Tour de France

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Tour de France's doping era became impossible to ignore in 1998, when French customs officials stopped a car belonging to the Festina team at the Franco-Belgian border and found a substantial supply of erythropoietin, known as EPO, along with other banned substances. The discovery triggered police raids on team hotels mid-race, arrests, and a wave of rider protests and strikes that brought stages to a standstill, an episode remembered simply as the Festina affair. EPO, which boosts the blood's oxygen-carrying capacity, had made systematic doping newly effective for endurance cycling, and its use spread through the peloton across the 1990s largely ahead of any reliable test to detect it.

Marco Pantani, the 1998 champion, was disqualified from the 1999 race while leading, after a blood test found an abnormally high hematocrit level. Floyd Landis was stripped of his 2006 title after failing a doping test during the race itself. Neither case, though, compared in scale to what followed Lance Armstrong's seven consecutive victories from 1999 to 2005. The United States Anti-Doping Agency's 2012 Reasoned Decision concluded Armstrong had run what it called the most sophisticated doping program cycling had ever seen, organized through his own team; Armstrong was stripped of all seven titles and banned for life from Olympic-affiliated sport. Tour organizers removed his name from the record books entirely, leaving those seven years without a recognized winner rather than naming a replacement champion.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Tour de France exists because of a newspaper circulation war, not a cycling federation's ambition. Henri Desgrange, editor of the French sporting paper L'Auto, was searching for a way to outsell his rival paper Le Velo when his colleague, the journalist Geo Lefevre, proposed an around-France cycling race that would keep readers buying the paper daily for updates. The first race, run in 1903, had only six stages, some of them well over 400 kilometers long and raced through the night, a grueling format built as much for newspaper drama as for sport.

Desgrange introduced the race's best known symbol, the yellow jersey worn by the overall leader, only in 1919, its color chosen to match the yellow newsprint L'Auto itself was printed on, giving spectators along the route an immediate way to spot the rider they were reading about each morning. The race's modern character as a mountain-and-sprint spectacle came later still: the Pyrenees were added to the route in 1910 and the Alps in 1911, transforming what had begun as a flat, largely tactical race into the climbing contest that now defines it. The race has been cancelled only twice in its history, during both World Wars, a suspension that briefly interrupted but never displaced the event's deliberately, and enduringly, French character.