people are following the race and the riders can beforgotten about in all the razzmatazz, but its still the biggestsporting event in the world, long may in run!

About the author:Alastair Hamilton is a successful writer who offers a trulyunique depth of experience in competitive cycling, he alsocontributes adding technical articles on road bikes (http://www.bike-cycling-reviews.com/road-bikes.html ) to somecycling online magazines. Further information on components andcycling news at http://www.bike-cycling-reviews.com