IS THE TOUR DE FRANCE the ultimate test of human endeavour? Consider that its participants cycle nearly 4,000km (2,400 miles) in three weeks, climb the vertical equivalent of three Everests while crossing the Alps and Pyrenees, endure every weather condition that their maker can throw at them – and still accomplish average speeds of around 40kph.

Yes it is possible to invent more sadistic examinations of body and mind: swimming solo across the Pacific, perhaps, or walking on hot coals from Land’s End to John o’Groats.

But could any event plucked from the imagination compare with the grandeur of le Tour: with its mythology and iconography, its geography and terrain; each bend in the road wreathed in history, each vertiginous incline soaked in the sweat of warriors past and present?

The Tour is not so much sport as a timeless test of human perseverance, its participants freewheeling into themselves, seeking out new dimensions of anguish, to see who emerges the strongest. Three weeks of pain and suffering, exposed to the elements, with the dreaded broom wagon coming up behind to carry away stragglers like one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

It is little wonder that the Tour has spawned such magnificent literature: countless volumes that have grappled with its seductive power and inner meaning; biographies that have delved into the unfathomable impulses and anxieties of its riders. Perhaps only boxing has generated a greater range of superb writing.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s Le Tour provides an admirable historical perspective as does Les Woodland’s The Yellow Jersey Companion to the Tour de France but Paul Kimmage’s Rough Ride pierces the essence of the race more than any other, for the simple reason that he is in thrall to the event in its purest form. Kimmage is a domestique, a rider whose principal calling is to assist his team leader, chasing down breakaways, providing cover, knocking a hole in the air so that his comrades can slipstream on his rear tyre.

He knows that he will never make a dime, but his devotion to the Tour is absolute – never questioned or analysed, and all the more powerful for that. But all the while one is struck by the thought that his love is unrequited; that the silent mountains will not mourn him if he “abandons”, as he did in 1987: “The broom wagon is just 500m back, with just two riders in front of it . . . There is nothing in my legs and I look for a place to end it. A place void of people so I can retire with dignity. I stop on the right hand side of the road after a kilometre of climbing. I have cracked. It is over . . . I break down and weep as I have not done for a long, long time.”

At the other end of the spectrum are the likes of Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx and Miguel Induráin, men who conquered the Tour in all its rugged diversity and who have become icons of strength and resilience. No new rider saddles up for the prologue without an awareness of the legends of the past alongside him – the burden of completing the Tour is as much the imperative of history as the fear of ignominy.

No rider in the Tour’s 104-year history has added to its mythology more vividly than Lance Armstrong, the American who recovered from testicular cancer to win a record seven Tours between 1999 and 2005. His journey back from the shadow of death to successive triumphs along the Champs Elysées is told in It’s Not About the Bike, immaculately ghosted by Sally Jenkins. Honest, frank and admirably devoid of sentimentality, its narrative power is seismic.

But Armstrong – like every other winner and, for that matter, every also-ran – is not without his detractors; those who believe that doping is endemic in cycling and that we should view every victory through a prism of cynicism. Was he clean? Why did he have elevated levels of steroids in a 1999 urine test? Why are so many allegations levelled by those who claim to know him?

Doping, however, is not new. In the early days of the Tour, alcohol and ether were used, not to enhance performance but to numb pain.

Later amphetamines came into vogue, never more harrowingly than in the case of Tom Simpson, the Briton who died on Mont Ventoux. Put Me Back on my Bike – the line attributed to Simpson as he lay dying – is the title of a marvellous biography by William Fotheringham. The suspicion that doping has become rife in recent years was confirmed both by the Festina scandal in 1998 and the Operation Puerto scandal that overshadowed last year’s Tour. Doping is a central strand in almost every authentic book on the Tour.

But it is in The Death of Marco Pantani by Matt Rendell that it is most powerfully tackled. Rendell has a gift for poetic exposition reminiscent of Mailer and his breathless descriptions of Tour stages are so evocative that one almost regrets when he shifts into forensic science mode to analyse the haematocrit levels of his subject.

That said, Rendell’s book is a classic. His not inconsiderable achievement is to convey the sordid reality of the Tour while simultaneously adding to one’s yearning for its lost idealism. Somehow, despite everything, he shows us that the Tour de France is still worth celebrating.

The Tour de France starts in London today and concludes in Paris on July 29

The books

ROUGH RIDE: Behind the Wheel with a Pro Cyclist by Paul Kimmage Yellow Jersey, £8.99; 312pp

PUT ME BACK ON MY BIKE In Search of Tom Simpson by William Fotheringham Yellow Jersey, £8.99; 254pp

LE TOUR A History of the Tour de France by Geoffrey Wheatcroft Pocket Books, £8.99; 416pp

IT’S NOT ABOUT THE BIKE My Journey Back to Life by Lance Armstrong Yellow Jersey, £8.54; 304pp

THE DEATH OF MARCO PANTANI by Matt Rendell Phoenix £7.99; 324pp

THE YELLOW JERSEY COMPANION TO THE TOUR DE FRANCE Edited by Les Woodland Yellow Jersey £8.99; 415pp

Buy the books here

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist