Tour De France

The Tour de France started in 1903, and is the world's largest cycling tournament/race. It is a 23-day, 21-stage road race that is usually run over more than 3,000 km (1,864 mi). The route traces a circuit around most areas of France, and often passes through one or more neighbouring countries. The race is broken into stages from one town to another, each of which is an individual race. The time taken to complete each stage is added to a cumulative total for each rider, to decide the outright winner at the end of the Tour.

Together with the Giro d'Italia (Tour of Italy) and Vuelta a EspaÐ"±a (Tour of Spain), the Tour de France is one of the three major stage races and the longest of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) calendar. While the other two European Grand Tours are well known in Europe, they are relatively unknown outside the continent, and even the UCI World Cycling Championship is familiar only to cycling enthusiasts. The Tour de France, in contrast, has long been a household sporting name around the globe, even to those not generally interested in cycling.

As with most cycling races, competitors enter as part of a team. The race consists of 20 to 22 teams with nine riders each. Traditionally, entry is extended to invitation only, with invitations granted only to the best of the world's professional teams. The tour organizers recently have utilized UCI points (based upon team riders/results) to determine which teams would gain automatic entry into the tour and then typically reserve 2-4 team slots to at large teams or French continental teams who would not be able to race in the tour based upon their individual team results. Each team, known by the name of its sponsor, wears a distinctive jersey and riders assist one another and have access to a shared 'team car' (a mobile version of the pit crews in car racing).

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