The international road cycling race "Tour de France" (Le Tour de France) is held for the 99th time this year. According to the established tradition, it takes place in the middle of summer - in July - and attracts the most powerful representatives of this sport. The race involves professional cyclists who are divided into teams, and the points gained in the multi-day competition are counted both in individual and team events.
The first Tour de France competition was organized in 1903 as an advertising project for the Parisian newspaper L'Auto. The author of the idea was the journalist of this edition Geo Lefebvre, and the main organizer of the cycling race was the editor and co-founder of the newspaper Henri Degrange. The new competition was a response to a similar move by competitors who sponsored two similar bike tours. “Tour de France” in the first year brought the organizers a huge success - only the number of regular subscribers of the publication during the race has increased two and a half times. Such a boom in sales then occurred during the cycling race of each subsequent year and peaked in the summer of one of the last pre-war years - 1933. Then the organizers sold an average of 854 thousand copies of their newspaper per day.
After World War II, L'Auto journalists created a new sports newspaper, L'Equipe, which today has become one of the leading national daily newspapers. It is part of the editions Philippe Amaury media holding, one of whose divisions, the Amaury Sport Organization, organizes various major sports events, including the famous Paris-Dakar marathon rally. The Tour-de-France Society branch is in charge of the annual road race, which received the unofficial name "Big Loop" in this division of the holding.
The modern cycle race "Tour de France" consists of a "prologue" and twenty stages, each of which has one day of competition. This year, the competition will begin on June 30 and, in addition to French territory, will take place in Belgium and Switzerland. The total length of the stages is 3479 km. In addition to the winner in the team and individual events, the best among the young - up to 25 years old - riders, the leader of the mountain stages and the best sprinter of the cycle race will be determined.
