In the local Gascon, Tourmalet means “distant mountain”. That is probably because from either side the top of the Col is visible from some way off, an obvious defile atop intimidating scree slopes by those of the Pic du Midi. When the field of the Tour de France start to climb the Col on 20 July, the finish line on the summit will seem all too distant to most of them.

The only Briton to lead the Tour over the climb, Philippa York, who as Robert Millar spoke of its “interminable long straights”, added of the western side which the Tour ascends this year: “I liked that it got steeper for the last couple of kilometres … It was always a headwind.”

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Just eight days before the finish in Paris, on the second day in the Pyrenees, the Tourmalet stage finish will mark the first real opportunity for the lightweight climbers to steal a march on their heavier brethren. The summit finish on the Planche des Belles Filles will be an initial shake-up but this is the first full-throated summit finish of the Tour, 19km of climbing, with 1,400m of height gain. It is the kind of finish where in recent years Team Sky have split the race to pieces and laid the foundations for a victory for Chris Froome or, in 2018, Geraint Thomas.

It is an absolutely key moment in this year’s race, appropriately for one of the Tour’s most legendary climbs. First ascended in 1910, it has been visited 86 times by the race, more than any other pass; for the Pyrenean giant’s centenary, 2010, the organisers cruelly sent the riders up the 2,115m monster in both directions on successive stages, with a finish by the statue of the Tour’s longstanding director Jacques Goddet that went to the eventual overall winner Andy Schleck.

Not surprisingly given its historic stature, the Tourmalet plays a role in three of the Tour’s creation stories. It was included after an inspection by Alfonse Steinès, right-hand man to the Tour founder, Henri Desgrange. It was a recce that could easily have ended in disaster. Steinès set off up the mountain in a car with a local driver but ran into deep snow partway up; with the car stuck, his chauffeur fled into the dark shouting warnings about the bears that came over from Spain in bad weather.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Raphaël Géminiani on the Tourmalet descent during the 1952 Tour de France. Photograph: -/AFP

Steinès walked on through the snow drifts, falling into streams, slipping on the ice, and suffering from hypothermia. At one point he sat on a rock, thought about staying there for the night, but realised he would probably freeze to death. Having made it to Barèges – where today’s road to the top starts to become truly steep – he wired Desgrange: “Good road, perfectly feasible.” That spirit drives the race today: taking the Tour’s cyclists where sane men would fear to venture.

The summer after Steinès’ near-death experience, the Tour went through the series of passes known as the “circle of death” for the first time: the Tourmalet was the third climb after the Aspin and Peyresourde and it was that year’s overall winner Octave Lapize, whose statue also stands on the narrow summit, who climbed the mountain first. On the final col, the Aubisque, he encountered the organisers near the top and muttered an imprecation which has entered Tour legend: “Assassins!” In the 108 years since, countless “convicts of the road” have had similar thoughts about the race organisers.

At the foot of the Tourmalet, a plaque on a well tells the 1913 tale of Eugène Christophe and his fork. The “Old Gaul” was in a possible race-winning position as he descended the Col, leading by 18 minutes, only to break his fork in a collision with a race vehicle. There were no spare bikes in those days, so he walked to the nearest village, Sainte-Marie-de-Campan, to find a blacksmith’s forge, where he was told by race officials that race rules stipulated he could not accept outside help, so he had to repair his bike himself.

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It had taken two hours for him to reach the forge; it took a further three to weld the fork together, after which he was penalised a further 10 minutes because he had allowed a small boy to pump the bellows in the forge. Piled on misfortune, it is that final touch of official cruelty that makes Christophe’s the perfect hard-luck story for the Tour, and it’s a safe bet that on 20 July some of his successors will be feeling equally hard-done by.