List of Tour de France Grands Départs

The Tour de France is an annual road bicycle race held over 23 days in July. Established in 1903 by newspaper L'Auto, the Tour is the most well-known and prestigious of cycling's three "Grand Tours"; the others are the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a España. The race usually covers approximately 3,500 kilometres (2,200 mi), passing through France and neighbouring countries such as Belgium. The race is broken into day-long segments, called stages. Individual finishing times for each stage are totalled to determine the overall winner at the end of the race.

The course changes every year, but has always finished in Paris; since 1975 it has finished along the Champs-Élysées. The start of the course is known as the Grand Départ. Since the 1950s it has typically taken place in a different town each year, and since the 1970s it has been common to award the Grand Départ to cities outside France as a way of increasing international interest in the competition and the sport. The right to host the Grand Départ is now highly sought after, with cities bidding to host, and has been shown to increase economic activity as well as interest in cycling in the host area.

Host cities

Footnotes

A.  Bjarne Riis has admitted to doping during the 1996 Tour de France. The organizers of the Tour de France have stated that they no longer consider him to be the winner, although Union Cycliste Internationale has so far refused to change the official status due to the amount of time passed since his win. Jan Ullrich was placed second on the podium in Paris.

B.  Lance Armstrong was declared winner of seven consecutive tours from 1999 to 2005. However, in October 2012 he was stripped of all titles by the UCI due to the use of performance-enhancing drugs. The tour director Christian Prudhomme had previously declared that if this happened, there would be no alternate winners for those years, but this has not yet been made official.

C.  Floyd Landis was the winner at the podium ceremony in Paris on the last day of the 2006 tour, but subsequently was found to have tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs during stage 17 of the race. The United States Anti-Doping Agency found him guilty of using synthetic testosterone during the race and stripped him of his title on 20 September 2007.

D.  Alberto Contador was the winner at the podium ceremony in Paris on the last day of the 2010 tour, but subsequently was found to have tested positive for the prohibited substance Clenbuterol on a rest day. The Court of Arbitration for Sport found him guilty of using clenbuterol during the race and stripped him of his title on 6 February 2012.

Notes and references

Bibliography

See also
List of Tour de France secondary classification winners
Yellow jersey statistics
List of Grand Tour general classification winners

Category:Tour de France-related lists