The Tour de France was created in 1903 as a publicity stunt to sell more newspapers.

The Tour de France began not as a purely athletic venture but as a circulation booster for the French sports newspaper L’Auto, whose editor, Henri Desgrange, was locked in a rivalry with a competing paper. Journalist Géo Lefèvre proposed a multi-stage bicycle race around the country as a way to generate daily headlines and keep readers buying the paper throughout the summer.

The gamble worked spectacularly: the first Tour in 1903 more than tripled L’Auto’s circulation, and the race quickly became a major national event in its own right rather than just a marketing device. More than a century later, the Tour de France is now one of the most prestigious and physically grueling events in all of sports, still run largely along the same basic format Desgrange and Lefèvre devised to sell newspapers.