Tour de France: The French terms you need to know

To coincide with the 100th edition of the Tour de France, the BBC Magazine has a nicely-researched feature on the key cycling vocabulary that every self-respecting connoisseur of the sport should know.  As much as anything the article is a good promotion for learning a second language and for the life-enriching insights that open up as a consequence. As the piece points out, peloton means "little ball" in French and the term was first used to refer to a small group of soldiers, who, like cyclists, travel in tight formation; it is also thought that the word "platoon" is a variation of peloton. For those who want to dig deeper into terms to do with cycling, l'Office québécois de la langue française and le Réseau panlatin de terminologie (Realiter) publish the Vocabulaire panlatin du vélo, a very handy, free, illustrated PDF book of bicycle and cycling vocabulary set out simultaneously in eight different languages: French, English, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Galician and Romanian.