Today Is..The First Tour De France

The Tour de France was started by the immensely wealthy car company owner Jules Albert de Dion as a massive up yours to a newspaper, Le Velo, who called him all sorts of unsavoury names after he was arrested for attacking the President of France with his cane at a local racetrack and leading to a melee which saw him imprisoned for 15 days.
What prison does is give you plenty of time to consider your revenge so on his release de Dion withdrew all his advertising from Le Velo and then founded his own competing paper and to add an even bigger middle finger to the up yours basket, as Le Velo was sponsoring bicycle races, he created an even bigger and better bike race with a huge cash prize for the winner and called it the Tour de France.
The massive prize attracted a huge field of contestants determine to win the cash and in the first race the favorite had to drop out midway through after drinking a poisoned bottle of lemonade and fights regularly broke out with the eventual winner, Maurice Garin, pushing his biggest rival, Hippolyte Aucouturier, to the ground, stomping his bike to pieces and then serenely cycling across the line, insane but the public loved it so they did it again the following year.
The bike stomping winner from the first race took his place at the line alongside the previous years losing stompee but Hippolyte came prepared this time with a pocket full of nails and a lead pipe up his sleeve. The cheating was imaginative, there was itching powder and ground-up stones in jockstraps, slashed tires and riders pushing each other off their bikes and some simply had themselves towed behind a car for large chunks of the route while some even more simply jumped on trains and raced ahead.
At some point the spectators felt that the point of attending a sporting event was to attack as many contestants as possible and ambushed riders on multiple occasions, sometimes ramming them with cars to run the riders off the road.
Maurice Garin was again crowned the winner, only to be disqualified for cheating as was the second, third, fourth, fifth...actually the majority of the cyclists but all the drama made the Tour a huge news event, sold loads of papers and made de Dion a tonne of money, so we went ahead and held it for another century anyway so famous cheat Lance Armstrong with his fridge full of performance-enhancing drugs was just sticking to the original sporting ethos of the Tour de France of it you can't win, cheat, which is an ethos many riders have endorsed with suspicious blood tests and dodgy urine samples ever since.