What began as a circulation strategy for a struggling French sports newspaper turned into the most celebrated cycling race in the world. L’Auto launched the Tour de France in 1903 as a way to pull in readers and outpace its competitors. The plan worked beyond anyone’s expectations, and the event has been running ever since, interrupted only by the two world wars, when the destruction across Europe made continuing impossible.

The yellow jersey worn by the race leader has an origin story that most fans do not know. L’Auto was printed on bright yellow paper, and when the race needed a way to identify the leader on the road, the color was already close at hand. Before the jersey was introduced, spectators along the route often had no reliable way of knowing who was actually winning.

The race’s nickname, La Grande Boucle, translates simply as “The Big Loop,” a reference to the sweeping route that carries riders around the perimeter of France before drawing back toward Paris.

In the Tour’s earliest editions, the roads through the Pyrenees were barely roads at all, closer to rocky mountain paths than anything a modern cyclist would recognize. Riders hauled heavy steel bicycles uphill on foot when the terrain became too steep and rough to ride. Mechanical problems added another layer of misery: outside assistance was prohibited or penalized, so a broken chain or a flat tire meant stopping at the roadside and sorting it out alone.

Victory in the Tour is determined entirely by accumulated time across all stages. The rider who crosses the final finish line with the lowest total time wins the yellow jersey, regardless of how many individual stages they have won.

Individual stage victories carry their own form of glory, however. A rider who has no realistic chance of overall victory can secure a place in the sport’s memory with one well-timed attack on a mountain finish or a decisive move in a sprint, the kind of moment that gets replayed and remembered long after the race is over.

The competition for overall honors runs alongside several parallel contests, each marked by its own jersey. The green jersey identifies the leading sprinter, awarded on the basis of points collected at sprint finishes and intermediate checkpoints throughout the race. The polka-dot jersey goes to the best climber, the King of the Mountains, earned by reaching mountain summits ahead of rivals. The distinctive red dot pattern traces back to the packaging of Chocolat Poulain, a sponsor connected to the mountains competition in the race’s earlier years. The white jersey belongs to the strongest rider aged 24 or under, effectively serving as a running preview of where the sport’s future might be heading.

Cycling at this level is built on collective sacrifice. Every team enters with one protected leader, and the remaining riders, known as domestiques, spend the race working in service of that leader rather than pursuing their own ambitions. They shield their teammate from wind, chase down attacks, deliver food and water, and sometimes surrender their own bicycle if the leader suffers a mechanical failure.

The physical demands are almost difficult to comprehend from the outside. On a heavy mountain stage, a rider can burn upward of 6,000 calories in a single day, which means eating constantly and deliberately just to have enough fuel to finish.

Since 1975, the race has ended on the Champs-Elysees in Paris, with riders completing multiple laps of one of the world’s most recognizable avenues. The final stage carries an informal tradition of its own: the early hours are largely ceremonial, with riders sharing the road companionably, taking photographs, and marking the occasion before the sprinters shift into another gear entirely for the finishing stretch.