Tour de France: in 2024 the first Grand Départ from Italy, 70 years before the first Grand Départ from abroad in 1954. The honor of the debut went to the Netherlands, starting from Amsterdam. And there was a reason.

On the night between January 31 and February 1, 1953, the Dutch, Belgian, English, and Scottish coasts of the North Sea were overwhelmed by a terrible flood, caused by an exceptional high tide, an equally exceptional extratropical cyclone, and the terrible collapse of dikes. It was a massacre: almost two thousand dead in the Netherlands, vulnerable because 20 percent of its surface is below sea level, almost 600 deaths between England, Scotland, Belgium, and the open sea. A gigantic tragedy.

The Tour de France start was thus dictated not by economic reasons, but humanitarian ones: to restore confidence, hope, and joy to a people marked by that nightmare. Therefore, a year and a half later, on Thursday, July 8, to greet the 110 riders (without Italians: after the strike at the Giro d'Italia, the Federation had not granted them permission to participate) at the start of the Amsterdam-Brasschaat of 216 kilometers, the world was on the edges of the canals. To celebrate sport, the festival, life, bars were allowed to remain open until dawn. And this too was a first in the country's history.

But there was another reason, less noble. The Tour de France felt threatened by another stage race. Which was not the Giro d'Italia, nor the Vuelta a España. But the Tour d'Europe. It was conceived by Jean Leuilliot, an old journalist from the newspaper "L'Auto", where he had started working in 1932, and during World War II responsible for the sports pages of "La France socialiste". Leuilliot was a collaborator: and by exploiting relations with the Germans, he had organized cycling races, such as the 1942 Circuit de France in eight stages, then the Paris-Nice in 1951 and the first Tour de France for women in 1955. Precisely in 1954, the year the Tour de France started abroad in the Netherlands, Leuilliot launched the extremely ambitious Tour d'Europe. The first edition, from September 21 to October 3, starting from Paris, was organized by "L'Auto" and won by Primo Volpi over Belgian Hilaire Couvreur and Luciano Pezzi. In 1956 the second edition was held, from August 8 to 17, starting from Zagreb, set up by "L'Equipe", "Le Parisien Libéré", "Les Sports" and "La Gazzetta dello Sport", and conquered by Frenchman Roger Rivière over another Frenchman, Marcel Rohrbach, and Giuseppe Ferlenghi.

There would be no other Tours d'Europe. The Tour de France was already triumphing.