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The Tour de France is the world's best-known Cycling Race , a 22-day, 20-stage road race that is usually run over more than 3000km. It is a circuit of most areas around France and, sometimes, neighbouring countries. The race is broken into stages from one town to another, each of which is an individual race. The time taken to complete each stage becomes a cumulative total to decide the outright winner at the end of the Tour. Together with the Giro D'Italia (Tour of Italy) and Vuelta A España (Tour of Spain), the Tour de France is one of the three major stage races and the longest of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) calendar. While the other two European Grand Tours are well known in Europe , they are relatively unknown outside the continent, and even the UCI World Cycling Championship is familiar only to cycling enthusiasts. The Tour de France, in contrast, has long been a household sporting name around the globe, even to those not generally interested in cycling. As with most Cycling races, competitors enter as part of a team. The race consists of 20 to 22 teams with nine riders each. Traditionally, entry is extended to invitation only, with invitations granted only to the best of the world's professional teams. Each team, known by the name of its sponsor, wears a distinctive jersey and riders assist one another and have access to a shared 'team car' (a mobile version of the pit crews in car racing). HISTORY . ''L'Auto'' announced the race on January 19 , 1903 . The plan was for a five-week tour from May 31 to July 5; however, this proved too daunting, with only 15 entrants, so Desgrange cut the length to 19 days, changed the date to run from July 1 to 19, and offered a daily allowance which attracted 60 entrants, including amateur characters, some unemployed, some simply adventurous. It was these characters that helped catch the public imagination. The demanding nature of the race (with the average length of the 6 stages being 400km the riders were sometimes expected to ride into the night)1 , also proved popular. The race was such a success for the newspaper that the circulation, which was 25,000 before the 1903 Tour, increased to 65,000 after it; by 1908 the race boosted circulation past a quarter of a million, and during the 1923 Tour it was selling 500,000 copies a day. The record circulation claimed by Desgrange was 854,000, achieved during the 1933 Tour.2 Today, the Tour is organised by the ''Société du Tour de France,'' a subsidiary of Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), which is part of the media group that owns ''l'Équipe.'' DESCRIPTION The Tour is a " Stage Race " divided into a number of ''stages'', each being a race held over one day. The time each rider takes to complete each stage is recorded and accumulated. Riders are often awarded time bonuses as well as their prizes for finishing well. Riders who finish in the same group are awarded the same time. Two riders are said to have finished in the same group if there is less than the length of a bike between them. A rider who crashes in the last three Kilometres is given the time of the group in which he would have otherwise finished. The ranking of riders by accumulated time is known as the General Classification . The winner is the rider with the least accumulated time after the final day.
There are subsidiary competitions within the race (see below), some with distinctive jerseys for the best rider. Today, the Tour is contested by teams backed by commercial sponsors and employing complicated tactics, but Desgrange originally insisted his competitors ride as individuals, even if they had sponsorship. He penalised Slipstream ing and other tactics and he accepted their inevitability only fromthe 1920s. Even when commercial teams had become commonplace in other events, the Tour was contested by national teams from 1930 to 1961 and again in 1967 and 1968, in both cases because the organisers felt sponsors were detracting from sporting purity. Most stages take place in France though it is common to have stages in nearby countries, such as Italy , Spain , Switzerland , Belgium , Luxembourg , Germany , the Netherlands , Ireland , and Great Britain (visited in 1974 and 1994 and start of the 2007 tour). The three weeks usually includes two rest days, sometimes used to transport riders long distances between stages. In recent years, the Tour has been preceded by a short Individual Time Trial (1 to 15km) called the ''prologue''. Since 1975, the finish of the Tour has been on the Champs-Élysées in Paris , the only time the city's symbolic avenue is closed other than for the processions of Bastille Day , and for the Paris Marathon . Before 1975, the race finished at the Parc Des Princes stadium in western Paris and at the Piste Municipale. Stages of the Tour can be flat, undulating or mountainous. They are normally contested by all the riders starting together with the first over the line being the victor, but they can also be run against the clock for individuals or teams. The time-trials often have a significant effect because they separate riders by substantial margins, whereas in some conventional stages the participants finish packed together or in a few large groups. The overall winner is almost always a master of the mountains and time trials rather than the more straightforward flat stages. The race alternates between clockwise and counter-clockwise circuits of France. For example, 2005 was clockwise — visiting the Alps first and then the Pyrenees — while 2006 went in the opposite direction. For the first half of its history, the Tour was a near-continuous loop, often running close to France's borders. Rules to restrict drug-taking have, since the 1960s, limited the overall distance, the daily distance and the number of days raced consecutively, and the modern Tour skips between one city or one region and another. A feature almost from the start has been stages in the mountains. The roads are now good but at first they were tracks of hard-packed earth on which riders frequently had to push their bicycles. Even into the 1950s and 1960s, the road at the summit could be potholed and strewn with small rocks, and falls and serious injuries were common. Mountain passes such as the Tourmalet in the Pyrenees have been made famous by the Tour de France and attract large numbers of amateur cyclists every day in summer, anxious to test their speed and fitness on roads used by the champions. The physical difficulty of climbs is established in a formula that rates a mountain by its steepness, its length and its position on the course. The easiest climbs are graded 4, most of the hardest as 1 and the exceptional (such as the Tourmalet) as unclassified, or "hors-catégorie". Some recur almost annually. The most famous ''hors-catégorie'' peaks include the Col Du Tourmalet , Mont Ventoux , Col Du Galibier , the climb to the ski resort of Hautacam , and Alpe D'Huez .
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| Previously, There Was A | "http://wwwinformationdelightinfo/information/entry/red_jersey" class="copylinks">Red Jersey for the standings in non-stage-finish sprints: points were awarded to the first three riders to pass two or three intermediate points during the stage These sprints also scored points towards the green jersey and bonus seconds towards the overall classification, as well as cash prizes offered by the residents of the area where the sprint took place The sprints remain, with all these additional effects, the most significant now being the points for the green jersey The red jersey was abolished in 1989{{cite web url=http://wwwbbccouk/dna/h2g2/A3197171 |
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