The 2000 Tour de France was won by Lance Armstrong. Jump to: navigation, search Armstrong on the cover of Sports Illustrated shortly before the 2005 Tour de France. ...
The TourdeFrance, Giro d'Italia (Tour of Italy) and the Vuelta a España (Tour of Spain) are the three major stage races and the longest ones of the UCI International Calendar, at three weeks each.
Arrival of the 2005 TourdeFrance in Mulhouse.
At the 1998 TourdeFrance, dubbed the "Tour of Shame", a major doping scandal erupted when Willy Voet, one of the soigneurs for the Festina cycling team, was arrested for the possession of erythropoietin (EPO), growth hormones, testosterone and amphetamines.
The TourdeFrance, in contrast, has long been a household name around the globe, even amongst people who are not generally interested in pro cycling, and is for cycling what the FIFA World Cup is to football (soccer) in terms of global popularity.
The Tour was founded as a publicity event for the newspaper L'Auto (ancestor of the present l'Équipe) by its editor and co-founder, Henri Desgrange, to rival the Paris-Brest et retour ride (sponsored by Le Petit Journal), and Bordeaux-Paris.
Promotion of the TourdeFrance certainly proved a great success for the newspaper; circulation leapt from 25,000 before the 1903 Tour to 65,000 after it; in 1908 the race boosted circulation past a quarter of a million, and during the 1923 Tour it was selling 500,000 copies a day.
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