Which sport awards a yellow jersey to its leader?

Cycling - the Tour de France, where the maillot jaune goes to the rider with the lowest cumulative time. The colour is generally explained by the newspaper that founded and organised the race, L'Auto, being printed on yellow paper, which is a rare case of a sporting tradition being a legible piece of advertising.

The race exists because of a newspaper war. L'Auto was set up by backers of the anti-Dreyfus side after a boycott of the existing sports paper, and the Tour was invented in 1903 as a circulation stunt. It worked - readership rose enormously - and the paper's successor, L'Equipe, still runs on the same foundations.

The leader is not always the best rider on the day, and that is the point of a stage race: it rewards consistency and defence over three weeks rather than any single performance. It also produces the sport's characteristic ethics, where a rider who crashes or has a mechanical failure is by convention not attacked, because winning by an accident is considered no win at all. The great embarrassment of the modern era is that seven consecutive Tours from 1999 to 2005 now have no listed winner.