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Riders aim to win overall but there are three further competitions: points, mountains and for the best young rider. The leader of each wears a distinctive jersey. A rider who leads more than one competition wears the jersey of the most prestigious. The abandoned jersey is worn by the second in the competition. The Tour's colours have been adopted by other races and have meaning within cycling generally. For example, the Tour of Britain has yellow, green, and polka-dot jerseys with the same meaning as the Tour. The Giro d'Italia differs in awarding the leader a pink jersey, being organised by La Gazzetta dello Sport, which has pink pages. The maillot jaune (yellow jersey) is worn by the general classification leader. The winner of the first Tour wore not a yellow jersey but a green armband. The first yellow was first awarded formally to Eugène Christophe, for the stage from Grenoble on 19 July 1919. However, the Belgian rider Philippe Thys, who won in 1913, 1914 and 1920, recalled in the Belgian magazine Champions et Vedettes when he was 67 that he was awarded a yellow jersey in 1913 when Henri Desgrange asked him to wear a coloured jersey. Thys declined, saying making himself more visible would encourage others to ride against him. He said: He spoke of the next year, when "I won the first stage and was beaten by a tyre by Bossus in the second. On the following stage, the maillot jaune passed to Georget after a crash." The Tour historian Jacques Augendre called Thys "a
Classification jerseys
valorous rider ... well-known for his intelligence" and said his claim "seems free from all suspicion". But: "No newspaper mentions a yellow jersey before the war. Being at a loss for witnesses, we can't solve this enigma." The first rider to wear the yellow jersey from start to finish was Ottavio Bottecchia of Italy in 1924. The first company to pay a daily prize to the wearer of the yellow jersey – known as the "rent" – was a wool company, Sofil, in 1948. The greatest number of riders to wear the yellow jersey in a day is three: Nicolas Frantz, André Leducq and Victor Fontan shared equal time for a day in 1929 and there was no rule to split them. One rider has won seven times: