The 1977 Tour de France was the 64th Tour de France, taking place June 30 to July 24, 1977. The total race distance was 22 stages over 4096 km, with riders averaging 35.419 km/h.

Lucien Van Impe, the winner of the previous year, wanted to repeat his victory. The main challenge came from Hennie Kuiper and Bernard Thévenet. In the end, Thévenet became the winner, with the smallest margin since the 1968 Tour de France.

The 1976 Tour de France had been focused around the mountains, with five hilltop finishes. In 1977, the climbing was de-emphasized, with only two hilltop finishes, and more emphasis on the time trials.

To ride the Tour, teams had to pay money. The other grand tours, the Giro and the Vuelta, paid the teams money to start. For financial reasons, some teams chose to avoid the Tour, and only 100 cyclists started the race, divided in ten teams of ten cyclists each. One of the notable absentees was Michel Pollentier. The ten teams that did start the Tour were:

Bernard Thévenet, the winner of 1975, was considered the main favourite, because the course of the race was considered suited to his talents. In March 1977, Thévenet had been penalized for a positive doping test in Paris-Nice.

The Tour de France (French pronunciation: [tuʁ də fʁɑ̃s]) is an annual bicycle race held in France and nearby countries. First staged in 1903, the race covers more than 3,600 kilometres (2,200 mi) and lasts three weeks. As the best known and most prestigious of cycling's three "Grand Tours", the Tour de France attracts riders and teams from around the world. The race is broken into day-long segments, called stages. Individual times to finish each stage are aggregated to determine the overall winner at the end of the race. The rider with the lowest aggregate time at the end of each day wears the leader's yellow jersey on the next day of racing. The course changes every year, but the race has always finished in Paris. Since 1975, the climax of the final stage has been along the Champs-Élysées.

The tour typically has 21 days of racing and covers 3,200 kilometres (2,000 mi). The shortest Tour was in 1904 at 2,420 kilometres (1,500 mi), the longest in 1926 at 5,745 kilometres (3,570 mi). The three weeks usually include two rest days, sometimes used to transport riders from a finish in one town to the start in another. The race alternates between clockwise and anticlockwise circuits of France. The first anticlockwise circuit was in 1913. The New York Times said the "Tour de France is arguably the most physiologically demanding of athletic events." The effort was compared to "running a marathon several days a week for nearly three weeks", while the total elevation of the climbs was compared to "climbing three Everests."

France (English ⁱ/ˈfræns/ FRANSS or /ˈfrɑːns/ FRAHNSS; French: [fʁɑ̃s] ( listen)), officially the French Republic (French: République française [ʁepyblik fʁɑ̃sɛz]), is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. It is often referred to as l’Hexagone ("The Hexagon") because of the geometric shape of its territory. It is the largest western European country and it possesses the second-largest exclusive economic zone in the world, covering 11,035,000 km² (4,260,000 sq mi), just behind that of the United States (11,351,000 km² / 4,383,000 sq mi).

Over the past 500 years, France has been a major power with strong cultural, economic, military and political influence in Europe and around the world. During the 17th and 18th centuries, France colonised great parts of North America and Southeast Asia; during the 19th and early 20th centuries, France built the second largest colonial empire of the time, including large portions of North, West and Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and many Caribbean and Pacific Islands.

Lucien van Impe (born 20 October 1946 in Mere, Belgium) was a Belgian cyclist from 1969 to 1987. He excelled mainly as a climber in multiple-day races such as the Tour de France. He was the winner of the 1976 Tour de France, and six times winner of the mountains classification in the Tour de France.

Van Impe credits the start of his career to Spaniard Federico Bahamontes, a climber nicknamed the eagle of Toledo and a former Tour de France winner. In 1968 van Impe was King of the Mountains in the Tour de l'Avenir. Bahamontes used his influence to get van Impe a contract as a professional. In 1969, Van Impe started his professional career with a 12th place in the 1969 Tour de France. In 1971, Van Impe won his first Mountains classification in the Tour de France. He would repeat that five more times, a record then shared with Bahamontes. When Richard Virenque broke the record with a seventh victory in 2004, Van Impe criticized Virenque for being opportunistic rather than the best climber; he said he had himself refrained from breaking Bahamontes' record himself out of reverence.

Michel Pollentier (born 13 February 1951 in Diksmuide, West-Vlaanderen) is a Belgian former professional road bicycle racer. He became professional in 1973. The highlight of his career was his overall win in the 1977 Giro d'Italia.

In the 1978 Tour de France, he was the Belgian national champion when he won the stage arriving in Alpe d'Huez and took the yellow jersey. However, he was accused of foul play in the succeeding doping test, having used what was described politely as a pear-shaped tube (in fact a condom) of different urine held under the armpit and connected by a plastic tube to give the impression of urinating. Pollentier was uncovered after another rider at the test had trouble operating his own system of tubes and aroused the suspicion of the doctor, who then demanded Pollentier lift his jersey to show if he too was cheating.

He was put out of the Tour, later won by Bernard Hinault.

The affair took away most of Pollentier's credibility in international cycling. Even though he managed to win 1980s edition of the Ronde van Vlaanderen and he also came 2nd in the 1982 Vuelta a España. 1984 was his last professional season. After his cycling career, Pollentier became a car tyre garage owner and founded a cycling school.