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Everyone Knows the Jersey. Almost No One Knows Its Real Story.

The true story behind the Tour de France's polka dot jersey

CYCLING

8/19/20262 min read

Every July, the roads of the Tour fill up with fans wearing red polka dots, a sight that's just become part of the summer scenery at this point. Almost nobody wearing it has any idea why that specific design exists, or why it's stayed untouched for fifty years.

Forty-two years without its own jersey

The mountains classification has been around since 1933, crowning some of the greatest climbers in history, guys like Fausto Coppi and Federico Bahamontes. But for more than four decades, the leader of that classification had no jersey to set him apart. He just got a small fabric badge with that year's sponsor's logo, nothing the crowd could actually spot from a distance.

The debate that decided cycling's most iconic design

The polka dot jersey came about because Chocolat Poulain, sponsor of the mountains prize at the time, wanted more visibility for the climbers' classification. That kicked off a debate among Tour officials about what design to go with. Former rider Albert Bouvet pitched something inspired by the Alps and the monument to Henri Desgrange on the Galibier. But the one who won everyone over was Félix Lévitan, race director alongside Jacques Goddet, who was hung up on a jersey he'd seen back in the '40s and '50s on the shoulders of French track cyclist Henri Lemoine, nicknamed "P'tit Pois."

And here's the part almost nobody knows. Lemoine himself had borrowed the look from British jockeys, who wore polka dot silks at the racetrack so they'd stand out in the crowd. Three completely different worlds, track cycling, English horse racing, and a French chocolate brand, ended up colliding on the same jersey.

The first jersey in history

The first rider to wear it was Dutchman Joop Zoetemelk, after winning the first categorized climb of the 1975 Tour. The irony is he never actually won the mountains classification in his entire career. That year, Lucien Van Impe was the one who carried it to Paris.

It's changed ownership six times, but never its design

Since then, sponsorship of the jersey has passed through Poulain, Campagnolo, Coca-Cola, Champion, Carrefour from 1993 to 2018, and E.Leclerc since 2019. No new sponsor has ever dared redesign it. A candy brand from the 1970s is still dictating the look of mountain cycling half a century later.

The sponsorship people actually wear

Before the riders even come through, a caravan of sponsor vehicles drives the same route handing out freebies to the crowd. E.Leclerc, as the jersey's current sponsor, hands out thousands of polka dot t-shirts with its logo on them. You could see the result just this past July on the final stage through Montmartre: the entire crowd dressed in red polka dots. The sponsor isn't just dressing one rider anymore, it's literally dressing the Tour's spectators.

A jersey designed to sell chocolate ended up becoming the costume hundreds of thousands of people put on every summer, with no idea that behind it is a nearly forgotten track cyclist, a handful of English jockeys, and a race director who just wanted to pay tribute to a hero from his youth.