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We tend to talk about the Tour de France as if it descended from the heavens fully formed — three weeks of suffering, the most beautiful race on earth, a sporting cathedral built on tradition. So it's almost funny to discover the truth. The Tour de France was not born from any noble sporting ideal at all. It was born from a political scandal, a vicious newspaper feud, and a struggling paper's desperate scramble to sell more copies than its rival.
This solo episode follows that thread the whole way back — from the scandal that split a country, to the race that was invented to win a circulation war, to the reason the leader of the biggest bike race in the world still pulls on a yellow jersey every July.
A Country Torn In Two
To understand the race, you first have to understand the row, and the row starts with the Dreyfus Affair.
In the 1890s France tore itself apart over the case of Alfred Dreyfus, an army officer wrongly convicted of treason. It became far bigger than one man's guilt or innocence. It split the entire country into two camps — those who believed in Dreyfus and those who were set against him — and the fault line ran through everything: politics, the press, the dinner table, and, as it turned out, even the world of sport.
Because the sports press wasn't sitting neatly above all this. It was right in the middle of it.
The Editor And The Industrialists
At the centre stood a man called Pierre Giffard, editor of Le Vélo, the dominant French sports daily of the day. Le Vélo was the paper everyone read, and Giffard was a Dreyfus supporter who wasn't shy about it.
That put him on a collision course with a group of wealthy industrialists — the kind of men who made cars and tyres and had a great deal of advertising money to spend. They were on the opposite side of the Dreyfus divide, and they fell out badly with Giffard. So they did what powerful people with deep pockets and a grudge tend to do. They started their own paper to take him on. They called it L'Auto, and they installed an editor named Henri Desgrange to run it.
This is the part worth holding onto. The paper that would go on to create the Tour de France was set up, in large part, as a weapon in a feud that began with the Dreyfus Affair. The race exists, indirectly, because of a national political scandal.
A Publicity Stunt To Stay Alive
There was one problem. L'Auto wasn't winning. Le Vélo was the established name, and the upstart was struggling to outsell it. The paper needed something dramatic, something nobody had ever seen, something that would force the whole of France to talk about L'Auto rather than its rival.
The idea they landed on was close to madness. A bicycle race — but not a one-day dash. A race that went the whole way around France, stage after brutal stage, an event so enormous and so punishing that it would generate headlines for weeks and put L'Auto's name on every café table in the country.
In July 1903 they ran it. Six gigantic stages, the first edition of what they called the Tour de France, won by a former chimney sweep named Maurice Garin. It was conceived as a marketing exercise, pure and simple — and as a marketing exercise it was a staggering success. Circulation soared. The stunt worked so well that the race became an annual fixture, and the rival that had started the whole feud, Le Vélo, eventually went under.
The most beautiful race in cycling began life as an advertising campaign.
The Newspaper Is Still Worn At The Front
Here's the detail that ties the whole thing in a bow, and it's the reason this story isn't just a piece of trivia.
L'Auto was printed on yellow paper. Years later, in 1919, the race introduced a special jersey so spectators could pick out the overall leader at a glance — and they chose to make it yellow, to match the colour of the newspaper that ran the race. The maillot jaune.
So when you watch the leader roll out in yellow every summer, you're not just looking at a sporting symbol. You're looking at the colour of a struggling newspaper from a feud that began with the Dreyfus Affair. The circulation war that created the Tour is still, quite literally, being worn at the front of the race more than a hundred years on.
That's the thing about cycling history. The deeper you go, the stranger and more human it gets. The sport's grandest institution started as a scrappy commercial scheme — and somehow grew into the thing we love.
Read The Companion Guide
The full written version of this story — the Dreyfus Affair, the feud with Pierre Giffard, the founding of L'Auto and the 1903 race that started it all — is in the companion blog post on how the Tour de France really began.
You Might Also Like
If you like the history that sits underneath the racing, the solo episode on why Armstrong was erased but Ullrich wasn't is the natural next listen — a story about how the record of the Tour actually gets made and unmade. The Festina Affair episode covers the scandal that nearly broke the modern Tour, and the Marco Pantani episode is the most human story of the lot.
For more on the culture and rivalries that shaped the sport, the Coppi and Bartali piece is a good place to wander next. And if you want to talk cycling history with people who genuinely love it, that's exactly what the free Roadman community is for.