The Wild History of the Tour de France: Cheats, Deaths and Utter Chaos
The Tour de France looks pretty glamorous on the telly these days. Helicopters sweep over sunflower fields, riders glide up mountain passes, and everyone sips their wine pretending they understand the time gaps. But dig into the race's back catalogue and you'll find something closer to a demolition derby than a polished sporting event. Riders have been punched off their bikes, doped to the eyeballs, run off the road by cars and, in a handful of grim cases, killed. Fans have scattered nails and broken glass across the road, thrown smoke bombs into the peloton and once even brought the race to its knees with a cardboard sign. One rider spent part of the 1919 Tour complaining that his brand new prize jersey made him look like a canary. This is the real, thoroughly documented history of the world's most chaotic bike race.
Quick Answers
● When did the Tour de France start? In 1903, as a publicity stunt for the French sports paper L'Auto, which needed a boost against a rival title.
● Has anyone died during the Tour de France? Yes. At least three riders have died mid-race, along with a reporter, a motorcycle driver and ten spectators struck by a runaway support vehicle.
● Why is the leader's jersey yellow? Because L'Auto was printed on yellow paper. The colour was picked in 1919 and it stuck.
● What was cycling's biggest doping scandal? The 1998 Festina affair, when customs officers found a team car packed with EPO, growth hormone and amphetamines two days before the race even began.
● Have women always raced the Tour de France? No. Women were barred for decades, and a permanent women's Tour didn't return for good until 2022.
A Newspaper's Cheap Trick to Sell More Papers
The Tour de France wasn't dreamed up by some visionary sports federation. It was a circulation-boosting stunt cooked up in 1903 by Henri Desgrange, editor of the cycling paper L'Auto, after its rival Le Vélo had been thrashing it on sales. The gamble paid off almost instantly. We've covered the full blow-by-blow of that chaotic first race elsewhere on the site, but the short version is that Desgrange wanted his race brutal. He once said he'd love nothing more than a winner so dominant that he finished as the only rider left standing. He also despised the idea of variable gears, reckoning a fixed gear separated real men from the soft ones.
You can get a proper sense of just how rough and undeveloped the French countryside looked back then in these colour photographs from the early 1900s, which help explain why a multi-day race over unpaved roads on single-speed bikes was considered borderline suicidal even by the standards of the day.
The Second Tour That Nearly Killed the Whole Idea
If the 1903 race was a success, the 1904 edition was a fiasco that nearly ended the Tour for good. Reigning champion Maurice Garin and fellow rider Lucien Pothier were ambushed by four men in a car during the first stage, apparently for having the nerve to break away early. Later that same stage, riders were disqualified for hitching lifts on trains, and someone copped a fine for riding in a car's slipstream.
Stage two was worse. Fans of local rider Antoine Faure spread nails and broken glass across the road and physically blocked rival riders from following him, punching Garin and knocking another cyclist out cold. Race officials had to fire pistols into the air just to break up the mob. Further down the route, Cesar Garin's bike was smashed by attackers, costing him fifteen minutes while he tracked down a replacement. By the time the Tour reached Nimes in stage three, angry fans were throwing rocks and barricading the road entirely.
It took the French cycling federation until November of that year to sort out the mess. When they finally did, they disqualified the top four finishers, including Garin, handing victory to nineteen-year-old Henri Cornet, still the youngest winner in Tour history. Desgrange was so disgusted he swore he'd never run the race again. He changed his mind within weeks and immediately started planning the next one. The following year's Tour saw 125kg of nails dumped on the very first stage, which finally pushed organisers to shorten the stages, cut out overnight riding and switch to a points system that made cheating harder to hide.
Women Weren't Allowed Anywhere Near It
In 1908, French sportswoman Marie Marvingt asked to enter the Tour and was refused outright, since the race was only open to men. She rode the entire 4,488km route anyway, unofficially, setting off about fifteen minutes behind the real field each day. She finished the whole thing, a feat only 36 of the 114 men who'd officially started managed to pull off that year. Marvingt had already swum the length of the Seine and won a national military shooting contest, and she went on to become one of the world's first female combat pilots, so being told no by the Tour barely slowed her down.
An official women's race came and went in fits and starts for decades after that. Journalist Jean Leulliot organised a one-off Tour de France Feminin in 1955, a five-day event won by Isle of Man rider Millie Robinson, and then dropped it after a single edition. A fuller version returned in 1984 alongside the men's race, won by American Marianne Martin, before it folded again, got renamed the Grande Boucle Feminine, and eventually shrank down to a single-day event called La Course. A proper multi-stage Tour de France Femmes finally came back for good in 2022, 114 years after Marvingt was turned away at the start line.
The Race Basically Ran on Drugs
Long before anyone talked about blood doping or EPO, the Tour de France ran on whatever riders could get their hands on. In 1923, defending champion Henri Pelissier told a journalist he kept cocaine for his eyes and chloroform for his gums to cope with the pain, and that riders were essentially skeletons by the finish. By 1930, the situation had become so normalised that the official rulebook Desgrange handed out simply reminded competitors they'd need to bring their own drugs, since the organisers wouldn't be supplying any.
Alcohol was standard fuel for the first five decades of the race, used to dull fatigue and pain, and riders would smoke cigarettes before mountain stages in the belief it opened up the lungs. None of this was hidden or particularly scandalous at the time. It was simply how professional cycling worked, and it set the template for a doping culture that would eventually turn deadly.
A Yellow Jersey Born Out of a Wool Shortage
The Tour didn't run at all between 1915 and 1918 because of the First World War, and when it returned in 1919 there was a shortage of dye and material, so most teams ended up wearing near-identical grey jerseys supplied by a single manufacturer. Officials couldn't tell who was leading the race, so partway through the punishing 482km stage from Les Sables d'Olonne to Bayonne, Desgrange had a yellow jersey made up for the man in front, using the same yellow paper L'Auto was printed on.
That man was Eugene Christophe, and he was not thrilled about it. He complained that spectators and rivals mocked him for looking like a canary. There's a bitter irony buried in his story too.
Christophe had led the 1913 Tour before the front fork on his bike snapped on a descent, forcing him to walk ten kilometres to a blacksmith's forge and weld it back together himself, costing him the race. In 1919, wearing the very first yellow jersey and leading by around thirty minutes with only a couple of stages left, his fork snapped again, this time on cobbles near Valenciennes. He lost more than two and a half hours making repairs and never won the Tour he so nearly had twice.
When Desgrange died in 1940, his initials were stitched onto the yellow jersey in tribute, and they're still there today. Eddy Merckx holds the record for wearing it, having pulled it on 96 times across his career.
The Tour That Stopped for the War
The Tour didn't run at all between 1940 and 1946. Desgrange tried to save the 1940 edition even after war broke out, but had to cancel it as France fell to German invasion, and died weeks later. His deputy Jacques Goddet took over both the newspaper and the race, and when German propaganda officials pushed him to restart the Tour as a show of normality under occupation, offering him special access across the border between occupied and Vichy France to make it happen, Goddet refused every single year.
That refusal didn't stop a substitute race called the Circuit de France running in 1942 with German approval, organised by a journalist named Jean Leulliot. He's the same man who would go on to launch the first official women's Tour de France thirteen years later. Goddet's own wartime record isn't spotless either. As head of the organisation that leased out the Velodrome d'Hiver, he handed the venue's keys to French police shortly before it was used to detain thousands of Jewish Parisians during the round-up of July 1942, a piece of history the Tour's organisers have kept at arm's length ever since.
A Race That Has Actually Killed People
The most notorious death came on 13 July 1967, when British rider Tom Simpson collapsed on the slopes of Mont Ventoux during stage thirteen. He'd mixed amphetamines with alcohol, and in the 40-degree heat and thin air near the summit, his body simply gave out. He began zig-zagging across the road, fell, was helped back onto his bike by spectators, then collapsed again a few hundred metres later and never regained consciousness. The now-famous line attributed to him, put me back on my bike, was actually the invention of a journalist covering the race rather than anything Simpson said.
Nearly thirty years later, in 1995, Italian rider and reigning Olympic road race champion Fabio Casartelli crashed on the descent of the Col de Portet d'Aspet and struck a concrete block at speed.
He was airlifted to hospital but pronounced dead on arrival. He was 24. Helmets became compulsory in professional racing soon after, and from 1997 the Tour's young rider classification carried his name in tribute.
Riders aren't the only people the Tour has claimed. In 1957, radio reporter Alex Virot and his motorcycle driver Rene Wagner died when they went off the road into a ravine while covering a stage. In 1964, a truck from the Tour's publicity caravan lost control and ploughed into a crowd of spectators, killing ten people. It remains one of the deadliest incidents in the race's history and barely gets a mention today.
Sometimes the Crowd Is More Dangerous Than the Climb
Spectators have caused almost as much chaos as the weather. In 1975, with Eddy Merckx leading the race up the Puy de Dome, a fan jumped out of the crowd and punched him square in the kidney. Merckx staggered across the line vomiting, lost his overall lead that year, and still rode back down the mountain afterwards trying to find the man responsible.
Animals have caused their own share of trouble. A herd of cows wandered onto the route back in 1929, sheep briefly halted the race in 2010, and llamas have more recently been spotted loitering on mountain roads during the Pyrenean stages. In 2007, a stray Labrador ran into the path of the peloton and German rider Marcus Burghardt collided with it, flipping over his handlebars. Remarkably, both rider and dog walked away fine.
The single most damaging fan incident in recent memory happened in 2021, when a spectator held out a large cardboard sign reading Allez Opi-Omi and turned her back on the peloton to pose for a photo. Rider Tony Martin clipped the sign and went down hard, triggering a pile-up that affected around fifty riders and forced several out of the race entirely, including Marc Soler with two broken arms. The fan responsible fled the scene and was reportedly pursued with legal action by race organisers. Crowd trouble on the mountain stages has kept escalating too, with fans throwing smoke bombs onto Alpe d'Huez in 2018, the same week a camera strap snagged Vincenzo Nibali's handlebars and broke his vertebra.
Farmers vs the Peloton
Fans aren't the only ones who've blocked the road. In 2018, a small group of farmers protesting cuts to EU funding piled hay bales and around fifty sheep across the route of stage sixteen in the Pyrenees. Police moved in with tear gas just minutes before the peloton arrived, and the wind carried it straight into the riders' faces. Race leader Geraint Thomas, four-time champion Chris Froome and points leader Peter Sagan were all treated for streaming eyes at the roadside before the stage could restart.
When the Podium Needed a Bouncer
Five-time Tour winner Bernard Hinault spent his retirement working the podium ceremonies for the race, and he had zero patience for gatecrashers. In 2008, when a protester jumped on stage in Nantes during the celebrations for stage three, Hinault didn't wait for security. He grabbed the man himself and shoved him straight into the arms of the waiting police. It fits his reputation. Back in 1984, at the separate Paris-Nice race, Hinault had ridden straight into a crowd of striking shipyard workers blocking the road and thrown a punch at one of them, a photo that's followed him around ever since.
The Scandal That Nearly Wrecked the Modern Tour
By the late 1990s, doping had gone from an open secret to a full-blown criminal investigation. On 8 July 1998, two days before the race started, customs officers stopped a Festina team car at the French-Belgian border and found it stuffed with EPO, growth hormones, testosterone and amphetamines. The team was thrown out, riders were arrested and briefly jailed, and police raids on other teams' hotels followed throughout the race. Several squads withdrew in protest, riders staged sit-down strikes, and one stage was cancelled outright. Journalists at the time nicknamed it the Tour de Farce, and the fallout reshaped anti-doping rules in cycling for good.
Riders are forced to take a break because of protesting farmers. Robert Jacquinot taking his break in a bistro (1922) Gastone Nencini drinking wine in 1958 French cyclist Amedeé Fournier resting during the 1939 Tour de France Aad Van den Hoek during a smoking break (1978) Refreshments
Running Up a Mountain in Cycling Shoes
Even the modern, heavily regulated Tour still throws up genuinely bizarre moments. During stage twelve of the 2016 race, dense crowds near the summit of Mont Ventoux forced a stopped TV motorbike to a standstill right in the path of the leaders. Richie Porte ploughed into it, and race leader Chris Froome crashed straight after him, wrecking his bike beyond use. With no team car in sight, Froome simply started running up the mountain in his cleats. A neutral support vehicle eventually handed him a spare bike, but the pedals didn't match his shoes, so he ditched that one too before finally getting hold of a proper replacement. He lost time in the chaos, but race organisers later stepped in and adjusted the standings, letting him keep the yellow jersey.
The Closest Finish in Tour History
Nothing in the Tour's history has been tighter than 1989. Laurent Fignon held a 50 second lead over American Greg LeMond heading into the final time trial into Paris. LeMond showed up with aerodynamic handlebars and an aero helmet, technology that barely existed in the peloton at the time, while Fignon rode his usual setup with his blond ponytail loose in the wind. LeMond clawed back 58 seconds over the 24.5km course and won the Tour by just 8 seconds, still the narrowest margin in the race's history. It's become such a well worn line in cycling folklore that Fignon would have kept the jersey if he'd simply cut his hair off before the stage.
Racing to Come Last on Purpose
Finishing dead last at the Tour earns a rider the lanterne rouge, named after the red lamp once hung on the back of trains, and for a good chunk of the twentieth century it was actually worth chasing. Last-placed riders used to get invited to lucrative post-Tour criterium races across Europe and could double their yearly income in a few weeks of appearances. In 1979, Austrian rider Gerhard Schonbacher set out to finish dead last on purpose, hiding behind spectators' cars to burn time without missing the daily cutoff, and got off his bike to walk the final 100 metres just to guarantee it. His own team manager was so unimpressed he fired him for it.
Two world wars, more doping scandals than anyone can count, riders dying on the roadside and fans nearly derailing the whole thing with a bit of cardboard. Somehow the Tour de France just keeps rolling on, and if its history is anything to go by, it'll keep finding new ways to go completely off the rails.
