When Marianne Martin graduated from the University of Colorado, her father offered to give her money as a graduation gift. “I said: ‘Great, because I want to buy a racing bike,’” Martin remembers. Instead, he gave her a camera. “I ended up taking out a loan to buy my first racing bike. It was $600, used.

At first, Martin’s father was not a big fan of the idea of his daughter racing. In the early 1980s, women’s competitive cycling was not a common pursuit. “But my mom was over-the-top amazing about it. When I heard about the first person to ride across America, I wondered if a woman could do that. And she said: ‘You can do anything if you put your mind to it.’”

By 1983, Martin had heard of something she really wanted to put her mind to: the Tour de France.

But that was a long shot. Martin had started racing for fun in college. In Boulder, where she attended college, cycling was a big deal. She first saw a race while working at a hotel and after that she cycled to stay fit. Soon enough someone convinced her to try a race herself. “I ended up doing really well,” Martin says. “It was an uphill climb and I found that cycling came pretty naturally to me.”

That first year, Martin competed in races on weekends. The next year she got a racing license, and a Colorado group added her to a team. That team helped her enter local races, but soon she wanted a bigger stage.

Martin called in sick for the days she’d miss competing in her first national race, the Tour of Texas. But she won the opening time trial, and the news made the Boulder paper. “So I got totally busted,” Martin says. Even though her bosses weren’t happy with her, that taste of victory gave Martin hope that she could get a spot on the national team.

Her timing just happened to intersect with history. In 1984, one of the Tour de France’s organizers, Felix Levitan, decided to hold the Tour de France Féminin. News of women joining the Tour de France in its 71st year was met with opposition by many in France, according to Christopher Thompson in Tour de France: A Cultural History. The 1983 Tour winner, Laurent Fignon, was blunt in his assessment: “I like women, but I prefer to see them doing something else.”

Marianne Martin riding in the polka-dot jersey. Photograph: Photograph by Denys Clément. Courtesy of Marianne Martin

The culture clash wasn’t on 26-year-old Martin’s radar, though, when she heard that the US team still had a spot open for the women’s Tour. She had failed to place in the top-six during the trials for the 1984 Olympics – she was still coming back from a bout of anemia earlier in the year – and the coaches didn’t name her to the Tour team with the other lower finishers, either. But by the time she was home, one spot for the Tour still remained. Martin’s friend, the cyclist Steve Tilford, drove her to Colorado Springs and told her to talk to Edward Borysewicz, the national cycling coach.

“I don’t know if I would have had the guts to go myself,” Martin remembers. “I had to wait a few hours to see him. I had just started to come into fitness and I felt good about it, but I really didn’t have any proof, so I kind of begged him to let me on the team. The last thing I said to him was, ‘Believe me, Eddie, you won’t be disappointed.’”

She got the last spot on the US team just weeks before the Tour began.

The Tour de France Féminin was over 18 stages compared to the men’s 23. The women riders completed about 1,080km of the 4,000km the men race covered, due to strict UCI rules about how far women could ride in races. In fact, even the shortened version violated UCI rules on rest time for female riders in multi-stage events – the women were granted an exemption and had five rest days over the 23-day race compared to one for the men. Though it was shorter in distance, the women’s course followed the men’s, including all the climbs. Each of the women’s stages ended at the same finish line as the men’s, so that the huge crowds waiting would be there to cheer on the women before the men arrived.

At first, the French press were skeptical of the 36 women, split into six teams, taking part in one of their most beloved cultural institutions. Martin says the media was full of stories questioning whether any of the women would make it to the Champs-Élysées. “It never even occurred to me that we couldn’t finish [the race],” Martin says. “I thought that was crazy the French would even think that.”

Graham Watson, who has been photographing the Tour since 1977, remembers the first women’s race well. The strong Dutch and Italian teams were interesting to the European media. But, he says, “the American team was largely unknown.”

However, Watson happened to have a personal interest in Martin. “I’d met an American couple watching the men’s Tour the year before and went skiing with them in the late winter of 1984. Deborah Martin tipped me off that her sister, Marianne Martin, was in the new women’s race, and to look out for her,” Watson says. He introduced himself before the race began.

Martin finished the first stage in third place, edged out by two Dutch riders, Mieke Havik and Petra de Bruin. But even that result was a surprise. While the press didn’t expect an American to win at all, Martin wasn’t seen as the country’s best rider. “This other woman, Betsy King, she was supposed to be the winner,” says Martin. “I knew I was stronger than her, but I knew if I was going to win, I would have to win by a lot.”

When the Tour got to the 12th stage, the first in the Alps, Martin decided it was her turn to take the lead. “I really wanted that polka dot jersey [for the Tour’s best climber], I wanted to show everyone that I was a good climber. I raced ahead because I wanted that jersey and when I got to the top of the hill, I was 10 minutes ahead of the next riders.”

Martin earned that polka-dot jersey. She won the 45-mile stage that took riders over two mountain passes, one 4,455ft high and the other 3,000ft. She finished the stage 1 minute and 33 seconds ahead of the race leader, the Netherlands’ Helen Hage. After that stage, Hage still had a 1min 4sec lead on Martin overall.

Martin’s stage win stirred media interest. “The women’s race had a tiny media following to begin with, as the men’s race swallowed up everything in its path in terms of news,” says Watson. “But when an American woman started doing well, a lot of the media went from the men’s race to the women’s as much as they could.” After the 12th stage, The New York Times ran its first story on the women’s race since the first stage.

Two stages later, Martin nabbed the yellow jersey. Her team-mate Patty Peoples, a powerhouse triathlete, had taken on the role of team domestique, supporting the leaders. “Once it was established that Marianne was in yellow, it was, OK, keep her in yellow. That was my job and I took my job very seriously,” Peoples says.

“The crowds were very receptive to us,” Peoples remembers. “They’d be yelling, ‘Go US! Go US!’ in French … the volume, the sound, you just never felt tired when people were yelling and cheering. It was just exhilarating. This was the best race in the world and we were winning. Eventually the papers were even saying nice things about us. I don’t remember anyone saying anything nasty, but maybe they said it in French, so I don’t know!”

Watson started focusing on the American riders. “Such images sold very well by the end of the Tour,” he says. “There was nothing very different in the images I was taking of the women and the men — they both climbed the same mountains, and suffered as much as each other in doing so!” The only difference Watson noticed? “I got a sense that the women were having more fun than the men — there was less pressure on them.”

It wasn’t until a photoshoot with Fignon, the reigning men’s champion, that Martin thought she might actually have a chance of winning the Tour. She didn’t speak French, nor did the team have an interpreter, so she was never quite sure why she was told to go anywhere. Though Vincent Barto held the yellow jersey in the men’s race at the time, the photographers asked for photos of just Fignon. “One of the photographers pointed at Fignon and said: ‘He’s going to win.’” Martin remembers. “And I don’t know why, but I just thought to myself at that moment: ‘I’m going to win.’ I guess part of me at that moment realized I actually could.”

With the final stages in her sights, Martin tried calling her father to tell him to watch the end of the race on television. He had started to warm up to the idea of his daughter the cyclist after seeing her race in Colorado. But she couldn’t get hold of him.

Before the final stage, Martin, still in the yellow with a comfortable lead, knew she had all but won the race. “But you never know,” she says. “I could have flatted and I would have been out.”

Marianne Martin and Patty Peoples celebrating Martin’s Tour de France win. Photograph: Photograph by Graham Watson. Courtesy of Marianne Martin

Martin kept her lead as she completed the final stage, a 30km ride that ended on the Champs Élysées. When she first passed the finish line under the Arc de Triomphe, she heard an American voice in the crowd yell: “Go Marianne Martin!”

She turned toward the voice and recognized her father. He’d hopped on a last-minute flight to see his daughter win. “He crawled over the fence – and my dad’s one of those people that obeys all the rules. The officials were saying ‘No, no.’ And he’d say ‘Moi, papa! Moi, papa!’ So he was out in the middle with me when I won. It was a fairytale. It was unreal.”

A journalist in the middle told Martin that he didn’t even know there were women racing the Tour. She wasn’t surprised or offended. “I didn’t feel like: ‘You should have known!’ I felt like: ‘Oh! Well I’m going to tell you about it!’”

All but one woman, a rider who dropped out after breaking her collarbone, crossed the finish line. Martin, the first American to ever win a Tour de France, says she was surprised in the end: she expected it to be harder.

Watson couldn’t believe that the rider whose sister he had met randomly had ended up the winner. “Her achievements inspired other American women to give [cycling] a try, so she’s a significant step in the growth of the American women’s cycling that we know of today.”

After the men’s race arrived, the top men and women got on the podium together, Martin stood by Fignon. “I felt very honored to be on the podium with the men,” she says. “For the men it’s such an historic event.”

Though they stood on the same podium, the similarities for the men’s and women’s Tour winners just about ended there. Fignon took home prizes worth more than $225,000 in today’s money. In a post-race interview Fignon said: “My ambition is simply to win a lot of races and make a lot of money. I’m not ashamed to admit that I ride for glory and money.”

Martin, who finished the women’s race in 29 hours, 39 minutes and 2 seconds, just over three minutes ahead of the second-place Hage, brought home much less glory and much less money. “I won a trophy,” Martin says. “And then I won $1,000, but we shared that with our team. Some people think I made a whole lot of money, but, for me, it wasn’t about the money anyway. We did it because we loved it.”

The women’s Tour struggled after that first year. Funding and support for the race dwindled so that there was no event in 1990 or 1991. When it started again, in August instead of alongside the men’s race in July, a legal battle brought by the organizers of the men’s Tour meant the women’s race could not even use the same name. So in 1998 the name was changed to La Grande Boucle Feminine and ran on and off in a much-diminished form until 2009, when it stopped for good.

In 2014, a movement by top women cyclists to reinstate a women’s Tour de France resulted in the creation of La Course, a one-day race held on the last day of the men’s Tour de France, which will be held for the third time this year.

Peoples, the domestique from the inaugural women’s Tour, was thrilled when she heard about La Course, until she read that many were calling it the first time women would ever be a part of the Tour. “I got mad. I spoke up. We were the first,” Peoples says. “Also, I don’t want to take away from the thunder, I’m glad it’s come back, but it needs to come back as the Tour, not one day. We’ve already proven you can do it.”

Martin quit racing in 1986 after struggling with health issues. She worked two jobs for two years to pay off the debt she incurred from riding the Tour de France and the other races she paid her own way to participate in.

But to her, it was all worth it.

“It cost me money to do the Tour de France. But even if I hadn’t won, so what? I got to race my bike every day, I was fed and got massages every day. And I was in France. To me, that was the greatest thing in the world.”