The first Tour de France: old photos of the most popular cycling race

The world-famous cycling race Tour de France at the very beginning of its existence was conceived as an advertising project to promote the French periodical L'Auto, which eventually turned into a sports-themed newspaper L'Équipe. The idea to hold cycling competitions came to the journalist of the newspaper Jeo Lefebvre. The cycling race justified the hopes of the organizers: the number of subscribers of L'Auto in 1903, when the Tour de France was held for the first time, more than doubled. Every year this number grew, and in 1923, during the regular competitions, the daily circulation of the newspaper reached 500 thousand copies. Every year, the organizers of the Tour de France change the routes, the length varies from 3 to 4 thousand km, in 1926 they allocated the longest route - more than 5,700 km. These photos depict the moments of the very first cycling race in 1903.