IT is brutal, yet can be oddly picturesque.
It is personally draining, but accessible to the public. It shows sportsmen at their best. It exposes them at their worst. The Tour de France is more than a sporting event. It is a drama, a scandal and an enduring phenomenon. A new book displays its excitement, its allure and the obsession of both fans and competitors. Here are 10 stages shamelessly culled from its pages:
1 Henri Desgrange, the organiser of the first tour, showed great vision in launching the event. His focus was less precise when he announced the next year that : "The Tour de France is finished and the second edition will, I fear, also be the last. It has died of its success, of the blind passions that it unleashed, the abuse and dirty suspicions."
2 In 1964, a seer predicted in France Soir that Jacques Anquetil would die on the 14th stage. He lived to be livid with this. Jacques enjoyed a smoke, though only on rest days.
3 In 1971, Eddie Merkcx and his team raced in Marseille so ahead of schedule that the mayor, Gaston Deferre, missed the arrival of the leaders. He announced the Tour would never come back as long as he lived. It did not, returning in 1989.
4 Legendary cyclist Charly Gaul found a novel way to spend a chunk of his retirement. He lived as a hermit in the Ardennes forest.
5 The yellow jersey was introduced in 1919 and the first man to wear it, Eugene Christophe, said it made him look like a canary.
6 An interview with Henri Pelissier and his brother Francis produced a telling portrait of how riders prepared for the tour in the early 1920s. "We run on dynamite," said Francis. Henri then expanded, stating that he needed "cocaine for our eyes, chloroform for our gums and horse ointment for our knees". Then he produced boxes of pills.
7 In 1910, the Tour suffered its first fatality. Adolphe Heliere went for a swim in Nice and died of a jelly fish sting.
8 Was it the inspiration for the title of a famous play? The story is that one day while walking through the streets of Paris Samuel Beckett stopped to ask members of a large crowd what they were doing. They replied: "We are waiting for Godot," explaining he was the oldest Tour cyclist, and had not yet passed by.
9 The Swiss star of the 1950s, Hugo Koblet, carried a bottle of eau de cologne and a comb in his back pocket so he could be prepared for his spruce-up at the finishing line.
10 The list of winners of the Tour has three blank periods: the First World War, the Second World War, and the Armstrong years.
* Tour de France 100: A Photographic History of Cycling's Most Iconic race by Richard Moore is published by Bloomsbury, priced £30
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