Butcher, Blacksmith, Acrobat, Sweep: The Tale of the First Tour de France

In 1902, the journalist Géo Lefèvre met Henri Desgrange, editor of struggling newspaper L'Auto, for lunch in Montmartre in Paris. Lefèvre pitched him a totally unprecedented cycling event, comprised of multiple stages over thousands of kilometres, touring the country. It sounded preposterous, but, desperate to revive the publication, Desgrange went along with it. In 1903 the first Tour de France took place.

Cyclists of the time weren't enthusiastic about this 'heroic' race through roads more suited to hooves than wheels, with bikes weighing up to twenty kilos, on a single fixed gear, for three full weeks. Assembling enough riders for the race meant bribing unemployed labourers from the suburbs of Paris, including a butcher, a blacksmith, a chimney sweep, and a wrestler.

Through these characters' backstories, acclaimed cyclist writer Peter Cossins paints a nuanced portrait of France in the early 1900s. The race itself was packed with mishaps and adventure - nighttime starts, nefarious strategies employed to gain advantages over competitors, riders hydrating with wine.

There was no indication that a ramshackle cycling pack would draw crowds to throng France's rutted roads and cheer the first Tour heroes. But they did, and cycling would never be the same again.

First drawn into the sport while a student in Spain in the mid-1980s, Peter Cossins has been writing about cycling since 1993. He has covered more than a dozen editions of the Tour de France and spent three years as editor of Procycling magazine and the last five as contributing editor to that title. In 2012 he collaborated with Tour de France winner Stephen Roche on his autobiography, Born to Ride. The Monuments, his history of cycling's five greatest one-day Classic races, was published in 2014, when he also translated former French pro Christophe Bassons' autobiography, A Clean Break. Resident in Ilkley, he is the co-author of Two Days in Yorkshire, a review of the 2014 Tour's Grand Depart in the county.