In order to win the Tour, a rider must fi nd a way to separate himself from
the peloton and his rivals during one or several stages of the race in order to win a time advantage over the fi eld. He must then conserve the advantage
until he reaches the fi nish line in Paris. Herein lies the main strategic goal of the Tour de France. Usually a team designates one rider as its sole contender
for the yellow jersey and devotes all the efforts of the nine- man group to
helping him win the Tour. The other riders pledge to act as the team leader’s
xvi
p r o l o g u e
domestiques, or “servant” riders: they pedal in front of the captain and allow him to conserve energy in their slipstreams; if the lead rider’s tire punctures, the nearest domestique exchanges his fresh tire for the fl at one; if the leader becomes hungry or thirsty, a domestique offers the star rider his food and drink.* Since even a team of nine racers has only limited physical endurance,
it must expend maximum effort only at key moments of the race. Competing
teams often cooperate in order to conserve their energy or to demoralize or
sap the energy of other teams. Since a team’s goal is to conserve its captain’s overall time advantage over his immediate rivals, often a team has to help
its leader win only one or two stages of the Tour. It is possible to capture the Tour’s title without winning any stages, as American Greg LeMond did in
1990. The teams with captains who are in contention for the yellow jersey
allow cyclists who are far behind in the overall standings to escape from the
peloton and vie for stage victories, as long as they do not threaten the time
advantage of the team leader.
A team captain with strong domestiques to aid him, riding in front of a disorganized peloton that is unwilling to cooperate and expend the energy to
pursue him, can build a lead in the fl atland stages. The varied stage organization and terrain of the Tour’s itinerary complicates this basic strategy. Each
yellow jersey contender competes in the time trials alone against his rivals,
without the aid of his teammates to magnify his strengths or nullify his weak-
nesses. During the mountain stages, the aerodynamic advantages of team rid-
ing diminish since climbing speeds are much slower than fl atland speeds and
since cyclists must spread themselves out in order to avoid crashing during
the winding descents. Leaders may have domestiques to pace them during the climbs, but they must nevertheless perform all the work of traversing the Alps
and Pyrenees themselves. Mountains forge or destroy possible Tour champi-
ons. When a race leader “cracks,” or exhausts himself and becomes unable to
climb quickly, his rivals can attack him and transform the race leader’s time
advantage of several seconds gained during the fl atland stages into a defi cit of minutes or even hours.
A Tour victor usually possesses several crucial qualities. He must be tal-
ented in the Tour’s three disciplines — fl atland racing, climbing, and time
trialing — and he must know how to lead the team. Only an extraordinary
strength in one of the disciplines can overcome a glaring weakness in an-
* There are exceptions to this rule. Teams usually include some riders who specialize in sprinting, climbing, or time trialing. These riders attempt to win stages of the race that are tailored to their specialties in order to shower glory (and media attention) on the team and its sponsors.
These specialists do not perform most of the tasks of domestiques.
p r o l o g u e
xvii
other. In addition, he must know through racing experience how and when
to expend his teammates’ limited physical resources. He must know how to
strike and when to break alliances with other teams in order to protect him-
self or hurt his rivals. The Tour de France is an individual competition that a racer cannot win alone.
Introduction
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the French embraced the bicycle
as a mode of transportation and leisure and as a potent symbol of modernity
and progress. The Tour was the greatest and most enduring of the turn- of-
the- century bicycle racing spectacles and embodied France’s love affair with
the bicycle. A quintessentially French creation, the race very quickly “trans-
formed itself into a tradition [and] rooted itself in the national rituals” af-
ter its fi rst installment in 1903.1 French riders dominated the Tour for much
of the twentieth century. France’s star racers often became national heroes
and their exploits exemplifi ed French prowess, panache, and perseverance.
The Tour was a celebration of — and central fi xture in — French provincial
life. The competition traveled through almost every region of France and
became an occasion for the French to revisit, through sport, an idealized
thirty million fans from around the world crowded France’s country roads
and mountain passes to see the riders pedal by. The holiday atmosphere sur-
rounding the annual, three- week race became part of the fabric of French
popular culture.
France’s national bicycle race has been a global spectacle since its cre-
ation.2 In the competition’s early years, fans around the world followed the
race in the pages of their local newspapers. By the new millennium, mil-
lions of spectators followed the race on television and the Internet. The race
quickly emerged as the world’s most prestigious cycling competition. The
planet’s best cyclists and their sponsors made an annual pilgrimage to Paris to race for glory, wealth, and fame. Some competitors returned to their homelands as heroes. The Tour’s compelling format, star culture, and commercial
2
i n t r o d u c t i o n
success spurred imitators throughout Europe and elsewhere as professional
road racing became a global sport. Some Tour- inspired races like the Tour of
Italy (Giro d’Italia, created in 1909) and the Tour of Spain (Vuelta a España, created in 1935) became enduring classics in their own right. Others such as
the short- lived Tour de Trump, founded in the late 1980s by American real
estate tycoon Donald Trump, perished soon after their creation. Neverthe-
less, thanks to the enormous prestige, infl uence, and media footprint of the
Tour, its stars, and French cycling around the world since 1903, competitive
cycling adopted French traditions, athletic and commercial forms, and even
language. The Tour’s history offers a fascinating case study in how the French
interacted with the broader world in the global era. To explore these interac-
tions, I trace three interrelated stories.
1. The Tour, France, and Globalization
One way of looking at France and globalization characterizes the global age
as one that began in the 1950s and was spurred by the rise of telecommu-
nications, airline travel, television broadcasting, postwar international con-
sumption regimes, and multinational conglomerates. Such an approach also
stresses the dramatic rupture with the past caused by the emergence of digital
media since the 1980s. It highlights the homogenizing tendencies of postwar
globalization by exploring the ways that the process has seemed to erode cul-
tural distinctiveness, increase consumer homogeneity, and undermine tra-
ditional fram
eworks of identity such as the nation.3 Undoubtedly, the rapid,
often tumultuous cultural shifts of the postwar era represented a signifi cant
break from the past. In the popular imagination, such trends were epito-
mized by Hollywood’s hegemony, Coca- Cola’s world empire, the ubiquitous
Golden Arches, and the frivolous, universalized, Americanized consumer
culture they appeared to represent.4
I approach globalization as a longer- term, ongoing process that planted
its roots in the mid- nineteenth century. Since then, globalization has con-
tinued to reduce or eliminate barriers of time and space and increase inter-
connectedness. Important trends that facilitated the process include the ex-
pansion and contraction of empires; increasingly rapid exchanges of goods,
services, and people; and the rise of mass communication and mass consum-
erism since the Industrial Revolution. The proliferation of new networks of
social and cultural interaction, loci of identity, and patterns of consumerism
that transcended national and even continental frameworks also character-
ize the globalization trend. In other words, contemporary globalization can
i n t r o d u c t i o n
3
be understood as an integral element of the dramatic transformations of the
“long twentieth century.” Although most commonly applied to the rise of
capitalism and its associated substructures, the viewpoint can also be applied
to the cultural and social sea changes associated with the rise of modern mass
society since the mid- nineteenth century.5
The Tour’s evolution over time illustrates the unique ways that the French
participated in and instigated cultural globalization. This process was not a
recent phenomenon external to the French experience. Rather, the Tour’s
story reveals that cultural and commercial globalization had powerful, indig-
enous, and particularly French roots that reach deep into the past, and that
uniquely French circumstances drove the process forward in France and gave
it meaning.6 The Tour’s century- long history as a global spectacle that was in-fl uenced and transformed by diverse actors and stakeholders in and outside
France provides an ideal laboratory for investigating the globalizing process.
Scholars have paid increasing attention to the Tour recently.7 The com-
mercial history of the event, especially after the Second World War, has re-
ceived relatively little treatment. The race was born from the cycling milieu,
where spectacle, sport, and commerce mingled. It was a manifestation of
the new relationship between business and culture that arose in France and
throughout the modernizing world beginning in the mid- nineteenth century.
Parisian journalists created the contest in 1903 as a promotional vehicle to sell newspapers and bicycles in France. The contest emerged as the crown jewel
of French professional cycling. Yet the appearance of modern commercialism
in sport and in other areas of entertainment and leisure around the turn of
the twentieth century was not the end of the story of how business interests
shaped popular culture.
The Tour’s history illustrates the ways that mass media and business fa-
cilitated new kinds of interconnectedness since the nineteenth century. Glob-
alization scholars are particularly interested in the phenomenon of “deter-
ritorialization,” a process in which social and cultural space was no longer
mapped solely according to territorial place and in which location, distance,
and physical borders played a diminishing role in many social and cultural
relationships and experiences.8 The rise of mass media, a process initiated in
local and regional settings, spurred this transformation. Local, national, and
global communities of Tour fan spectators blossomed after 1903. The race
became an event that French people experienced in an increasingly simulta-
neous time frame as more and more of them followed it in local newspapers
and, later, on national broadcasting systems. Many tens of millions more
around the world read about it in their newspapers, as well, and followed
4
i n t r o d u c t i o n
the race in its entirety and in real time on international radio, television, and the Internet.
Uniquely French circumstances drove the Tour’s global story forward over
time, often with unintended consequences. Although the Tour was born as
an unabashedly for- profi t media event, its organizers struggled to limit and
control the race’s media exposure and commercialization. In the television
age, for example, the Tour resisted corporate sponsors’ demands for more
publicity and fought a losing battle to limit television coverage of the race.
During this time, the Tour was a touchstone for the broader French ambiva-
lence toward the commercialization of the public sphere as the postwar con-
sumer economy blossomed.9 Paradoxically, the Tour helped to instigate the
commercialization of France’s state- controlled, not- for- profi t radio and television networks because it was a wildly popular, publicity- soaked spectacle
broadcast openly on France’s commercial- free airwaves. The event’s singular
qualities and struggles in the French context determined how its organizers
exploited the race for profi t and developed the format, rules, traditions, and business models that the rest of the cycling world emulated.
The Tour imbued global cycling with a particularly French fl avor. The
story of the event’s growing infl uence spanned the twentieth century. Very
rapidly after 1903, the Tour emerged as the most famous cycling race on the
planet and the fulcrum of road cycling’s globalization. The race’s preemi-
nence afforded its organizers formal and informal power to shape the global
sport. Since the early 1900s, French men, many of whom were Tour offi cials,
dominated cycling’s international governing bodies and exerted vast infl u-
ence on the rules, competitive schedules, ethics, and commercialization of
European professional cycling. By the 1970s, the Tour’s parent corporation,
the Amaury Group, owned and organized many of the most important and
best- fi nanced cycling races in the world, including the Paris – Roubaix, Paris –
Nice, and Dauphiné Libéré classics. By the 1980s, the Tour’s leadership em-
braced an overtly globalizing agenda. The Tour’s infl uence penetrated into
areas outside road cycling’s traditional core in Western Europe. The race’s
athletes and leadership helped to build the foundations of viable professional
road racing organizations in virgin territories like the United States. All the while, the Tour remained the brightest star around which world cycling’s
evolving constellation of competitions orbited. The end result of these trends
was that the Tour and its organizers succeeded in linking “France” and “cy-
cling” in the popular imagination, much as French chefs and culinary schools
had created such an association between “France” and “cuisine” in the nine-
teenth century and the French fi lm industry established a particularly French
i n t r o d u c t i o n
5
cinematic brand and international cosmopolitan fi lm culture in the twentieth
century.10 The pitfalls of
its prominence affl icted the Tour ever more deeply
after the 1960s, as the event’s humiliating doping scandals came to epitomize
the long- running crisis of the entire sport.
2. Small Communities in a Global Society
The stories of Brest and Pau, small French communities that were signifi cant
Tour host towns, will unveil the many meaningful ways that small communi-
ties interacted with and reacted to globalization. Their stories demonstrate
that globalization did not occur as a dialectical process in which new, global
identities, cultures, and networks of exchange inevitably and inexorably dis-
placed entrenched local ones. Rather, globalization is best understood as a
deeply historical, uneven, localizing process in which local cultures and iden-
tities were continually reinforced and enriched, even in the contemporary
period.11 In fact, the tension between globalization’s homogenizing tenden-
cies and local cultures’ resistance to and selective appropriation of new cul-
tural forms and practices helped to ensure and even promote heterogeneity,
even in imperial settings.12
The Tour established an important place in annual summer leisure cul-
ture in France’s provincial communities. Nearly the entire race takes place on
remote, picturesque byways deep in the French countryside and in the town
squares of small cities. The cases of Pau, a regional hub and winter resort for wealthy Anglophones in the Pyrenean foothills, and Brest, a port town located at the tip of the Brittany peninsula, demonstrate how small communi-
ties, through sport, engaged the broader, interconnected world in novel ways
and reveal the continuing role of small towns in actuating and facilitating the globalization process. Brest and Pau viewed the Tour through the lens of their
unique, evolving identities and exploited it for their own ends. Beginning in
the 1930s, as their needs and outlooks changed, these race host towns used the
Tour, with its massive media coverage, to capture larger shares of the expand-
ing mass tourism market and to promote their integration into the national
and international economies. Although their efforts did not always achieve
their desired goals, Pau and Brest recognized the ever- changing opportunities
and dangers presented by the globalizing world. They tried to forge unique