Tour de France Facts

Important Facts - Records

2009 Tour de France
Local name	Le Tour de France
Edition	96th
Date	Saturday, July 4th to Sunday, July 26th, 2009
Nations (total lenght)	France, Monaco, Spain, Andorra, Switzerland and Italy (3.500 Km)
Distinctive aspects	-3 mountain finishes -2 rest days -55 km of individuual time-trials -20 Category 1, 2 and highest level passes will be climbed.
Stage Profiles	-10 flat stages -7 mountain stages -1 medium mountain -2 individual time-trial stages -1 team time-trial stage (first time since 2005)
Director General	Christian Prudhomme

The Tour de France is the most prestigious of all cycling competitions in the world. While the other two European Grand tours are well-known in Europe and attract many professional cyclists, they are relatively unknown outside the continent, and even the UCI World Cycling Championship is only familiar to cycling enthusiasts.

Other major cycling races include the Giro d'Italia (Tour of Italy) and the Vuelta a Espa�a Tour of Spain). The Giro d'Italia, Tour de France and World Cycling Championship constitute the Triple Crown of Cycling.

The Tour de France has long been a household name around the globe, even amongst people who are not generally interested in pro cycling, and is for cycling what the FIFA World Cup is to soccer in terms of global popularity. Only the best cycling teams in the world are chosen to compete and competitors must have an invitation to enter the race. It is also the world's largest annual pro sporting event, measured in the number of viewers.

The traditional ending stage is in Paris on the Champs-Élysées. During the Tour, various stages occur, including a number of mountain stages, individual time trials and a team time trial. The remaining stages are held over relatively flat terrain. With the variety of stages, sprinters may win stages, but the overall winner is almost always a master of the mountain stages and time trials.

The race itinerary changes each year and alternates between clockwise and counter-clockwise direction around France. For example in 2005 was clockwise and in 2006 was counter-clockwise.

The Tour of France is a stage race, divided into a number of stages, each being a race held over one day. The time it takes each rider to complete each stage is noted, recorded and accumulated. Riders who finish in the same group are awarded the same time, with possible subtractions due to time bonuses. Two riders are said to have finished in the same group if the gap between them is less than one bike-length. A crash in the final kilometer of a normal stage means that all riders in the same group entering the final kilometer are given the same time.

The ranking of the riders according to accumulated time is known as the General Classification, or GC. The overall winner is the one who is ranked first on GC at the end of the final stage. Winning a Tour de France stage is considered a great pro cycling achievement, more prestigious than winning most single day races, regardless of one's overall standing in the GC.

For 2008 race Director Prudhomme announced that the Tour would change the format of the order of the stages. In the latest years before, the Tour started with a prologue, that was followed by a flat stages week, but since them on the prologue was eliminated.

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