SUMMARY: A 32-mile bicycle "race" that starts and ends in Staunton, Ill. The Tour de Donut, which is put on by the St. Louis-based Boeing Employees' Bicycle Club is a spoof of the Tour de France. The ride consists of three sections, each about 10 miles, and two doughnut stops. Cyclists get five minutes taken off their time for each doughnut eaten. Some racers have mastered the art of smashing and eating three doughnuts at a time to get more bonus time.

NOTE: This account of the Tour de Donut likely will be updated sometime in 2008 to mark the 20 years of the event. More accounts and updates about Tour de Donut can be found on my blog page.

RIDE WEB SITE:http://www.bebikeclub.com/

Tour de Donut

The Tour de Donut was born in Mark Pace's living room in Staunton, Ill. Officers of the Mid-America Bicycle Club — Mark Pace, Joe Booth, Ed Taylor and myself — were thinking of rides for the coming year.

This was in the midst of excitement about Greg LeMond's three Tour de France wins, and we thought about a stage race. Someone else talked about a breakfast ride. We then somehow combined the two into the Tour de Donut. To make it even more deviant, we decided to reward people for eating doughnuts. OK, they're not exactly the healthiest food cyclists can eat, but we started to imagine how people would feel after eating a dozen doughnuts. That's how we decided to give a five-minute bonus for each doughnut eaten.

Joe was skeptical about whether the event would take hold, but Mark and I thought the event was crazy enough that it might just find a following.

Because we designed the ride to be a spoof of the Tour de France, it had to be run during that Tour. So in July 1989, the Tour de Donut was born. Karl Painter was the first champion of the ride. He had one of the slowest road times, but he ate 15 doughnuts to win the prize, a yellow jersey.

The following year, we moved the ride to Staunton, but we made the mistake of getting Hardee's to provide cinnamon-raisin biscuits for the event. They were good, but they sure were heavy. It was hard to eat many of them and still ride 30 miles.

We went back to doughnuts the following year, this time from Jubelt's Bakery, a prominent bakery in that part of Illinois. That was the best move ever. They're great doughnuts — right up there with the Krispy Kreme glazed doughnut — and the bakery has provided doughnuts for the race ever since. More than 100 dozen doughnuts are made for the Tour de Donut each year.

( In 2008, the Springfield, Ill.-based Mel-O-Cream donut chain provided donuts for the event. In 2008, Jubelt stopped delivering to wholesale accounts and now has one location in Litchfield, Ill., at 303 North Old Route 66. Jubelt will be celebrating its 87th year in business in September.)

I skipped involvement with the ride a couple of years in the early 1990s, and a guy by the name of Evan Williams of Kansas raised the bar to 25 doughnuts. I returned to the ride in 1994 and finished a respectable third, but I wanted more. When I found out Williams wouldn't be riding in 1995, I decided this race was mine! There's no way I was going to eat 25 doughnuts, but I figured somewhere between 15 and 20 could win it. I managed to eat 15 doughnuts and finished the ride in two hours. The doughnut bonus took 75 minutes off my time. Another guy ate 25 doughnuts, but his road time was slow enough that he couldn't catch me.

I won the yellow jersey!

The Mid-America Bicycle Club went out of existence in 1998, but the Boeing Employees' Bicycle Club has taken over the event.

The event has grown considerably since then, and there were more than 600 cyclists in the 2005 and 2006 events.

The Tour de Donut also inspired filmmakers Steve Kelly and Jim Klenn to make a documentary about the event: "Tour de Donut: Gluttons for Punishment". The movie centers around the attempt by Gateway Cup race director Tim Ranek to win the 2005 Tour de Donut, and I make some appearances in the film in my role as co-founder of the event. DVD copies of the film are now on sale through the film's Web site.

• Read The Telegraph's account of the 2008 Tour de Donut.
• Read The Telegraph's account of the 2008 Tour de Donut.
• For another account about Tour de Donut written in 2002, check out this American Profile article.