Tour de France

The Tour de France is the world's best-known cycling race, a three-week long road race that covers a circuit of most areas around France and, sometimes, neighbouring countries. The race is broken into stages from one town to another, each of which is an individual race. The time taken by cyclists to complete each stage becomes a cumulative total to decide the outright winner at the end of the Tour.

Together with the Giro d'Italia (Tour of Italy) and Vuelta a España (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 at three weeks each. 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, known even to those not generally interested in cycling.

As with most cycling races, competitors enter as part of a team. The race usually consists of 20 to 22 teams with nine riders each. Traditionally, entry in the Tour de France is extended to teams by invitation only, with invitations being granted only to the best of the world's professional teams. Each team, known by the name of its primary sponsor, wears distinctive jerseys and assists one another and has access to a shared 'team car' (a mobile version of the pit crews seen in auto racing). However, most scoring is individual, and no substitution is permitted.