Countdown to the Tour de France: 4 days | The origin of the yellow jersey

In today’s Tour de France countdown article, we turn back the clock over a century to witness the birth of the race’s most iconic symbol: the yellow jersey. It’s hard to imagine the Tour without the flash of bright yellow at the head of the peloton, marking the overall leader.

Yet for the first decade and a half of the Tour de France, there was no yellow jersey at all, in the early years, the race leader simply wore a green armband, which often went unnoticed in the bunch. How, then, did this now-famous jersey come into being? Let’s dive into the historical storytelling of when and why the yellow jersey was first introduced, why the colour yellow was chosen, and who the first riders were to wear it.

The Tour de France of 1919 was unlike any before it. It was the first Tour after World War I, and the nation was rebuilding. Basic supplies, even fabric dyes, were scarce, so almost all riders wore drab grey jerseys provided by a consortium of bicycle makers known as “La Sportive.”

With no team colours (and many riders effectively racing as individuals), all the riders in the peloton ultimately looked very similar. Spectators and officials struggled to tell who was leading the race on any given day.

But how could the organisers make the race leader stand out?

Once the decision was made to create a distinctive leader’s jersey, the next question was the colour. Why yellow? The commonly told story is that it was chosen in homage to the race’s founding newspaper, L’Auto, which was printed on conspicuous yellow newsprint.

Just as the Giro d’Italia would later put its leader in a pink jersey to match La Gazzetta’s pink pages, Desgrange opted for his Tour leader to wear the same shade as L’Auto. There’s also an oft-cited practical reason: supposedly yellow dye was one of the few colours readily available in 1919 on short notice.

Either way, by mid-July 1919 a batch of bright canary-yellow wool jerseys had been prepared for the Tour’s frontrunner. (Interestingly, years later former champion Philippe Thys claimed that Desgrange had actually offered him a yellow jersey when he led the Tour in 1913, Thys said he declined, fearing the attention would spur his rivals to attack him.

The honour of wearing the very first yellow jersey fell to Eugène Christophe, on July 19th in a stage that took the riders to Geneva. Christophe had taken the overall lead after Stage 10 of the 1919 Tour, as the race entered Grenoble in the Alps. On the morning of July 19, 1919, before the riders set off from Grenoble on the next stage to Geneva, Desgrange presented Christophe with a freshly dyed yellow leader’s jersey. There was no grand podium ceremony, the jersey was handed over rather matter-of-factly in the early hours with very little fuss.

As Christophe rolled out wearing the first maillot jaune, the significance of this moment was not yet fully understood, to the riders or the public. In fact, Christophe initially wasn’t entirely pleased with his new attire.

The reactions from roadside spectators caught him off guard. Accustomed to seeing riders in neutral colours, the crowd let out laughs and started calling out that Christophe looked like a canary in a coal mine.

The crusty Frenchman wasn’t sure if this new jersey was an honour or a nuisance. But regardless of his personal feelings, Christophe was now a rolling symbol of the race lead, everyone knew who the top rider was, and newspaper headlines the next day heralded the debut of “le maillot jaune.”

For a few days, the experiment seemed to be a rousing success. Christophe proudly defended the yellow jersey through the Alps, and fans began to warm to the visual cue of seeing the Tour de France’s leader in yellow. By the time the race reached its penultimate stage, starting from Metz on 25 July 1919, Christophe had worn the yellow jersey for a week and was just two days away from victory.

But fate had other plans. On that Stage 14, a long, hot ride toward Dunkirk, Christophe was cursed with bad luck. While riding over a rough cobbled stretch near Valenciennes, his front fork snapped, and in an era with no team cars or quick bike changes, the unlucky leader had to find a blacksmith and repair the bike himself, losing well over two hours in the process and dropping to third.

Christophe’s troubles didn’t end there, he would suffer a crash and multiple punctured tires as the race went on. His substantial lead evaporated on that second-to-last day, and Belgian rider Firmin Lambot seized the opportunity. Lambot rode into the lead and into Paris as the 1919 Tour’s champion.

Incredibly, L’Auto showed such compassion for Christophe and his misfortunes, that they offered him the same winning bonus that they offered Lambot! So, all was in fact not lost for Christophe despite his bad luck.

From that inaugural outing in 1919, the yellow jersey quickly became entrenched in Tour lore. And today, the yellow jersey is the most iconic garment in cycling, recognizable well beyond the sport itself.

To “wear yellow” is to join a lineage of champions and to carry the weight of sporting history on your shoulders. And it all traces back to that summer of 1919, a war weary France, a savvy race director, and a determined cyclist named Eugène Christophe who unwittingly kicked off a tradition that has now spanned over a century.

Since then many legends have worn the jersey. What makes the yellow jersey so special, is it’s not necessarily just about winning it that matters, but having the opportunity to wear it even for just one day. Think of the likes of Richard Carapaz, Romain Bardet, Mathieu van der Poel and Mark Cavendish, who have worn the yellow jersey with little to no chance of winning the race overall. But quite frankly, it would not have mattered to them one bit.