Full of adventure, mishaps and audacious attempts at cheating, the first Tour de France in 1903 was a colourful affair. 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. Dreamed up to revive struggling newspaper L'Auto , cyclists of the time were wary of this 'heroic' race on roads more suited to hooves than wheels, riding hefty fixed-gear bikes for three full weeks. 'With a few francs you could win 3,000', the paper declared in desperation, eventually attracting a field comprising a handful of the era's professional racers and, among other hopefuls, a butcher, painter and decorator, and a circus acrobat. 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, 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.