The 2010 Tour de France begins this Saturday in Rotterdam. This will be the 97th edition of the Tour, which was first staged in 1903.
The first tour included five over-night stages spread over ninteen days. It proved so popular that the passion of fans and competitors during the second tour led to an enormous amount of cheating and violence, prompting the founder and organizer, Henri Desgrange, to name the second Tour the last.
“The Tour de France has just finished and its second edition will, I fear, be the last. It will have died of its own success, of the blind passions which have been unleashed, of the abuse and of the suspicions that have come from ignorant and ill-intentioned people. And yet, however, it seemed to us and it still seems that we had built, with this great event, the most durable and the most imposing monument to cycle sport,” wrote Desgrange in the magazine L’Auto.
He did not keep to his word, however, and the 2010 Tour will include 20 stages over the course of 23 days. Favorite challengers this year include American seven-time winner Lance Armstrong, and Spanish two-time winner Alberto Contador. Armstrong, 38, is now older than any winning cyclist, while Contador is a deacade his junior.
“While it’d be great to win at nearly 38 years old, it’s virtually unheard of in this game,” said Armstrong to the New York Times. “So you’ve got to understand and respect that.”
Mark Cavendish, an outside favorite, is actually a long-shot for the win. The British sprinter is a weak climber and mountain stages cause far bigger time-gaps than flat stages, giving climbers a huge advantage over sprinters. In recent years, the Tour has been dominated by climbers, though most great cyclists excel at both time trials and mountain stages.
"Six stage wins should secure the green jersey and I didn't get it last year so nothing's certain but I'm confident I've got good form," Cavendish told BBC Sport. "My team's going very well and we're focused on the green jersey."
This year’s Tour de France will begin in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, and spend days crossing Belgium before getting to France. After circling the souther border of France, the race will finish in the Champes-Elysees in Paris, where it has finished since 1975.
Since a stage was held in England In 1974, the Tour has made a habit of visiting neighbouring countries. In 1987, it started at the foot of the Berlin Wall and in 1992 riders went through all six of the founding nations of the European Union. Its most distant start was Dublin in 1998.
To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first Tourmalet ascent in 1910, this year’s tour will include two climbs of the French mountain. The Tourmalet has the distinction of being the first high-altitude summit included in the tour, and in 1910, its inclusion kept many riders from entering the race. French cyclist Octave Lapize was the first to the top a century ago.
“What's going on is that you are criminals! Do you hear?” said Lapize to a journalist after the climb in 1910. “Tell Desgrange from me: you cannot ask human beings to do a thing like this!”
The Tour is raced by 20 teams of nine riders. Each team includes a leader, as well as any type of rider who can bring some advantage to the team. Teammates will often act to support their leader, whether by passing on one of their wheels if he punctures his, or picking up a bottle for him at the feeding zone. They will often be seen riding ahead of their leader to protect him from the wind, because when nearly 200 cyclists ride together at 50 kilometres per hour, the riders at the front waste much more energy than the ones sheltered from the wind.
Cyclists will often finish a race at the same time because it is the convention in road cycling that all the cyclists included in the same group are awarded the same finish time whether they are at the front or the back of the group. Also, in flat stages, if a cyclist crashes in the last three kilometers, he will be awarded the same time as the group he had been in before the crash.
The tour’s overall lead wears a yellow jersey, the colour chosen in 1919 to match the paper on which L’Auto, Desgrange’s daily paper which sponsored the race, was printed. The green jersey is awarded to the cyclist with the highest points classification based on stage wins. Points are awarded to the top 20 finishers in each stage. The polka dot jersey is awarded to the best climber. Points are awarded after each climb, which is ranked based on difficulty.
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