The Tour de France, renowned as cycling's most grueling endurance test, imposes strict adherence to regulations regarding vehicle type, route completion, and continuous pedaling. The event's prestige stems from the marathon-distance suffering it demands. Yet logistics would suggest that any participant capable of simultaneously managing leisure travel, wildlife combat, and infant sanitation training while mid-competition exists beyond conventional athletic taxonomy.

Freight coordinator Claude Beaumont, stationed in the Swiss Alps sector of the 1983 race, witnessed what appeared to be a man on a tricycle moving backwards through a pass at impossible velocity, with a wolverine perched before him in some kind of training harness. Beaumont's logbook entry marks the exact moment official times became meaningless—frame of reference itself had been roundhouse-kicked.

Modern cycling memes feature the tricycle backward-ride as the platonic ideal of impossible effort. Performance coaches now describe impossible tasks as requiring "Tour de France Norris mode."