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The academic historians Jean-Luc Boeuf and Yves Léonard say most people in France had little idea of the shape of their country until L'Auto began publishing maps of the race. [158] Arts [ edit ]
The city of Tours has a population of 140,000 and is called "Le Jardin de la France" ("The Garden of France"). There are several parks located within the city. Tours is located between two rivers, the Loire to the north and the Cher to the south. The buildings of Tours are white with blue slate (called Ardoise) roofs; this style is common in the north of France, while most buildings in the south of France have terracotta roofs. Catherine Poirot (born 1963) former breaststroke swimmer, bronze medallist in the 1984 Summer Olympics On 1 February 2011, Canada's TSN announced that they had acquired the rights to the Tour de France in a "multi-year" deal, [150] which ultimately lasted for three years; the rights were acquired by Sportsnet in 2014. Tours has served as the finish location for Paris–Tours, a one-day road cycling classic race held almost every October since 1896. [16]The Tour and its first Italian winner, Ottavio Bottecchia, are mentioned at the end of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. [160] In the early years of the Tour, cyclists rode individually, and were sometimes forbidden to ride together. This led to large gaps between the winner and the number two. Since the cyclists now tend to stay together in a peloton, the margins of the winner have become smaller, as the difference usually originates from time trials, breakaways or on mountain top finishes, or from being left behind the peloton. The smallest margins between the winner and the second placed cyclists at the end of the Tour is 8 seconds between winner Greg LeMond and Laurent Fignon in 1989. The largest margin, by comparison, remains that of the first Tour in 1903: 2h 49m 45s between Maurice Garin and Lucien Pothier. [215]
Between 1920 and 1985, Jules Deloffre (1885–1963) [212] was the record holder for the number of participations in the Tour de France, and even sole holder of this record until 1966, [213] when André Darrigade rode in his 14th Tour. [214]A 12-year-old from Ginasservis, known as Phillippe, was hit by a car in the Tour de France publicity caravan. [209] Such was the passion that the first Tour created in spectators and riders that Desgrange said the 1904 Tour de France would be the last. Cheating was rife, and riders were beaten up by rival fans as they neared the top of the col de la République, sometimes called the col du Grand Bois, outside St-Étienne. [31] The leading riders, including the winner Maurice Garin, were disqualified, though it took the Union Vélocipèdique de France until 30 November to make the decision. [32] McGann says the UVF waited so long "...well aware of the passions aroused by the race." [33] Desgrange's opinion of the fighting and cheating showed in the headline of his reaction in L'Auto: THE END. [34] Desgrange's despair did not last. By the following spring, he was planning another Tour—longer, at 11 stages rather than 6—and this time all in daylight to make any cheating more obvious. [35] Stages in 1905 began between 3am and 7:30am. [36] The race captured the imagination. L'Auto's circulation swelled from 25,000 to 65,000; [14] by 1908, it was a quarter of a million. The Tour returned after its suspension during World War I and continued to grow, with circulation of L'Auto reaching 500,000 by 1923. The record claimed by Desgrange was 854,000 during the 1933 Tour. [37] Le Vélo, meanwhile, went out of business in 1904.
Twice, in 1949 and 1952, Italian rider Fausto Coppi won the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France in the same year, the first rider to do so. Tours is famous for its original medieval district, called le Vieux Tours. Unique to the Old City are its preserved half-timbered buildings and la Place Plumereau, a square with busy pubs and restaurants, whose open-air tables fill the centre of the square. The Boulevard Beranger crosses the Rue Nationale at the Place Jean-Jaures and is the location of weekly markets and fairs.Main article: Young rider classification in the Tour de France Tadej Pogačar wearing the White Jersey at the 2023 Tour de France. Pogačar is the only rider to win the Young Rider's Classification 4-times overall and has held the white jersey for a record 75 days in total. Broadcasting in France was largely a state monopoly until 1982, when the socialist president François Mitterrand allowed private broadcasters and privatised the leading television channel. Competition between channels raised the broadcasting fees paid to the organisers from 1.5 per cent of the race budget in 1960 to more than a third by the end of the century. [144] Broadcasting time also increased as channels competed to secure the rights. The two largest channels to stay in public ownership, Antenne 2 and FR3, combined to offer more coverage than its private rival, TF1. The two stations, renamed France 2 and France 3, still hold the domestic rights and provide pictures for broadcasters around the world. In the United Kingdom, ITV obtained the rights to the Tour de France in 2002, replacing Channel 4 as the UK terrestrial broadcaster. Channel 4 coverage had been broadcast for the previous 15 years [148] with episodes introduced with a theme written by Pete Shelley. [149] The coverage is shown on ITV4, having aired in previous years on ITV2 and ITV3. Initially, live coverage was only broadcast at the weekend but since the 2010 Tour de France, ITV4 has broadcast daily live coverage of every stage except the final which is shown on ITV, ITV4 have the nightly highlights show.