Did You Know? The Wild Story of How the Tourmalet Ever Became a Tour Climb

Today's carnage on the Tourmalet is nothing new — the mountain has been breaking hearts and legs since 1910, when Tour founder Henri Desgrange sent his lieutenant Alphonse Steinès to check if the barely-there mule track over the pass could possibly handle a bike race.

Steinès got hopelessly lost in a snowstorm near the summit, had to be rescued by locals in the middle of the night, and yet still sent Desgrange a now-legendary telegram the next morning claiming the road was "perfectly passable." It very much was not — but the Tour crossed it anyway, and a monster climb was born.

More than a century later, the mountain hasn't softened one bit, as today's shattered group of favourites can attest. At the summit today, as every year, stands the famous statue of Tour legend Octave Lapize, who is said to have screamed "Assassins!" at race organisers as he struggled over the pass back in 1910 — a sentiment more than a few riders were probably repeating quietly to themselves today.