The Road's Convicts is not just another sports book; it is the founding document of the modern mythology of cycling. In 1924, the newspaper Le Petit Parisien sent its star reporter, Albert Londres, to cover the eighteenth edition of the Tour de France. What Londres found was not a placid athletic exhibition, but a race to the death featuring men who pedaled to the point of exhaustion under inhumane conditions. These journalistic chronicles, sent from the road and published in installments in that newspaper between June 23 and July 20, 1924, were always written by Londres in pencil, using notebooks or almanacs to capture the immediacy of sensations and the decisive moment before it vanished. What we read today as a book was, in its origin, a mass phenomenon that drew hordes of readers eager to learn the fate of cyclists like the French Pélissier brothers, the stars of the era, who revealed to the journalist the brutality of a competition fueled by dust, mud, and the use of performance-enhancing substances. The value of this work lies not only in the epic nature of the competition, but also in the talent of Albert Londres. A pioneer of investigative journalism, he possessed a chameleonic eye capable of covering events in the most disparate places, anticipating narrative styles such as New Journalism by decades. Albert Londres, who just a year earlier had denounced the horrors of the Devil's Island penal colony in French Guiana, dubbed the cyclists in these chronicles "the convicts of the road." By deliberately equating the athletes with those condemned to hard labor, the author elevated the Tour to the status of a tragic epic of extreme humanity.