Special Guest Blogger: Jules Albert de Dion

The Tour de France started shortly after i was arrested for attacking the President of France at a local racetrack but you would be forgiven if you thought that was as ridiculous as it got.
I was an extremely wealthy aristocrat who ran France's biggest car company and when the French President was replaced by another who did not share my views on race inequality, i decided to somehow show my displeasure and by sheer luck he appeared at a Paris Racetrack and i took the opportunity to whack him over the head with my cane, crunching his hat and a melee ensured with the president's bodyguards causing me to break my elegantly jewel-encrusted cane in half over a policeman's head earning me 15 days in prison.
What really hurt was Le Velo, France's biggest sports paper, calling me a dickhead so i withdrew all my advertising and then founded my own competing sports paper and although i was considering setting up a motor car race, to add an even bigger middle finger to the paper, as Le Velo was sponsoring bicycle races, i 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 we 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, actually the majority of the cyclists but all the drama made the Tour a huge news event, sold loads of papers and made me a tonne of money, so we went ahead and held it for another century anyway so that American with the 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 and it would be if we found a clean cyclist who had not actually taken any performance enhancing drug of any description that would pose question mark over the continuation of my cycling race.