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

From the winner of the Telegraph Sports Book Awards Cycling Book of the Year 2018The first Tour de France in 1903 was a colourful affair full of adventure, mishaps and audacious attempts at cheating.Its riders included characters like Maurice Garin, an Italian-born Frenchman, said to have been swapped for a round of cheese by his parents in order to smuggle him into France to clean chimneys as a teenager, Hippolyte Aucouturier with his trademark handlebar moustache, and amateurs like Jean Dargassies, a blacksmith who had never raced before.Would this ramshackle pack of cyclists draw crowds to throng France's rutted roads and cheer the first Tour heroes?Surprisingly it did, and, all thanks to a marketing ruse dreamed up to revive struggling newspaper L'Auto, cycling would never be the same again.Peter Cossins takes us through the inaugural Tour de France, painting a nuanced portrait of France in the early 1900s, to see where the greatest sporting event of all began.