Grand Départ

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.

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. ^{a b c d e f g h} 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.

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