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The Tour de France, the world’s most prestigious cycle race, very early evolved into more than a sports competition: it became a modern myth, as described by Roland Barthes. Collective memory does not simply remember extraordinary gestures from the Tour; its mention evokes a familiar visual culture based on repeated and established body language. Many figures spontaneously come to mind: the victorious champion putting on the yellow jersey on the podium; the cautious racing cyclist slipping a newspaper inside his jersey to protect him from the cold on top of a pass, with help from a spectator; the begging audience raising hands to catch samples from the Tour’s publicitary cars. To use the expression of the sociologist Pierre Sansot, the Tour de France appears as “a form of national liturgy”, stirred by ceremonial and technical gestures but also by the audience’s activity. In the immediate decades after WWII, audiovisual medias contributed to set on screen the representation of this body language. If the role of television, then at its beginnings, seems obvious in this process, we must also consider the importance of newsreel, an essential part of information until the end of the 1950s, sunk into oblivion since, in the Tour de France’s storytelling. Using approaches from media studies and anthropology of gesture, this article focuses on how moving image records and promotes ritualised gestural sequences.