Tour de France
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1960s. Sales of bicycles had fallen and bicycle factories were closing. There was a risk, the trade said, that the industry would die if factories weren't allowed the publicity of the Tour de France. The Tour returned to trade teams in 1962, although with further problems. Doping had become a problem and tests were introduced for riders. Riders went on strike near Bordeaux in 1966 and the organisers suspected sponsors provoked them. The Tour returned to national teams for 1967 and 1968 as "an experiment". The author Geoffrey Nicholson identified a further reason: opposition to closure of roads by a race criticised as crassly commercial. He said: The Tour returned to trade teams in 1969 with a suggestion that national teams could come back every few years. This never happened.
The Tour originally ran around the perimeter of France. Cycling was an endurance sport and the organisers realised the sales they would achieve by creating supermen of their competitors. Night riding was dropped after the second Tour in 1904, when there had been persistent cheating when judges could not see riders. That reduced the daily and overall distance but the emphasis remained on endurance. Desgrange said his ideal race would be so hard that only one rider would make it to Paris. A succession of doping scandals in the 1960s, culminating in the death of Tom Simpson in 1967, led the Union Cycliste Internationale to limit daily and overall distances and to impose rest days. It was then impossible to follow the frontiers, and the Tour increasingly zig-zagged across the country, sometimes with unconnected days' races linked by train, while still maintaining some sort of loop. The modern Tour typically has 21 daily stages and not more than 3,500 km (2,200 miles). The longest Tour was in 1926 at 5,745 km, the shortest in 1904 at 2,428 km. The Tour changed in 1930 to a competition largely between teams representing their countries rather than the companies which sponsored them. The costs of
Distances
Advertising caravan