Bikers' Britain: Great Motorbike Rides (AA) - The Tours

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First World War [ edit ] Tours Cathedral: 15th-century Flamboyant Gothic west front with Renaissance pinnacles, completed 1547. Netflix, partnered with the organizer Amaury Sport Organisation, has produced a documentary series about the eight major teams across the 2022 Tour de France named Tour de France: Unchained. [168] It was released in June 2023. [169] Post-Tour criteriums [ edit ] The longest successful post-war breakaway by a single rider was by Albert Bourlon in the 1947 Tour de France. In the Carcassonne–Luchon stage, he stayed away for 253 kilometres (157mi). [227] It was one of seven breakaways longer than 200 kilometres (120mi), the last being Thierry Marie's 234 kilometres (145mi) escape in 1991. [227] Bourlon finished 16m 30s ahead. This is one of the biggest time gaps but not the greatest. That record belongs to José-Luis Viejo, who beat the peloton by just over 23:00 and the second place rider by 22m 50s in the Montgenèvre-Manosque stage in 1976. [227] He was the fourth and most recent rider to win a stage by more than 20 minutes. The same day, leader Michael Rasmussen was removed for "violating internal team rules" by missing random tests on 9 May and 28 June. Rasmussen claimed to have been in Mexico. The Italian journalist Davide Cassani told Danish television he had seen Rasmussen in Italy. The alleged lying prompted Rasmussen's firing by Rabobank. [188] The population data in the table and graph below refer to the commune of Tours proper, in its geography at the given years. The commune of Tours absorbed the former commune of Saint-Étienne in 1845 and Sainte-Radegonde-en-Touraine and Saint-Symphorien in 1964. [12] Historical population Year

The winner of the classification is the rider with the most points at the end of the Tour. In case of a tie, the leader is determined by the number of stage wins, then the number of intermediate sprint victories, and finally, the rider's standing in the general classification. The classification has been won a record seven times by Peter Sagan. [90] [94] The Tour and its first Italian winner, Ottavio Bottecchia, are mentioned at the end of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. [160] The Tour was shown first on cinema newsreels a day or more after the event. The first live radio broadcast was in 1929, when Jean Antoine and Alex Virot of the newspaper L'Intransigeant broadcast for Radio Cité. They used telephone lines. In 1932 they broadcast the sound of riders crossing the col d'Aubisque in the Pyrenees on 12 July, using a recording machine and transmitting the sound later. This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( May 2021) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Données climatiques de la station de Tours" (in French). Meteo France . Retrieved 31 December 2015. Main article: 1903 Tour de France Maurice Garin, winner of the first Tour de France standing on the right. The man on the left is possibly Leon Georget (1903). [20] To host a stage start or finish brings prestige and business to a town. The prologue and first stage ( Grand Départ) are particularly prestigious. The race may start with a prologue (too short to go between towns) in which case the start of the next day's racing, which would be considered stage 1, usually in the same town. In 2007 director Christian Prudhomme said that "in general, for a period of five years we have the Tour start outside France three times and within France twice." [123] On the Tour's return, the format of the race settled on between 20 and 25 stages. Most stages would last one day, but the scheduling of 'split' stages continued well into the 1980s. 1953 saw the introduction of the Green Jersey 'Points' competition. National teams contested the Tour until 1961. [55] The teams were of different sizes. Some nations had more than one team, and some were mixed in with others to make up the number. National teams caught the public imagination but had a snag: that riders might normally have been in rival trade teams the rest of the season. The loyalty of riders was sometimes questionable, within and between teams. Sponsors were always unhappy about releasing their riders into anonymity for the biggest race of the year, as riders in national teams wore the colours of their country and a small cloth panel on their chest that named the team for which they normally rode. The situation became critical at the start of the 1960s. Sales of bicycles had fallen, and bicycle factories were closing. [56] There was a risk, the trade said, that the industry would die if factories were not allowed the publicity of the Tour de France. The Tour returned to trade teams in 1962. [55] In the same year, Émilion Amaury, owner of le Parisien Libéré, became financially involved in the Tour. He made Félix Lévitan co-organizer of the Tour, and it was decided that Levitan would focus on the financial issues, while Jacques Goddet was put in charge of sporting issues. [57] The Tour de France was meant for professional cyclists, but in 1961 the organisation started the Tour de l'Avenir, the amateur version. [58]

July: Motorcycle rider Rene Wagner and passenger Alex Virot, a journalist for Radio Luxembourg, went off a mountain road in the Spanish Pyrenees. [206] Jacques Anquetil (centre), Raymond Poulidor (left) and Federico Bahamontes (right), podium of the 1964 Tour de FranceSee also: List of professional cyclists who died during a race Memorial of Tom Simpson on Mont Ventoux, who died near the summit during the 1967 Tour de France, aged 29. Normes et records 1961–1990: Tours – St Symphorien (37) – altitude 112m" (in French). Infoclimat . Retrieved 31 December 2015. Tours ( / t ʊər/ TOOR, French: [tuʁ] ⓘ) is one of the largest cities in the region of Centre-Val de Loire, France. It is the prefecture of the department of Indre-et-Loire. The commune of Tours had 136,463 inhabitants as of 2018 while the population of the whole metropolitan area was 516,973. [3] The classification awarded no jersey to the leader until the 1975 Tour de France, when the organizers decided to award a distinctive white jersey with red dots to the leader. This is colloquially referred to in English as the "polka dot" jersey. [90] [92] The climbers' jersey is worn by the rider who, at the start of each stage, has the largest number of climbing points. [91] If the race leader is also leading the Mountains classification, the polka dot jersey will be worn by the next eligible rider in the Mountains standings. At the end of the Tour, the rider holding the most climbing points wins the classification. Some riders may race with the aim of winning this particular competition, while others who gain points early on may shift their focus to the classification during the race. The Tour has five categories for ranking the mountains the race covers. The scale ranges from category 4, the easiest, to hors catégorie, the hardest. During his career Richard Virenque won the mountains classification a record seven times. Répertoire national des élus: les maires" (in French). data.gouv.fr, Plateforme ouverte des données publiques françaises. 13 September 2022.

Tours is a special place for Catholics who follow the devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus and the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. In 1843, Sister Marie of St Peter of Tours reported a vision which started the devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus, in reparation for the many insults Christ suffered in His Passion. The Golden Arrow Prayer was first made public by her. The recent history of Tours is marked by the personality of Jean Royer, who was Mayor for 36 years and helped save the old town from demolition by establishing one of the first Conservation Areas. This example of conservation policy would later inspire the Malraux Law for the safeguarding of historic city centres. In the 1970s, Jean Royer also extended the city to the south by diverting the course of the river Cher to create the districts of Rives du Cher and des Fontaines. At the time, this was one of the largest urban developments in Europe. In 1970, the François Rabelais University was founded; this is centred on the bank of the Loire in the downtown area, and not – as it was then the current practice – in a campus in the suburbs. The latter solution was also chosen by the twin university of Orleans. Royer's long term as Mayor was, however, not without controversy, as exemplified by the construction of the practical – but aesthetically unattractive – motorway which runs along the bed of a former canal just 1,500 metres (4,900 feet) from the cathedral. Another bone of contention was the original Vinci Congress Centre by Jean Nouvel. This project incurred debts although it did, at least, make Tours one of France's principal conference centres. Tours became a metropolis in the Roman province of Lugdunum towards 380–388 AD, dominating Maine, Brittany, and the Loire Valley. One important figure in the city was Saint Martin of Tours, a bishop who shared his coat with a naked beggar in Amiens. The importance of Martin in the medieval Christian West made Tours, and its position on the route of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, a major centre during the Middle Ages. Months before the start of the 1988 Tour, director Jean-François Naquet-Radiguet was replaced by Xavier Louy. [72] In 1988, the Tour was organised by Jean-Pierre Courcol, the director of L'Équipe, then in 1989 by Jean-Pierre Carenso and then by Jean-Marie Leblanc, who in 1989 had been race director. The former television presenter Christian Prudhomme—he commentated on the Tour among other events—replaced Leblanc in 2007, having been assistant director for three years. In 1993 ownership of L'Équipe moved to the Amaury Group, which formed Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO) to oversee its sports operations, although the Tour itself is operated by its subsidiary the Société du Tour de France. [73] Miguel Induráin at the 1993 Tour de FranceA motorcyclist giving a demonstration in the velodrome of La Roche-sur-Yon, to entertain the crowd before the cyclists arrived, died after he crashed at high speed. [205] In 732, Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi and an army of Muslim horsemen from Al-Andalus advanced 500 kilometres (300 miles) deep into France, and were stopped at Moussais-la-Bataille [5] (between Châtellerault and Poitiers) by Charles Martel and his infantry. This ignited the Battle of Tours. The Muslim army was defeated, preventing an Islamic conquest of France.

Between 1920 and 1985, Jules Deloffre (1885–1963) [212] was the record holder for the number of participations in the Tour de France, and even sole holder of this record until 1966, [213] when André Darrigade rode in his 14th Tour. [214] As of 2015 Jersey sponsor is Optician company Krys, [98] replacing Škoda who moved to the Green Jersey. A 12-year-old from Ginasservis, known as Phillippe, was hit by a car in the Tour de France publicity caravan. [209] Main article: Points classification in the Tour de France Peter Sagan in the green jersey at the 2018 Tour de France. Sagan won the points classification a record seven times, in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019

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L'Étape du Tour (French for 'stage of the Tour') is an organised mass participation cyclosportive event that allows amateur cyclists to race over the same route as a Tour de France stage. First held in 1993, and now organised by the ASO, in conjunction with Vélo Magazine, it takes place each July, normally on a Tour rest day. [228]