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Mapping Le Tour: The unofficial history of all 100 Tour de France races
1903
1st Edition
“The ideal Tour would be one that only one rider was capable of finishing.”
Henri Desgrange, founder of the Tour de France
Just six stages made up the route of the first Tour de France in 1903. Rather than the race being easy by today’s standards, however, the shortest stage – between Toulouse and Bordeaux – was still 268 km (167 miles), while most of the rest were well over 400 km (250 miles).
Where the stages were easier compared to today’s, however, was in their relative lack of climbing, with a route that avoided both the Alps and the Pyrenees, instead focusing on featuring France’s major towns and cities.
While the Ballon d’Alsace, in the Vosges, is widely credited with being the first major climb to have been included on the Tour route, in 1905, the inaugural race did in fact include a number of climbs, although they were not noted as particular challenges to the riders.
Stage 1, between Montgeron, on the southeast edge of Paris, and Lyon featured both the Col des Echarmeaux and the Col du Pin-Bouchain – 712 m (2336 ft) and 759 m (2490 ft) high, respectively – while on the second stage riders had to tackle the Col de la République, near St-Étienne, with France’s Hippolyte Aucouturier the first rider to reach the top of the 1161-m (3809-ft)-high pass.
Named as one of the pre-race favourites, Aucouturier, riding as an ‘independent’, had failed to finish the Tour’s opening stage due to stomach cramps, but was allowed to start stage 2 under rules that said that he could no longer remain in the hunt for the overall prize. He went on to win the second stage in Marseille, and repeated the feat on stage 3.
The first Tour ended in front of an enthusiastic crowd at the Parc des Princes velodrome, where another pre-race favourite, Frenchman Maurice Garin, riding in the colours of bicycle manufacturer La Française, took his third stage win of the race, and with it the honour of being the first Tour de France winner, having held the lead since his victory on the opening stage in Lyon.
The Tour was born, but its second edition was to be a lot less celebrated.
Maurice Garin (in white) becomes the Tour’s first champion
1904
2nd Edition
“The Tour de France is over, although its second edition will have been, I fear, its last – a victim of its own success.”
Henri Desgrange, founder of the Tour de France, following the 1904 race
It’s become somewhat of a cliché, but the second edition of the Tour de France, in 1904, was almost its last.
Geographically, the 1904 Tour followed the same route as the first edition the previous year, again starting in Paris and taking in the major cities of Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux and Nantes, before finishing once more in the Parc des Princes, Paris.
However, the race was marred by interventions from a by-now feverish public, while following the race it was discovered that the first four in the overall classification, including defending champion Maurice Garin, had cheated, and were disqualified from the race, handing victory to 19-year-old Henri Cornet, who remains the race’s youngest-ever winner.
On the race’s second, hilliest stage, between Lyon and Marseille, local Lyon lad Antoine Fauré led the race over the Col de la Rébublique while behind him the race favourites, including Garin and his brother, César, were set upon by masked men, believed to be Fauré’s supporters.
That year was also the first recorded instance of tacks being thrown onto the road by partisan crowds – something that would happen intermittently throughout the Tour’s history, including as recently as the 2012 Tour when the race passed over the Mur de Péguère on stage 14.
It took some time for the organisers of the 1904 Tour to wade through all the accusations and rumours at the end of the race, but in November they came to the decision to ban the two Garin brothers – who had finished first and third – with the older Maurice having apparently illegally been given food by one of the race organisers themselves, as well as allegedly having covered part of the route by train.
Runner-up Lucien Pothier was handed a lifetime ban by French governing body the Union Vélocipédique Française (although he was later permitted to start the Tour again, in 1907), while fourth-placed Hippolyte Aucouturier, again one of the race favourites, having failed to finish the first stage of the 1903 race due to illness, was one of those believed to have cheated by gripping a cork in his mouth that was attached to a string tied to the back of a car.
Spectators use tacks and pebbles to sabotage the stage between Nantes and Paris
1905
3rd Edition
Despite the race having tackled the Col de la République in its previous two editions, the third Tour de France entered new territory in 1905 by introducing its first serious, leg-crunching, lung-busting climb in the shape of the Ballon d’Alsace. It was also made up of shorter stages, albeit with an increase in their number – up to eleven from six.
After his despair at the previous year’s mass cheating, race director Henri Desgrange almost cancelled the 1905 Tour as early as its first stage, during which tacks were again thrown onto the road. All the riders punctured apart from 1904 runner-up Jean-Baptiste Dortignacq, though eventual overall race winner, Louis Trousselier, was nevertheless able to recover and win stage 1 from Paris to Nancy.
For stage 2, between Nancy and Besançon, it was out with the Col de la République and in with the Ballon d’Alsace, in the Vosges mountains. Wrongly, the Ballon d’Alsace is considered the Tour’s first major climb, but it was recognised as such by the race organisers more for its steepness than its height: at 1178 m (3865 ft), it is just 17 m (56 ft) higher than the Col de la République. Indeed, the Col Bayard, climbed later, on stage 4 of the 1905 Tour, stands at 1246 m (4088 ft).
With an average grade of 6.9 per cent, climbed from the north from the town of St-Maurice-sur-Moselle, Desgrange predicted that none of his race’s participants would be able to ride over the Ballon d’Alsace. René Pottier, however, had other ideas, stomping on the pedals to become the first rider to the top of the climb, although he was overtaken later in the stage by Hippolyte Aucouturier.
Overall race winner Trousselier – victorious thanks to five stage wins and Desgrange’s newly introduced points, rather than time, system of determining the winner – was a deserving Tour champion, but gambled his winnings away in a single, celebratory evening after the finish in Paris.
Frenchman Louis Trousselier was the first rider to win the Tour de France on points
1906
4th Edition
The 1906 edition of the Tour was a true tour of France, increased to thirteen stages from eleven, and reaching further afield than ever before: up to Lille in the north, Nice in the southeast, Bayonne in the furthest southwest corner, close to the Spanish border, and Brest, in Brittany, to the northwest.
It was also the first time that a stage started in a different town to the finish the previous day, when Douai hosted the start of stage 2, some 40 km (25 miles) from the Lille finish of stage 1.
It was a real Tour of ‘firsts’: for the first time, too, the race ventured outside French territory, when the stage from Douai dipped into German-held Alsace-Lorraine, and the city of Metz (today inside the French border), on its way to Nancy.
When it came to the competition, René Pottier, the man who had stunned the cycling world the previous year by managing to ride up the supposedly unridable Ballon d’Alsace, did it again, making it first to the top of the same climb when it featured on stage 3, and this time holding his advantage all the way to the finish in Dijon.
Having already won stage 2, and by taking another four stage wins en route to Paris, including the tough fifth stage over the Côte de Laffrey and the Col Bayard, Pottier beat the always-consistent Georges Passerieu – a Frenchman who finished in the top ten in every stage, including winning two stages – on points, 31 to 39. It was the rider with the fewest points who won, stage winners being awarded one point, two points being awarded for second place, etc., and was a system race organiser Henri Desgrange was to retain until the 1913 Tour, which reverted to being contested on time.
Pottier, it seemed, had an illustrious career ahead of him, having proved himself at the Tour as the sport’s best climber.
René Pottier was unbeatable in the mountains
1907
5th Edition
The 1907 Tour started on a sombre note as the 1906 champion, gifted 27-year-old climber René Pottier, had committed suicide in January.
The fifth edition’s opening stage followed the route of the famous cobbled Classic, Paris-Roubaix, which had run since 1896, and although 1906 Tour runner-up – and now race favourite – Georges Passerieu had won the 1907 edition of the one-day race, it was 1905 Tour champ Louis Trousselier who took the victory in Roubaix in July.
The race followed a very similar route around the edge of France to that of 1906, again taking in the city of Metz, then still in Germany, and adding a second foreign sojourn by briefly drifting onto Swiss soil on stage 4 from Belfort to Lyon. The total number of stages ramped up to fourteen, and the race included its highest mountain pass yet by adding the 1326–m (4350–ft) Col de Porte, in the Chartreuse mountains of southeast France, to the route of stage 5 from Lyon to Grenoble.
There was a South American flavour added to the mix, too, in that Lucien Petit-Breton – a Frenchman born in Brittany who had moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, as a child with his family, only returning to France in 1902 to enlist in the French army – was a very real contender for overall victory, having finished fifth overall at the 1905 Tour and fourth in 1906. Winning the very first edition of the Italian one-day Classic, Milan-San Remo, earlier in the 1907 season hadn’t done his prospects much harm, either.
Petit-Breton – real name Lucien Mazan – had adopted the pseudonym while bike racing in Argentina, a moniker presumably given to him by Buenos Aires locals, to hide the fact that he raced from is disapproving father.
After taking control of the race on stage 10 to Bordeaux, the little Breton held on to the lead the rest of the way to the finish in Paris.
Overall winner Lucien Petit-Breton leads the stage between Toulouse and Bayonne
The Tour takes on the Ballon d’Alsace, in the Vosges mountains of eastern France, in 1908. The Ballon, the first ever genuine mountain climb in the Tour, first featured in the 1905 race, five years before the first appearance of the Pyrenees, and six years before the Alps.
1908
6th Edition
“It’s time to hand over the mantle. Next year’s Tour is for Faber.”
1908 Tour champion Lucien Petit-Breton following his second consecutive overall victory, suggesting that Luxembourg’s François Faber, his Peugeot team-mate, is the rightful heir to the Tour crown
Lucien Petit-Breton arrived at the 1908 edition of the Tour in rude form, having already won that year’s Paris-Brussels – a one-day race still in existence, now held in September, but then held in April.
The 1908 Tour followed the exact route of the previous edition, both starting on Paris’s Ile de la Jatte and finishing at the Parc des Princes. The only real change was the number of starters – up to 114 from 93 the year before – and Petit-Breton’s absolute dominance of the race this time, becoming the first rider to win two Tours (winner of the inaugural Tour, Maurice Garin, having been disqualified after cheating to win the 1904 edition).
Although London-born Georges Passerieu – second at the 1906 Tour to the late René Pottier – put up a good fight, winning stages 1, 5 and 13, and standing out as the only rider capable of getting over the Col de Porte and ‘Pottier’s mountain’, the Ballon d’Alsace, without walking, his Peugeot-Wolber ‘team-mates’ (riders often simply shared the same sponsors rather than necessarily working as a team), Petit-Breton and François Faber, dominated the race with five and four stage victories apiece, respectively.
René Pottier’s younger brother, André, helped to keep the family name alive by leading the race over the Col Bayard and Côte de Laffrey, but simply wasn’t in the same league as his more famous sibling, and could only finish seventeenth overall in Paris.
François Faber struggles over the summit of the Ballon d’Alsace
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