Tour De France, 2007, Rest Day 2: Remembering Cycling's Pioneers

The 2007 Tour de France has its second and final rest day Tuesday, and like all race editions, this year's presentations has had its share of dramatic riding and odd occurrences.

And beyond the continuing drug accusations, the traditions of bicycle racing at its highest level has continued for yet another year.

The Tour is the Tour and it's the sport's most celebrated event. It's history has been well-documented.

Its founder and first race director, Henri Desgrange was a newspaper advertising executive and former elite track cyclist, who conceived the event as a promotion to battle a rival newspaper.

Long before the Tour began in 1903, track cycling was all the rage on velodromes (banked tracks). The sport thrived in Europe and in the United States.

Few people know more about track cycling's history and prosperous heydays in the late 1800s and early 1900s than author Peter Nye.

Nye, a long-time journalistic acquaintance, has forgotten more about cycling than I'll ever know. But in a collaborative effort with an historian and filmmaker, Nye in 2006 wrote The Six-Day Bicycle Races: America's Jazz-Age Sport. The 240-page book details stories of many great pioneering riders of yesteryear and their exploits on various velodromes.

More recently, an accompanying 77-minute DVD of the same name debuted. In addition to the wondrous stories of cycling's pioneering track riders and commentary by a few of the sport's pioneers, the film includes several layers of cycling history.

Greg LeMond, the three-time Tour de France winner, provides the introduction. The film is narrated by Frank Deford, one of the country's finest sportswriters, authors and National Public Radio commentators. And Nye is also featured in the DVD, providing insightful and enthusiastic glimpses of cycling history and the stories of riders who gave the sport its first heyday.

The book and DVD, available via online and traditional retailers, is described on Amazon.com with the following:

"Six-Day bicycle racing was once the biggest spectator sport in America: In the 1920s and 1930s, those events held at indoor tracks around the country attracted bigger crowds and paid bigger purses than baseball, football, or hockey.

"This highly pictorial books tells the story of six-day racing in America from its beginning in the last decade of the 19th century up to attempts at revival in the 1970s. A lively text and an amazing collection of duotone photographs allows the reader to relive this exciting period, this almost forgotten era of American sports history."

The 94th Tour de France resumes Wednesday with its final mountain stage. It's sure to be a dramatic day, further adding to cycling's wondrous lore.

And on Sunday a new Tour champion will be celebrated in Paris. But in many ways, he would not likely be the sport's newest most celebrated athlete without the track riders who pedaled the sport into existence more than 100 years ago.