[citation needed] Desgrange worked as a clerk at the Depeux-Dumesnil law office near the Place de Clichy in Paris and may have qualified as a lawyer.

[2] He began racing on the track, but endurance riding suited him better, and he set the first recognised "hour record" when on 11 May 1893 he rode 35.325 kilometres (21.950 mi) on the Buffalo velodrome in Paris.

[3] He wrote a training book in 1894, La tête et les jambes,[4] which included the advice that an ambitious rider has no more need of a woman than an unwashed pair of socks.

[5] In 1897 he became director of the Parc des Princes velodrome and then in December 1903 of France's first permanent indoor track, the Vélodrome d'Hiver, near the Eiffel Tower.

[citation needed] "It was a magnificently imaginative invention, a form of odyssey in which the lonely heroism of unpaced riders was pitted against relentless competition and elemantal nature.

The Tour encompassed the territory of France, and Desgrange later claimed that it encouraged a sense of national identity, establishing La Patrie in clear geographic terms".

He wrote in L'Auto: A suggestion of how Desgrange already perceived his race came in the paragraph that followed: The "magnitude of the Tour de France", by then only in its second year, came close to be ended there and then.

[7] Marcel Bidot, another rider and later manager of the French team in the Tour de France, called Desgrange"a driven man and a boss who tolerated no disagreement".

He presented himself at an assembly centre at Autan, distinctive for his grey hair and the Légion d'honneur pinned to his chest, and went to war as a poilu, an ordinary soldier.

[2] Desgrange was made an officer in May 1919 and that summer returned to L'Auto to edit the paper and to restore the Tour de France in a nation of death, ruin and shortage.

Enthused by the way he saw long-distance cyclists challenging themselves to ride long distances in a set time, he created Audax Français to encourage and regulate such events in France.

[13] For Desgrange, the Tour de France was not simply a long-distance and multi-day cycle race - an idea invented by Lefèvre - but close to what would now be called social engineering.

A doctor would ride beside him, but the jolting and the repeated acceleration and slowing proved too much on the second day of the Tour already, and he left the race for good, retiring to his château at Beauvallon, Grimaud.

[citation needed] L'Auto wrote, under the headline Le Patron: A monument to his memory, paid for by subscription, stands at the Col du Galibier.

The Souvenir Henri Desgrange is a cash prize awarded in his honour each year in the Tour De France to the first rider who crosses the race's highest point.