Tour de France 

The 1904 edition was a complete circus of cheating. During the second year of the race, the competition was so fierce that the top four finishers were eventually completely disqualified for blatant cheating, which included getting secretly towed by cars, taking shortcuts through the woods, and literally hopping onto passenger trains to skip the hardest sections of the route.

Early competitors smoked cigarettes to boost their performance. In the early twentieth century, sports science was practically non-existent, and many riders genuinely believed that smoking cigarettes while riding would help open their lungs and increase their breathing capacity before a massive mountain climb.

Alcohol was considered a vital sports drink. Before modern electrolytes and energy gels, cyclists regularly consumed massive quantities of wine, beer, and champagne during the race, using the alcohol to dull the agonizing physical pain of riding hundreds of miles on unpaved roads and to keep themselves dangerously hydrated.

The famous yellow jersey was essentially a marketing gimmick. Introduced in 1919 to help spectators easily identify the race leader in the peloton, the organizer Henri Desgrange specifically chose the color yellow simply because his sports newspaper, L’Auto, which sponsored the race, was printed entirely on yellow paper.

The last-place finisher receives a highly celebrated phantom award. The rider who finishes dead last in the overall time classification is affectionately awarded the lanterne rouge, or red lantern, named after the red light hung on the back of a caboose to signify the end of a passenger train.

The initial stage lengths were completely absurd. When the race first began, the daily stages were not the modern distances of one hundred miles, but were regularly pushed well over four hundred kilometers, forcing the exhausted riders to pedal continuously through the pitch-black night just to reach the finish line by morning.

The 1919 race was an almost impossible test of human survival. Following the devastation of the First World War, the French roads were completely bombed out and ruined, resulting in an incredibly brutal edition where out of the sixty-nine men who started the race, only eleven actual riders managed to cross the final finish line in Paris.

Mechanics were strictly forbidden for decades. In the early years, the rules brutally mandated that riders had to perform all bicycle repairs entirely by themselves without any outside assistance, famously forcing the legendary rider Eugene Christophe to hike miles to a blacksmith forge and weld his own broken metal fork back together mid-race.

The calorie consumption is biologically staggering. Modern sports scientists have calculated that navigating the high mountains at racing speed forces a rider to burn up to eight thousand calories in a single day, meaning they have to constantly eat a massive diet of complex carbohydrates while riding just to prevent their bodies from shutting down.

Gears were officially banned because they were considered weak. The original race organizers believed that having multiple gears on a bicycle was a crutch for less athletic men, forcing riders to use single-speed bikes where they literally had to dismount, unbolt the rear wheel, and flip it around to access a different sized cog for climbing hills until derailleurs were finally allowed in 1937.

Fan interference used to involve literal acts of violence. Rivalries between competing regions were so intense in the early days that passionate fans would routinely attempt to sabotage opposing riders by throwing sharp nails, tacks, and broken glass directly onto the dirt roads to cause massive tire blowouts.

A teenager holds the record for the youngest champion. Following the massive disqualification scandal of 1904, a nineteen-year-old rider named Henri Cornet was officially crowned the overall winner of the race, a remarkable youth record that still stands unbroken over a century later.

The oldest winner claimed victory at thirty-six years old. In 1922, a seasoned Belgian rider named Firmin Lambot utilized his incredible veteran stamina to outlast the younger competition and win the entire grueling event at the age of thirty-six, proving that endurance heavily favors experienced muscle memory.

The introduction of the massive mountain stages was viewed as an assassination attempt. When the organizers first routed the race through the brutal, unpaved peaks of the Pyrenees and the towering switchbacks of Alpe d’Huez, the exhausted riders famously screamed at the officials as they passed, accusing them of being literal assassins trying to kill them for sport.

Rest days were an absolute physical necessity. Because the early stages were over four hundred kilometers long and required riding well into the night, the original format of the race included a mandatory rest day between every single stage just to give the riders a chance to sleep in ditches and recover their broken muscles.