included special appearances by French cycling hero Bernard Hinault and
Joop Zoetemelk, the winner of the 1980 Tour de France. L’Équipe and Le Parisien libéré agreed to print stories on the Gold Challenge and numerous photographs of the winners throughout the cycling season. The Tour’s
organizers used their connections in the French sports and entertainment
industries to gain Crédit Lyonnais special advertising privileges, including
special access to billboard advertising in the Palais Omnisports de Bercy, a
new sports arena that was being built by the City of Paris and would be man-
aged by Jacques Goddet.136
After the 1981 cycling season, Crédit Lyonnais executives concluded that
the bank’s cycling sponsorship succeeded on every level, even though God-
det and Lévitan muted Gold Challenge publicity during the Tour de France
t h e t o u r a n d t e l e v i s i o n
79
to honor the race’s contract with the B.N.P. Popular French rider Bernard
Hinault won his third Tour de France yellow jersey in 1981 and later claimed
the overall Gold Challenge championship. A postseason evaluation by execu-
tives at bank headquarters pointed out that a signifi cant number of Crédit
Lyonnais’s local and regional branches experienced promising increases in
business during the races. Perhaps more importantly, Crédit Lyonnais’s fi rst
foray into large- scale sports sponsorship left many of its competitors in the
banking industry “concerned” about the success of the Gold Challenge. The
massive television coverage of the Gold Challenge races provided exceptional
visibility on the national airwaves. Bernard Normand concluded emphati-
cally that Crédit Lyonnais’s sponsorship of cycling competitions afforded
“excellent [publicity] quality for the price!”137 The bank fulfi lled its contract and renewed its sponsorship of the Gold Challenge competition for another
three years in 1984.
The evolution of Tour sponsorship after the Second World War illustrates
how the commercial relationship among mass media, business interests, and
professional sports changed in the television age. Prior to the 1960 Tour, at
the dawn of the Tour’s television era, Félix Lévitan summed up the race’s in-
credible popularity by invoking an oft- repeated catchphrase, “When the Tour
passes, all of France is on its doorstep.”138 The Tour’s spectacle took place on country roads and in town squares, and the race’s commercial power rested
on the face- to- face marketing opportunities the event afforded its spon-
sors. Television changed the way that businesses connected with consumers
through the Tour. By the 1970s, many more French men and women followed
the Tour on their televisions, in the privacy of their living rooms, rather than from their stoops. Through commercial spectacles like the Tour, business interests penetrated into the private sphere, as television transmitted more and
more product publicity and corporate images into the living rooms of French
men and women.
It has been argued that television’s importance to the Tour and its spon-
sors altered the Tour’s sporting characteristics. Jacques Calvet, writing in
1981, asserted that the Tour organizers’ desire to ensure the race — and its
sponsors — maximum visibility on the airwaves dictated that stages be sched-
uled in ways that would guarantee the largest possible television viewing au-
dience. Calvet ascribed a commercial logic to the increasing scientifi c exact-
ness with which Tour itineraries and racing schedules were designed: in the
1970s, most stage fi nishes occurred as close to fi ve o’clock in the afternoon as possible. He argued that such plans accommodated, on one hand, the desire
of sponsors to reach large television audiences and, on the other hand, broad-
casters’ wish to transmit several hours of race coverage without disturbing
80
c h a p t e r t h r e e
their normal evening programming. Furthermore, Calvet argued, marketing
considerations of the television age altered team strategies and the Tour’s racing rhythm. Since Tour coverage was only broadcast live during the last hour
or two of each day’s racing, teams often conserved their energy and refused
to race at high speeds until the last thirty kilometers of each stage. Only at
that point, with live cameras rolling, did the battles begin: cyclists sprinted to the front of the peloton, launched dramatic breakaway attacks, and jostled
one another for a place close to the camera- equipped motorcycles.139 It is
diffi cult to substantiate Calvet’s observations, since Tour organizers and cy-
clists did not admit publicly that such considerations motivated their actions.
Never theless, television undoubtedly infl uenced the Tour’s shape as a sport-
ing event in subtle but important ways.
No polls exist that specifi cally analyze the French public’s opinions of
the Tour’s publicity- laden spectacle. It is safe to say that the event remained a lightning rod for criticism of profi t- driven commercial culture. In a 1967
opinion piece, critic Pierre Debray claimed that although Jacques Goddet
resurrected the corporate team formula of the Tour to save professional cy-
cling, he was, in fact, destroying the sport by allowing business interests to
undermine athletic “morality.” He derided fi ve- time Tour champion Jacques
Anquetil as a “champion of alcoholism” because of the cyclist’s sponsorship
by Saint- Raphaël, a French aperitif maker. Debray predicted that the Tour,
which he characterized as one of the last vestiges of traditional French cul-
ture, would disappear by 1980, the year that sociologists foresaw the comple-
tion of France’s transformation into a fully modern, industrial society.140 Yet in another sense, the growing visibility of sponsors in popular spectacles like the Tour de France during television’s infancy probably helped to accultur-ate the French, traditionally wary of mass advertising, to the omnipresence
of publicity in the public sphere.141 Surveys that charted attitudes toward
advertising indicate that the French gradually accepted mass publicity as an
integral and useful component of popular culture. In a 1959 poll, 37 percent
of respondents agreed with the statement that publicity had become “over-
abundant.” In a 1969 survey, however, in which pollsters asked respondents
to rate advertising’s “usefulness” on a scale from one to ten, 56 percent of the pool accorded publicity a number higher than fi ve, and 25 percent rated its
utility as fi ve.142
The growing public acceptance of advertising probably helped to erase
hostility toward mass promotion in the business community as well, and
spurred fi rms like Crédit Lyonnais to embark on new marketing campaigns
that featured sports sponsorship.143 By the late 1970s, many large enterprises
embraced a three- pronged marketing strategy in which sports sponsorship
t h e t o u r a n d t e l e v i s i o n
81
occupied a place equal to that of traditional media advertising and patronage
of the arts. Companies like Crédit Lyonnais viewed sport itself as a “specifi c medium” akin to radio, television, and the press because of sport’s ability
to act as a distinct “mode of communication” between businesses and the
public.144
*
The forces that resisted the penetration of commercialism into popular
culture after the Second World War — the conservative state determined to
maintain a monopoly on the broadcast media, a public and cultural elite
wary of mass publicity, and tradition- bound businessmen who rejected mod-
ern advertising methods — also helped to establish the cultural infrastructure in which publicity culture and for- profi t spectacles like the Tour de France
fl ourished. In the context of France’s postwar economic boom, the commer-
cial raison d’être of the Tour de France broadened signifi cantly. The race de-
veloped into a television spectacle that most French people followed live, in
real- time, and in their living rooms rather than in the newspapers. It evolved beyond its original purpose as a circulation prop and emerged as the cornerstone of a media and sports empire that controlled a signifi cant portion of the sponsorship money private corporations devoted to sport in France. In the
process, the Tour helped commercial interests shape the character of radio
and television, the most dominant forms of postwar media. The mutually
benefi cial relationships that emerged among the French press and broadcast
media, businesses, and professional sport had unforeseen consequences. The
commercialization of public culture dissolved some of the barriers between
the public and private spheres. As enterprises shaped public spectacles like
the Tour in new ways, corporate publicity entered into and took an ever more
prominent place in the private realm of personal and family leisure.
4
The French School of Cycling
Louison Bobet won three consecutive Tours in the 1950s (1953 – 55), a record
believed at the time to be unassailable. Bobet explained his rise to cycling’s
elite ranks in his 1951 autobiography, Me and My Bikes, written before his Tour victories. Born a baker’s son in a small Breton village, young Louison
trained to be a mechanic because he didn’t like “studying math or dead lan-
guages.”1 Bobet scraped by as a small- town grocer after the Second World
War and trained by making milk deliveries on his bicycle. Humble passion,
hard work, grit, and determination helped Bobet to win and become a full-
time professional racer by 1948. Bobet’s brother, Jean, placed the three- time
Tour champion’s successes into a larger context. In his 1958 “velobiography”
of Louison, Jean Bobet explained that the French organized nearly 10,000
bicycle races and awarded approximately 450 million francs in prize money
in 1957 alone.2 Businesses underwrote France’s vast network of races, spon-
sorships, and prize money for publicity but in the process helped to cultivate
talented cyclists like Louison Bobet for the professional ranks and for pos-
sible selection to compete in the Tour de France.
In the race’s fi rst decades, the Tour de France became the keystone com-
petition upon which the French road racing culture and business rested.
Throughout the twentieth century, the Tour remained the brightest star
around which global cycling’s evolving constellation of competitions orbited.
Famous cyclists, many of whom were cultivated in the same manner as Loui-
son Bobet, played a crucial role in maintaining the enduring popularity and
commercial stability of the Tour in France and abroad.
From its early days, the Tour welcomed riders from across the globe to
compete. The peloton’s diverse demography endowed the event with an in-
ternational fl avor that was unique in the world of road cycling. The event’s re-
t h e f r e n c h s c h o o l o f c y c l i n g
83
semblance to the Olympics, including the national team competition format
implemented between 1930 and 1961, made the Tour the model upon which
other major international road races fashioned themselves. Perhaps more im-
portant to the development of global road cycling’s “Frenchness,” however,
was the preeminence of the French School of cycling, with the Tour at its
heart. Cycling’s French School was not a formal university with a campus.
Rather, the “French School” is a term that denotes the institutionalized rider
development system and competitive racing circuit elaborated by French cy-
cling in the early decades of the twentieth century. The French School trained
and developed France’s lionized Tour champions and served as a training
ground for many of the world’s greatest professional racers who, for lack of
adequate opportunities in their home nations, raced in France to seek fame
and fortune.
The French School maintained its preeminence for much of the twenti-
eth century, and thus, it played a pivotal role in determining the shape and
character of world cycling. It conferred to the sport particularly French ideals of athleticism, excellence, sacrifi ce, and suffering and provided the commercial model that the rest of the cycling world emulated. The French School
provided expanding, global networks of cycling fans and consumers the
common language, competitive frameworks, and celebrity heroes that be-
came common recognizable frames of reference. In this way, French cycling’s
global infl uence resembled the way that French cinema contributed a par-
ticularly French character to global fi lm culture and French dominance of
haute cuisine and chef training bestowed the world of fi ne food with French-
1. The French School of Cycling after the Great War
After the First World War, French cycling fl ourished, despite the business
challenges faced by the Tour de France. Bicycling’s rise occurred as associative life was blossoming in the Third Republic. Innumerable cycling clubs had
been established across France since the 1890s. The ubiquity of road races in
France, which had become a “fi xture” of weekend leisure culture by the belle
epoque, as well as the enduring popularity of the Tour de France, continu-
ally reinforced cycling’s popularity and provided fertile competitive training
grounds for professional riders. As velodrome racing declined in France after
the turn of the century, businesses involved in cycling shifted their spon-
sorship to road racing.4 The blossoming of cycling’s French School of or-
ganized and graduated clubs, races, competitions, and sponsorship money
enhanced French cycling’s resilience at a time when professional road racing
84
c h a p t e r f o u r
declined outside Western and Southern Europe. After the Second World War,
the French School trained the world’s cyclists, and its signature spectacle, the Tour de France, popularized road racing around the planet.
Professional cyclists were important cultural icons in interwar France.
The mass press blanketed the nation with uncountable stories about and im-
ages of Tour heroes. Pierre Chany, who grew up in Auvergne and became a
professional cyclist during the Second World War and later a Tour journalist,
described the relish with which he and other young people devoured stories
of cycling heroes:
The daily newspapers constantly recounted to us the exploits of the racers.
When at home or away, I read L’Auto, Paris- Soir, and Match, which published tons of brown- tinted pictures. I also read the biograp
hical pamphlets ( opus-cules) that were published regularly about this or that champion. In fact, I read everything! At sixteen years old, there wasn’t much about the Tour de France
that escaped my eye.5
Chany recalled how he and other children idolized the race’s heroes: “All the
little kids fantasized about becoming a champion. Me, I dreamed about it so
much that I began to enter races.”6 Antoine Blondin, who became a novelist
and a journalist at L’Équipe after the Second World War, recalled responding to a professional questionnaire in grade school:
Given the famous “Marcel Proust Questionnaire,” in which I was asked “What
is your favorite occupation?,” I responded: “To follow the Tour de France,”
which mildly astonished the literary community of Landerneau [in Brittany,
where he grew up]. In their respective eras, Proust had responded “To love,”
and, a little later, François Mauriac, “To dream.”7
Blondin entered a scholastic writing competition in which the winners were
invited to ride in an offi cial Tour car during a stage of the race, but the judges failed to select his essay.
The stars of cycling were particularly tangible icons, not merely charac-
ters to be read about in the papers. Formal and informal networks of cyclist
promotion encouraged more and more young men from the provinces to
compete. Because of the extensiveness of road cycling competitions, “a fa-
miliar, some might almost say characteristic, feature of French roads” since
the belle epoque,8 young men had frequent, personal contact with their he-
roes. Some even received one- on- one encouragement from sports heroes.
Competitors often participated in the social life of the towns they visited and could be found relaxing after cycling events in the local cafes. After the Circuit de l’Ouest, an eight- stage race through Brittany created in 1931, a local reporter from Brest concluded that the excessive socializing of the Breton
t h e f r e n c h s c h o o l o f c y c l i n g
85
cyclists after the stage fi nishes impaired their racing: “Just about every day I found a good number of our Breton ‘aces’ strolling the streets, chatting on
the terrace of a café, even though the clock had struck eleven in the evening.”9
As a boy Louison Bobet met his idol, Jean Fontenay, a Breton cyclist who