10 Wild Facts about the Crazy First Years of the Tour de France

The Tour de France was first held in 1903. Since then, the long-distance bicycle race has become one of the most revered sporting events in the world. Of course, in recent years, the incredible and inspiring presence of American cyclist Lance Armstrong sure didn’t hurt the sport. Fans from all over the world tuned in and watched his astonishing stamina, strength, balance, and poise. (Well, that is until his career ended in disgrace, but we digress…)

Regardless, he is far from the only memorable story that has cropped up through the long history of the Tour de France. In fact, the early years of the cycling event were by far the craziest! In this list, we’ll take a look at ten jaw-dropping stories involving the Tour de France’s first few years in operation.

The 20th century had just dawned in France, and for the world, the Tour was a totally new phenomenon. The cyclists—and fans—were wild with exuberance. And more. So, so much more. Read on to learn all about it.

Related: 10 Most Infamous Team Brawls in Sports

10 That Little Cheater!

The man who won the first two Tour de France races, in 1903 and 1904, was named Maurice Garin. He was a very tiny fellow—so tiny, in fact, that he was known as “The Little Chimney Sweep.” He was a noted bicyclist during his lifetime and had most memorably won an 1893 race that came to be seen as a precursor to the Tour de France. He was a true character, too—the kind of character who they just don’t seem to make nowadays.

For one, he very often rode with a cigarette in his mouth. Not only that, but he openly credited his 1893 race victory to his diet during competition. That smorgasbord of foods included red wine, tapioca, hot chocolate, and… oysters. Truly, the breakfast (lunch and dinner) or champions, we suppose. But he won that 1893 race, so we can’t necessarily argue with his diet, can we?

The real story about Garin came during the 1903 Tour de France, though. And the real story could be summed up in one word: cheating. Garin was notorious during those first two official Tour races for pushing other riders off their bikes as they rode past him. He stomped on their bike wheels to damage them, too. At one point, he even jumped on a train and caught a ride between cities to get ahead of the other riders! Garin’s cheating was so legendary that officials eventually stripped him of the 1904 win. But the 1903 victory still stands to this day. And he died decades later as a hero in France and a legend everywhere else.^[1]

9 Hot off the Presses

It might be natural to think that the whole point of the Tour de France was to promote cycling. Or maybe to celebrate the endurance of top-level athletes. But nope! The early races were only actually formed to… sell more newspapers. Seriously. In 1903, a journalist named Géo Lefèvre was working for a struggling newspaper called “L’Auto.”

Lefèvre was tasked with a way to sell more papers to more people across France. The paper focused on sports news, which had been a lucrative market for their competitors. But for the poor journalist’s outlet, people just weren’t buying papers. So, he got the idea to hold a massive race to boost circulation for his paper. They would promote the race, cover it exclusively, and get readers to show up at the newsstands.

Lefèvre took the idea to his editor-in-chief, Henri Desgrange, and the boss loved it. It helped that Desgrange was himself a former champion cyclist in his younger days. So the two men went full force into setting up and promoting the event. There was just one problem: it appealed to literally nobody. Just a week before the initial starting date, only 15 riders had signed up, and interest from readers appeared tepid. Desgrange was forced to push back the start date of the race another month. He also shortened the race to 18 days instead of its initially proposed five-week tour.

Oh, and they even went so far as to offer a bonus to the next 50 riders who signed up: 5 francs a day during the competition! That last little promo proved to do the trick. More than 60 cyclists signed up in short order after that, and soon enough, the Tour de France was chugging ahead as a media phenomenon.^[2]

8 No Referees

Today’s Tour de France has race officials absolutely everywhere. They are in every town where the riders stop to confer with them about things on the course. They are following along with the riders very closely behind in cars that track the race. And, of course, there are video cameras everywhere. So riders can pretty much not get away with anything when it comes to dirty tricks on race days. That wasn’t the case back in the first few years of the Tour de France, though.

It helped (or hurt, as it were) that the prize for the winner of the event was a cool 3,000 francs. That was the equivalent of about two years’ worth of wages for a manual laborer back in 1903. So, while the pro cyclists who had entered that first race were big favorites, enough amateur riders entered just hoping for a shot at that big money. Naturally, the amateurs were extremely willing to cut corners and cheat to try to get their share of the massive prize pool.

Specifically, those cheating tactics included all kinds of things. As we’ve mentioned with Garin already, some riders hopped on trains between towns when they felt like they could get away with it. Other riders would regularly toss tacks and nails into the road behind them with the hope that the sharp objects would flatten the tires of their competitors.

Still, other riders would resort to cutting corners, taking shortcuts, and hitching rides from various passing vehicles during the long night ride portions of the competition. With few racing officials dispersed throughout the country and no way to track their activities—especially at night—there was pretty much nothing to be done.^[3]

7 Shaming the Loser

During the first-ever race, the loser had to be actively shamed while out on the course. The tradition began right then and there that the last racer running in every single section would wear a “red lantern” as they rode. And in 1903, that last racer was a long way back, too. He crossed the finish line a full two DAYS after Maurice Garin won the race! And because he had a red lantern strapped to himself while he rode, he was quite literally a marked man the whole time. Consider it the Tour de France’s version of the scarlet letter.

But while the red lantern very quickly ended up becoming a source of massive shame, it actually had a long history in transportation safety. See, in the world before GPS systems and computers and satellites and stuff, trains used red lanterns at the end of their cabooses to ensure that all the cars had remained connected and were still on track. It was a simple way for train conductors and railway operators to track which cars and trains were going where and with whom. It was from that tradition that the Tour de France borrowed the red lantern idea.

By the way, the red lantern—known popular as the “lanterne rouge” in France—still exists as part of the bike race today. The last rider doesn’t have to literally wear one nowadays. However, the term is generally used and widely recognized to designate the last-place rider in a heat or classification. In that way, it has become something of a badge of honor for some cyclists by now. If you can’t win the race, well, you might as well lose it in style!^[4]

6 Poisoning Problems

While some current-day Tour de France riders might have (allegedly!) taken steroids to win their races, way back then, poisoning was standard. Why dope yourself for good when you can dope your rivals for bad, ya know? In 1903, the favorite in the race was a man named Hippolyte Aucouturier. But during the very opening stage of that debut race, he had to quit altogether after falling victim to a brutal poisoning attack. Just days into the race, Aucouturier was beset by horrible stomach cramps. As it later turned out, the cramps were caused by a bottle of poisoned lemonade that he’d taken from a spectator. Ouch!

The first-year poisoning problem wasn’t the only early Tour de France issue, either. In 1911, a cyclist named Paul Duboc won two consecutive stages of the race and looked like the odds-on favorite to win it all. That didn’t sit well with a competitor named François Lafourcade. One night, the evidently evil Lafourcade spiked a drink that Duboc had been consuming.

The next day, Duboc pulled over to the side of the road and began vomiting uncontrollably. Lafourcade and the rest of the competitors rolled right by. In the end, Lafourcade not only got away with it, but he actually was able to frame another innocent cyclist as being the supposed poisoner!^[5]

5 Fight! Fight! Fight!

The first Tour de France in 1903 was pretty wild, but the second one held in 1904 was maybe the dirtiest ever. That year, during the middle of the race, four random men zoomed up in a car and jumped out to attack Maurice Garin, who had won the previous year’s contest. He was brutally beaten by the men, who may have been gamblers seeking to affect the race or perhaps just local thugs paid off by a competitor.

Somehow, that wasn’t the only attack! Later, during the 1904 race’s second stage, supporters of cyclist Antoine Fauré let him pass by, then began to toss shards of glass on the road behind him. Naturally, that caused all kinds of flat tires behind him. And when that wasn’t enough, some fans took to throwing rocks at the competitors, too.

The worst part, however, was the full-on brawl that occurred during the stage heading into the town of Saint-Étienne. There, the townspeople also very much favored Fauré. So, when Garin and another cyclist approached, they created a blockade to prevent them from getting through. When Garin protested, the mob began to beat the two competitors! The vicious fight was only stopped when none other than Tour creator Géo Lefèvre himself showed up and fired a pistol into the air. Scary! Garin went on to win his second straight Tour de France after that, too, so the mob’s violence didn’t have its intended effect.^[6]

4 Dirty Tricks

During the first races, the riders were not allowed to receive help from anyone else to repair their bikes. If wheels deflated (which happened all the time), they had to make repairs on their own during the race. In fact, wheels deflated so often that cyclists in the first few Tours actually carried spare tires around their bodies! Just in case they had a few flats along the route, they went off looking like the bike version of the Michelin Man. As we’ve already covered, competitors and spectators alike weren’t above throwing glass, nails, tacks, and other things on the ground in the roadway. So, tire problems happened a lot.

Tire problems were just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, though. Far more dastardly tricks were afoot in those first few races, too. In the 1903 contest, the aforementioned Garin and another rider named Fernand Augereau nearly came to blows after Garin had a few of his buddies who were watching the race knock Fernand off his bike… twice! Fernand was able to recover and leap off his bike before he hit the pavement. But as he did that, Garin ran over and stomped on the other rider’s back until the wheels were so messed up as to be unfixable!

And there were STILL more dirty tricks to take on, too. Cyclists would wrap wires around trees on the side of the road and then run them across the pavement. Those coming up on the wire couldn’t see the little strands pulled taut across the cement. And inevitably, they would hit the wires and fall in a heap. And if that didn’t work, cyclists were even known to go far enough to dump itching power in their rivals’ shorts—which is a thing that actually happened during the 1904 race. Nothing was out of the question in those early days!^[7]

3 Culling the Herd

The very first Tour de France started out hot. The first stage was a 300-mile (482.8-kilometer) trek to be done in a single day. And that was too tough for the 60 cyclists who left Paris on the afternoon of July 1, 1903. In fact, only 37 of them reached Lyon at the end of the stage! They all had to ride very long into the night, too. Eventually, Garin was the first to reach Lyon, riding for 17 straight hours and defeating his closest competitor by just one minute.

One official in Lyon that next morning noted that the cyclists were riding “like sleepwalkers.” And things only got worse from there. The cyclists had to ride for more than 1,500 miles (2,414 kilometers) in only SIX stages. And they only had roughly a day of rest between rides, too. That’s an insane amount of biking. So, it’s no surprise that 23 of the 60 riders dropped out on the first day. And it shouldn’t shock you to also learn that by the end of it all, only 21 of the original 60 cyclists actually finished the race! (By the way, to compare, the 2017 Tour de France was just over 100 miles (161 kilometers)—or one-fifteenth of the original course.)^[8]

2 Got Beer?

Nowadays, nobody questions how important good nutrition is for athletes. But back in the early 20th century, it was still a bit unknown. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the first few years of the Tour de France. The cyclists had no nutritionists or dietitians on hand. Instead, they were tasked with coming up with their own food strategies. And it might not surprise you to learn that a great many of them turned to beer.

The now-legendary Garin routinely stopped at bars during the inaugural race. And in the second year, competitor Henri Cornet chose champagne as his drink of choice while out on the course. Cornet was also known to drink copious amounts of hot chocolate AND eat multiple pounds of rice pudding each day. Yikes!

In those early days, the route around the nation wasn’t very closely monitored. So, cyclists were known to stop pretty much wherever they wanted to eat, drink, and be merry. In the 1910s, one cyclist who had come from wealth even got the incredible idea to set up his butler with a roadside picnic at one stopover point. Why not live a little, ya know? Oh, and beer wasn’t the only salve for the racer’s sore bodies. Cocaine came into play, too! Early years rider Henri Pélissier once told a reporter that cyclists used “cocaine for our eyes and chloroform for our gums” to provide energy and numb pain!^[9]

1 Illegal Aid from Engines

Finally, perhaps the wildest and most brazen Tour de France story has to do with the fact that riders used to routinely get assistance from cars and motorcycles. The aforementioned rider, Hippolyte Aucouturier, for example, was notorious in those early years for catching a ride from an early, primitive model of car driving in front of him. But he didn’t just grab onto the back bumper and hold on for dear life as his bike sped down the road while being towed. No, he had a far more ingenious way of doing things!

Basically, he would put a piece of cork in his mouth. Then, he’d tie a wire around the cork. And then, very subtly before the race began, he would tie the other end of the wire to the back of the car. Nobody would be able to see him being ridden along like that, but it sure saved him a lot of physical agony. And he was so brazen about it that in one stage of the 1904 Tour de France, he actually crossed the finish line being secretly towed by a car just seconds behind race officials—who themselves had driven the whole way through the stage. Somebody probably should have looked a little bit deeper into that pace of his!^[10]