Tour De France

About Tour De France

The Tour de France started in 1903 and is the world's largest cycle race. It is a 23-day, 21-stage bicycle road race usually run over more than 3,500 kilometres (2,200 mi). The route traces a circuit around most areas of France, and often passes into 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 is added to a cumulative total for each rider, 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 interested in cycling.[citation needed]

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 by invitation, invitations granted only to the best professional teams. The organizers recently have utilized UCI points (based upon team riders/results) to determine which teams would gain automatic entry into the tour and then typically reserve 2-4 slots to large teams or French continental teams not able to race in the tour based upon their individual team results. 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 pit crews in car racing).