IT IS brutally long, stupefyingly hard, and a punishing test of human endurance. It is gruelling.

All descriptions agree that the Tour de France is tough, and that’s how it was designed to be. Its founder, Henri Desgrange, said: “The ideal tour would be one in which only one rider survives the ordeal.”

This is because he wanted its gruelling nature to inspire, he wanted it to push back the boundaries of human achievement, and he wanted it to boost sales of his flagging newspaper.

Desgrange was the editor of L’Auto-Vélo, a cycling and motor racing magazine founded in 1900 to rival the established Le Vélocipède Illustré. Le Vélocipède printed on green paper so L’Auto-Vélo had to print on yellow; Le Vélocipède organised a 130km race so L’Auto-Vélo had to go longer.

The length of the race tested the stamina of the cyclists, and also increased opportunities to sell copies to the roadside crowds.

In 1902, to overcome Le Vélocipède, one of Desgrange’s reporters, Géo Lefèvre, proposed a race made up of mini-races, or stages, and so the Tour de France was born.

The first tour started in Paris on July 1, 1903, and the 100th begins in Leeds on Saturday.

This year’s first stage will take fiveand- a-half hours and cover 118 miles – it is a gentle pootle in the Yorkshire Dales in comparison to 1903’s gruelling opener. The riders left Paris at 3.15pm and covered 291 miles without stopping even for a “pause pipi” to answer the call of nature. The first riders reached Lyon at 9am but the last ones didn’t make it for a further 20 hours.

But that’s how Desgranges, himself a renowned endurance cyclist, wanted it. On the first tour, he insisted on no teams, no tactics, no gears, no mechanics, no pacemakers – just man, machine and the gruelling open road.

Over the years he had to compromise – he had to reduce the lengths of the stages because overnights allowed cyclists to cheat in the dark by getting lifts, and it allowed the partisan spectators to beat up the riders they didn’t like – but it remained gruelling.

In 1910 when the Pyrenees were tackled for the first time, the leader Octare Lapize went over his fourth summit of the stage and snarled at the organisers: “Assassins.”

It was that gruelling.

But it worked. Le Vélocipède was put out of business within six months of the first tour, and Desgranges’ circulation soared by 100,000.

For me, the most gruelling aspect of the Tour de France will be fighting through the traffic to my campsite at Low Row near Reeth. I fear I will have plenty of time to examine the yellow jackets with which the Richmond residents have decorated their houses – yellow, of course, because L’Auto- Vélo was printed on yellow paper – and to muse on the meaning of “gruelling”.

It is an ancient word for flour or oatmeal, particularly when oats are boiled with leftovers and bones to create a cheap liquid dish.

In the 18th Century, “gruel” came to mean punishment, presumably because, as Oliver showed by asking for more, gruel was infamously served to criminals and poor people in prisons and workhouses.

So the cyclists punish their bodies on the tour, although I intend to be sipping a more appealing liquid as I watch them gruel their way over Grinton Moor.