Cycling began with a wooden running machine in 1817 and grew into one of the world's great spectator sports. These stories follow the riders, the races and the machines, from a Tour de France invented to sell newspapers to a woman who pedaled at 183.9 miles per hour, and they set the record straight on a few famous nicknames along the way.
Every tile in a Cycling game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Riders
nine stories
1A world champion turned away at home
On the tile: Major Taylor1899
Marshall Taylor earned his nickname as a boy, performing bicycle tricks in a soldier's uniform outside a bike shop. In 1899 he won the one-mile sprint at the world championships in Montreal. Yet promoters in the American South rejected his entries, and from Syracuse to San Francisco restaurants and hotels refused to serve him. Taylor died penniless in Chicago in 1932 and was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1948 old racing stars learned of it, and bicycle maker Frank Schwinn paid to move him to a more fitting section of the cemetery.
2She passed the men's record holder and offered him candy
On the tile: Beryl Burton1967
In 1967 Beryl Burton, a Yorkshire rider who worked on a rhubarb farm, rode 277.25 miles in a 12-hour time trial. That beat the men's record by 0.73 of a mile. On the road she caught and passed Mike McNamara, who was setting that men's record himself, and offered him a licorice allsort as she went by. No man rode farther for two years. No woman did for half a century, until Alice Lethbridge covered 285.65 miles in 2017.
When a pay dispute kept stars such as Ottavio Bottecchia and Costante Girardengo out of the 1924 Giro d'Italia, the rider who drew the crowds was Alfonsina Strada, wearing number 72. On rough, rocky roads she crashed and punctured, and when her handlebars broke she repaired them with a broom handle. She finished a stage outside the time limit but was allowed to ride on unofficially, and the organizing newspaper's editor paid her board. She reached Milan a hero, and is still the only woman to have raced one of cycling's three grand tours.
4The champion said to have hidden papers in his bike
On the tile: Gino Bartali1943Legend
Gino Bartali won the Tour de France in 1938 and again in 1948. The story goes that after Germany occupied Italy in 1943, he carried forged identity papers hidden in the frame of his bicycle, using long training rides as cover, and told guards not to touch the bike because its parts were specially adjusted for racing. In 2013 Yad Vashem recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations, noting that he also helped hide a Jewish family in Florence. Some historians have since questioned the courier story, saying no wartime document links him to it.
Eddy Merckx rode his first Tour de France in 1969 and left little for anyone else. He won the yellow jersey by 17 minutes 54 seconds, along with the green points jersey, the mountains prize and the award for the most combative rider. On the Pyrenean stage to Mourenx he rode about 130 kilometers alone and finished some eight minutes clear. The Tour's official history credits French rider Christian Raymond with the nickname that stuck: the Cannibal. The race ended on July 20, the day Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
Raymond Poulidor finished on the Tour de France podium a record eight times between 1962 and 1976, yet he never wore the yellow jersey for a single day. In 1973 he missed it by four-fifths of a second in the opening prologue. France adored him anyway, calling him Poupou, and his first autobiography was titled Glory Without the Yellow Jersey. In 2021, less than two years after his death, his grandson Mathieu van der Poel won stage two of the Tour, took the yellow jersey and dedicated the victory to him.
7She kept her place when the league tried to shut her out
On the tile: Kittie Knox1895
Kittie Knox, a seamstress from Boston's West End, saved her wages to buy a bicycle and in 1893 joined the League of American Wheelmen. The next year the league wrote the word white into its constitution. In July 1895 she went to the league's meet at Asbury Park, New Jersey, where newspapers reported that she was denied entry and refused service by restaurants and hotels. The league then declared that its rule could not apply to members who had joined before it, and Knox was accepted as a full member.
In 1984 the Tour de France organizers held their first women's race, and the winner was a surprise: Marianne Martin of Colorado, who had nearly missed the U.S. team. The women rode the final stretch of each men's stage just ahead of the men's race. Martin took the climber's polka-dot jersey in the Alps and then the yellow jersey, and won the 18-stage race by just over three minutes. On the Paris podium she stood beside Laurent Fignon. He collected more than $100,000; she won about $1,000, which she shared with her team.
In 1899 Charles Murphy, a racer from Brooklyn, declared that no locomotive could get away from him. The Long Island Rail Road agreed to find out, laying boards between the rails and fitting its last car with a hood to block the wind. Riding in the still air behind the train, Murphy covered a mile in 57 and four-fifths seconds, the first time anyone had ridden a mile in under a minute. At the finish he ran into the back of the car and was hauled aboard. He was Mile-a-Minute Murphy ever after.
The Tour de France was invented to sell newspapers. In 1903 the sports paper L'Auto was struggling against a bigger rival, Le Vélo, and a young journalist, Géo Lefèvre, suggested a race around France. The first Tour had only six stages but covered 2,428 kilometers, and several stages started at night so riders could finish them; the last one left Nantes at 9 p.m. About 60 riders started and 21 finished. Maurice Garin won by nearly three hours, still the largest winning margin in Tour history, and L'Auto's circulation more than doubled.
2The Hell of the North was never about the cobbles
On the tile: Paris-Roubaix1919Myth busted
Paris-Roubaix is nicknamed the Hell of the North, and many fans assume the name describes its brutal cobbles. It does not. When the race began in 1896, cobbles were among the better roads around. The nickname dates from 1919, when organizers drove north to see whether a route still existed after World War I and found a devastated land of mud and blackened tree stumps. They called it hell in their newspaper reports. Only after World War II, as roads improved, did organizers go looking for rough cobbled tracks on purpose.
Six-day racing is often thought of as American, but the first six-day race for a field of riders was held in London in 1878, won by Bill Cann of Sheffield, who rode 1,060 miles on a high-wheeler. The format boomed at Madison Square Garden in New York in the 1890s, where solo riders raced nearly around the clock to exhaustion. In the late 1890s New York limited riders to 12 hours a day, so promoters sent them out in pairs who took turns. The two-rider relay born at the Garden is still called the madison.
Keirin was created in Japan in 1948 to help raise money after World War II, and gambling still drives it. It is one of only four sports Japanese fans can legally bet on, and more money is wagered on its annual Grand Prix than on an entire British horse racing season. To protect the betting, riders may not look at the crowd or celebrate as they cross the finish line, in case a gesture passes a signal to gamblers. The race, with its motorized pacer, joined the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000.
5The Tour's founder set the first official hour record
On the tile: Hour record1893
The first hour record authenticated by an international governing body was set in 1893 by Henri Desgrange, who went on to found the Tour de France. He rode 35.325 kilometers at the Buffalo track in Paris and considered himself a fairly minor rider; he wanted to set a distance for others to aim at. They did. Fausto Coppi set the record in 1942, in a Milan being bombed every night during World War II. Eddy Merckx raised it at altitude in Mexico City in 1972, and at the finish he could neither move nor speak.
Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, is generally regarded as the birthplace of mountain biking. In the early 1970s local road racers began riding heavy balloon-tire bikes from the 1930s and 1940s on the mountain's trails and fire roads. They went on to start the first organized downhill race series, on a descent so steep that hard braking heated their coaster brakes until the grease vaporized. After every race the hubs had to be repacked with fresh grease, so they called the race Repack. New bikes with lightweight chromoly frames soon followed.
The last event of the first modern Olympic Games, in 1896, was a 12-hour bicycle race on the velodrome near Athens, held in the worst weather of the Games: cold, wind and rain, with snow on the mountains outside the city. Seven riders started. Adolf Schmal of Austria, better known as a fencer, gained a lap early, then stayed glued to the wheel of Britain's Frederick Keeping as the others dropped out. Schmal covered 295.3 kilometers and won by 354 meters, that one lap and a little more.
The Tour de France first tackled the high Pyrenees in 1910, at the urging of Alphonse Steines. Earlier that year he scouted the Tourmalet; snow stopped his car short of the top, he continued on foot through the night, and he still reported the road passable. In July one stage crossed the Peyresourde, Aspin, Tourmalet and Aubisque. Gustave Garrigou was the only rider to reach the top of the Tourmalet without getting off his bike, and earned a 100-franc bonus. That year the Tour also introduced the broom wagon, to pick up riders who abandoned.
The Tour de France's last-placed rider earns an unofficial title, the lanterne rouge, generally said to come from the red lamp on the last car of a train. In the 1950s it could even pay, as last-place riders were invited to well-paid races after the Tour; Abdel-Kader Zaaf claimed he made 35,000 francs that way in 1951. In 2018 American Lawson Craddock, riding on after a crash on the first stage, became the first rider in Tour history to sit last after all 21 stages, and raised more than $250,000 for a Houston velodrome.
On June 12, 1817, Karl von Drais set out from Mannheim, Germany, on a wooden machine with two wheels, a padded saddle and no pedals. He pushed along with his feet, coasting between strides, and finished a round trip of about 9 miles in roughly an hour, faster than a stagecoach could manage. Historians have suggested hard times shaped his interest: after Mount Tambora erupted in 1815, crops failed and horses starved. The running machine had a brief vogue, and one critic joked that shoemakers should thank Drais for wearing out shoes.
The first patent for a two-wheeler with crank pedals was granted not in France but in the United States. Pierre Lallement, a French mechanic, arrived in Connecticut in 1865 carrying plans and parts for his velocipede, and he demonstrated it on the roads of Ansonia and New Haven. On November 20, 1866, he received U.S. patent No. 59,915. He found a backer but no manufacturer willing to buy his rights, so he sold them. Machines like his became known as boneshakers. Lallement died in obscurity in Boston, and more than a century passed before historians recognized his role.
The high-wheel bicycles of the 1870s were fast because pedals fixed to a huge front wheel carried the rider far with each turn. But riders perched over that wheel risked pitching headfirst over the handlebars, a spill known as taking a header. In 1885 John Kemp Starley introduced the Rover, with wheels of nearly equal size and a chain driving the rear wheel. Seated lower and farther back, riders were far less likely to take a header, so such machines were sold as safety bicycles. Starley's uncle James had helped popularize the high-wheeler.
Ask who invented the air-filled tire and the usual answer is John Boyd Dunlop. In 1888 the Scottish veterinarian fitted inflatable tires to his son's tricycle, tested them in Belfast and patented the idea. But another Scot, Robert William Thomson, had patented his aerial wheel in 1845: a rubber tube inside a leather casing, which he demonstrated in London's Regent's Park. Dunlop's patent was later declared invalid because of Thomson's. Dunlop's real achievement was a commercially successful tire, just as bicycles became commonplace.
Before they flew, Wilbur and Orville Wright built bicycles in Dayton, Ohio. In 1896 they introduced the Van Cleve, named after their great-grandmother and in honor of Dayton's centennial. Its wheel hubs, designed by the brothers, kept the oil sealed inside, away from dust, so they needed oiling only once every two years. The Wrights planned their trips to Kitty Hawk for the slow season of the bicycle trade and kept the business running until 1908. Of the few hundred bicycles they made, only five are known to survive.
6Tour riders once had to flip wheels to change gear
On the tile: Derailleur1937
The derailleur owes much to Paul de Vivie, a French magazine publisher known as Vélocio who championed riding for pleasure, or cyclotourisme. He hand-built many derailleurs, and in 1912 his friend Joanny Panel turned one design into the Le Chemineau, with two pulley wheels on a sprung arm and a lever by the handlebars. Racing was slower to change. Until the Tour de France allowed derailleurs in 1937, riders who wanted another gear had to get off, loosen the rear wheel, and move the chain to a second cog or turn the wheel around. That year Roger Lapébie became the first Tour winner to use one.
7The handlebars that won the Tour by eight seconds
On the tile: Aero bars1989
Going into the final day of the 1989 Tour de France, Laurent Fignon led Greg LeMond by 50 seconds, with only a 24.5-kilometer time trial into Paris left to ride. LeMond rode it on triathlon-style aerodynamic handlebars, which he had first tried in an earlier time trial to Rennes, and wore an aero helmet. He beat Fignon by 58 seconds and won the Tour by eight, the closest finish in the race's history. The rest of the peloton soon adopted the bars.
In 1993 Graeme Obree, a Scottish amateur, broke cycling's hour record on a bike he had built himself, called Old Faithful, riding 51.596 kilometers in Hamar, Norway, to beat Francesco Moser's mark by 445 meters. He rode in a tuck, elbows tight to his sides and chest on the handlebars. Cycling's governing body banned the tuck, and then banned his next invention, the arms-outstretched Superman position. Obree later said his biggest regret was telling a journalist that his bike included a part from a washing machine.
About two decades before mountain biking took off in California, some 20 young riders from the outskirts of Paris were doing something remarkably similar. Between 1951 and 1956 the Velo Cross Club Parisien raced off-road for big air and open riding on bikes they modified themselves. Almost all had suspension forks, most borrowed from mopeds, along with reinforced frames, handlebar-mounted derailleur shifting and better brakes. The club was largely forgotten until a French mountain bike magazine brought it back to light, and the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame inducted it.
Eugène Christophe was second over the Tourmalet in the 1913 Tour de France when his front fork broke on the descent. The rules said riders must make their own repairs, so he walked his bike down the mountain to Sainte-Marie-de-Campan and spent hours mending the fork at the village blacksmith's forge as a race official watched. A plaque now marks the spot. Six years later he became the first rider to wear the yellow jersey, then broke a fork again late in that Tour while leading by about half an hour. He finished third.
2Soldiers who rode 1,900 miles to test the bicycle
On the tile: Bicycle Corps1897
In June 1897, 20 Black soldiers of the Army's 25th Infantry left Fort Missoula, Montana, on bicycles bound for St. Louis. Led by Lieutenant James Moss, the 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps was testing whether bicycles had a place in military work. The riders pushed through rain and snow in the Rockies and thumped along railroad ties across Nebraska's sand hills. They reached St. Louis on July 24, after about 1,900 miles in 40 days, and hundreds of local cyclists rode out to escort them in. The Army was unconvinced and sent them home by train.
3The famous wager behind her world ride was her own tale
On the tile: A. Londonderry1894–1895Myth busted
In June 1894 Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, a Latvian-born Jewish immigrant living in Boston's West End, set out to ride a bicycle around the world. The trip, the story goes, settled a wager between Boston businessmen over whether a woman could do it, and that tale of a big payoff is still repeated. Boston's West End Museum says she created the wager story herself. What is true: a spring water company paid her $100 to carry its placard and its name, Londonderry, and she finished in September 1895, riding the last stretch with a broken arm.
4An Olympic champion who stopped to wait for his rival
On the tile: Léon Flameng1896
At the first modern Olympic Games, in 1896, France's Léon Flameng rode the 100-kilometer track race, 300 laps of the velodrome at Neo Faliro, near Athens. Most riders quit early because they had no pacemakers. When Georgios Koletis of Greece had a mechanical problem midway through, Flameng stopped, got off his bike and waited until his rival's machine was repaired. Then he rode on with a French flag tied around his leg, survived a fall near the end and won by 11 laps.
Late in the 1964 Tour de France, the French rivals Jacques Anquetil and Raymond Poulidor climbed the Puy de Dôme, an extinct volcano, side by side. Anquetil wore the yellow jersey; Poulidor needed to take time from him. On the narrow road they rode so close they bumped, and photographer Roger Krieger caught the moment in a famous picture. Near the top Poulidor finally pulled away, but Anquetil kept the lead by a handful of seconds. In the final time trial he stretched it to 55 seconds and won his fifth Tour.
In the 1971 Tour de France, Luis Ocaña beat Eddy Merckx by 8 minutes 42 seconds on the stage to Orcières-Merlette and took the lead. Days later in the Pyrenees, Merckx attacked on the Col de Menté as a storm broke. On the descent, in rain and hail, both men crashed, and Ocaña had to leave the race. Merckx inherited the lead but refused to wear the yellow jersey at the next day's start, saying he would rather have finished second after a real fight. He went on to win the Tour.
7Pedaling at 183.9 miles per hour behind a dragster
On the tile: Speed record2018
In 2018, on Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats, Denise Mueller-Korenek rode a bicycle at an average of 183.932 miles per hour. She had help: a dragster driven by racer Shea Holbrook towed her to about 100 mph, then she let go and pedaled in the slipstream behind a boxy fairing on the car's tail. Her bike was geared so high that each pedal turn carried her about 128 feet. The record she broke, 167 mph, had stood since 1995, when Dutch rider Fred Rompelberg set it behind the same dragster.
The 2024 Tour de France Femmes came down to its final climb, Alpe d'Huez. Demi Vollering attacked on the Col du Glandon and won the stage at the top, cutting into the lead of Kasia Niewiadoma. Niewiadoma paced herself up the Alpe, saving her best effort for the last five kilometers. When the times were added up, she had won the Tour by four seconds, half the margin of Greg LeMond's famous 1989 victory. She said afterward that she had lost faith she could do it until she learned she had won.
In 2024, with Paris about to host the Olympic Games, the Tour de France did something new. It started in Florence, Italy, and for the first time in its history it finished not in Paris but in Nice, with a 33.7-kilometer time trial from Monaco. Tadej Pogačar won that stage, his sixth of the race, to seal his third Tour title. He had already won the Giro d'Italia that year, and became the first rider since 1998 to win both in the same season.