He wrote about the elite cycling race for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune. He said he was smitten by the Tour from the first day.

Samuel Abt, an erudite writer who covered the Tour de France for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune in stage-by-stage dispatches for more than 30 years, died on Friday in Suresnes, a suburb of Paris. He was 91.

His son, John, confirmed the death, in a hospital, on the day of the seventh stage of this year’s Tour.

Mr. Abt was an editor at The International Herald Tribune (now The International New York Times), based in Paris, when he started covering the Tour in 1977. At the outset, he is believed to have been the only North American writing regularly about it.

“You have to remember that back in the 1970s, the Tour de France was nothing in the United States,” he