compared the Tour to running marathons, although “marathon runners have
it easy” compared to cyclists, and to “the Cup Final, Wimbledon, and Lord’s
[site of England’s most important cricket matches] rolled into one and put
on wheels.”26 Foreign newspapers often juxtaposed the turbulence of French
politics with the regularity of the Tour’s long- established summer traditions.
American journalists frequently alluded to the fi ction that rabid popular in-
terest in the Tour “[suspended] national interest in politics and everything
else.”27 Even during the constitutional crisis of 1958, which resulted in the
collapse of France’s Fourth Republic and the return of Charles de Gaulle to
power, the French were so enthralled by the Tour that they would be “much
too busy” to think of revolution.28 A Chicago Tribune piece on the 1986 Tour quoted a Red Smith quip: “An army from Mars could invade France . . . but if
it happened during the Tour de France, nobody would notice.”29 Sports writ-
ers occasionally characterized the Tour as an antidote for the ever- evolving
ills of modernity. Los Angeles Times columnist Dick Hyland characterized French youth of the 1950s as “surrounded by an atmosphere of futility and
defeat,” which he believed helped to explain the popularity of French Tour
champions like Louison Bobet. Hyland, repeating a theme often raised in the
French and English- language press, compared the popularity and renown of
Tour stars to the relative namelessness of French political leadership, espe-
cially during the Fourth Republic. He related the results of a survey of youth
opinion performed by L’Équipe that pointed out that 97 percent of young men entering the French army knew who had won the Tour de France, while
only 30 percent knew the name of their president.30
Although the French adored their Tour champions, they treasured even
more profoundly riders who demonstrated the ability to endure and conquer
intense pain with spirit and panache. Like their French compatriots, Ameri-
can and British journalists highlighted to their readers the uniquely French
way of understanding the event as a metaphor that celebrated enduring in-
tense human suffering as noble triumph, even in defeat.31 English- language
journalists scattered the linked themes of pain, suffering, survival, and tri-
umph throughout their analyses of the Tour. In a 1982 Los Angeles Times piece on Jonathan Boyer, the fi rst American to participate in the Tour, the American cyclist rhapsodized on why he was fi t to compete in the race: “To be a
cyclist, you have to be someone . . . who is tough, someone who enjoys pain,
someone who thinks going through pain will help them. I always felt pain was
t h e t o u r ’ s g l o b a l i z i n g a g e n d a
149
good for me.” Boyer explained that he would retire from the Tour soon, but
not because he would never taste victory — the American never contended
for the title, and his best showing was a twelfth place fi nish in the 1983 Tour, nearly twenty minutes behind winner Frenchman Laurent Fignon. Rather, he
would quit when he no longer had the ability to “suffer.” “I can’t justify the
pain any more. . . . I can’t suffer like I used to do.”32
New York Times reporter Robert Daley explained the link between hero-
ism, suffering, and noble defeat in the French imagination. In a 1960 piece
on aging champion Louison Bobet, Daley explained that the Rennes native’s
lionization arose from his dramatic failures and monumental suffering in the
Tours that preceded his three consecutive Tour titles from 1953 to 1955. In
the 1948 race, Bobet became “the hero of the Tour [even though] he had
not won” after riding his bicycle so hard in the Alps that the frame snapped
in half.33 The following year, before abandoning the race, Bobet attempted
to pedal through saddle sores so severe that he developed an anthrax infec-
tion. In a 1962 article on Norman Jacques Anquetil’s third Tour victory, Daley
also dwelled on the reasons why the French crowd adored perennial loser
Raymond Poulidor, nicknamed “The Eternal Second,” instead of dominant
champion Anquetil. Daley explained, “To fi nish fi rst [like Anquetil] is splendid . . . but much less important here than in the United States.” Poulidor
broke his hand more than a week before the Tour’s end and fi nished the race
even though he could not grip his handlebars: “To fi nish so well with such
a handicap seemed to the [French] crowd as wonderful as victory itself.”34
The Times columnist David Miller concurred, pointing out that the “enviable French concept of sport . . . holds that it is preferable to fi nish second with style than fi rst with expediency.”35
Into the 1980s, print journalism remained a powerful medium for elabo-
rating for English- language readers the uniquely French conception of the
Tour, its meaning, and its broader cultural context in France. Newspapers
helped to perpetuate and expand the global community of reader fans of the
Tour at a time when radio, television, and the Internet had not yet taken
on a sizable role in transmitting race coverage outside continental Western
Europe. Even in neighboring Britain in the early 1980s, television coverage
remained sparse. There, the BBC broadcast the Tour only during weekend
highlight shows of twenty to forty minutes, and programmers mingled Tour
highlights with updates of exotic, arcane sports such as the “Strongbow
World Superman Contest” and “Athletics from Leningrad.”36 In the United
States, the CBS network broadcast occasional weekend Tour highlights shows
during the early- and mid- 1980s.
150
c h a p t e r s i x
2. Media Deregulation, the Tour, and the
Television Economy of Professional Sports
François Mitterrand’s Socialist government reversed many of the state’s long-
standing media policies and embarked on a program of managed deregulation
in 1982, when the Socialist- led National Assembly declared that audiovisual
communication must be “free and plural.”37 France’s three state broadcasting
companies — TF1, Antenne 2, and FR3, and a network of twelve regional sta-
tions (Antenne 2 and FR3 were renamed France 2 and France 3 respectively in
1992)— remained in operation and continued to be funded by a combination
of advertising revenues and higher taxes on television sets.38 The state re-
tained control over the physical infrastructure of broadcasting but removed
all direct government control over media content.39 Very quickly, private
networks, including subscription television service Canal Plus, germinated.
The volume of sports- related viewership and programming increased
markedly as privatization advanced. Sports coverage on French televisions
rose from 793 hours in 1980 to 33,000 in 2000.40 The total sports budget for
the three state- founded stations and Canal Plus quadrupled to two billion
francs between 1987 and 1995. By 1994, Canal Plus devoted nearly 25 percent
of its overall budget to sports.41 In a 1990 poll, 44 percent of the French population responded that they watched the Olympic Games on television, 32 per-
cent watched soccer’s World Cup, 24 percent watched the Tour de France, and
18 percent watched tennis’s Frenc
h Open.42
The Tour’s television audience and on- air coverage expanded tremen-
dously during this period, as well (see appendix, table 3: The Tour and Televi-
sion, 1960 – 2009). France 2 and France 3 combined their resources to cover
the Tour and to retain the race’s French television rights. The two stations
increased the volume of their Tour- related broadcasts from 38 hours in 1986
to 110 hours in 1995. During the 1994 Tour, France 2/France 3 captured, on
average, more than 50 percent of the total estimated television audience.43
Television stations from around the globe sought to purchase television
footage of the race, as well. By 1986, according to the organizers, the Tour de France emerged as the world’s largest annual televised sporting event and the
third- largest television spectacle overall behind the Summer Olympics and
soccer’s World Cup. Tour organizers estimated that the race’s worldwide po-
tential viewing audience increased from approximately fi fty million in 1980,
to more than 150 million in 1983, and to more than a billion people in seventy-
two countries by 1986. The size of the Tour’s actual worldwide viewership was
likely much smaller than organizers believed. Nevertheless, in 1997, television viewers in 150 countries watched the Tour.44
t h e t o u r ’ s g l o b a l i z i n g a g e n d a
151
The privatization of television led to a radical restructuring of the Tour’s
fi nances. Private broadcasting companies competed fi ercely with one another
to secure broadcast rights contracts for major sporting events like the Tour.
As a result, television rights fees paid to the Société du Tour de France grew
from twelve million francs in 1990 to eighty- fi ve million francs in 1998. These payments represented an increasing portion of the race’s overall budget. In
1960, French television’s payments to the race organizers accounted for only
1.5 percent of the Tour’s projected budget. Rights fees, however, accounted
for 26 percent of the budget in 1992 and for more than a third of the bud-
get in 1998. In 1998, France 2/France 3 was the largest single contributor to
the Tour’s income. Host- town subventions, which accounted for up to half the event’s revenues in the 1940s and 1950s, amounted to only 11 percent
of the Tour’s budget in 1999.45
The emergence of television as the Tour’s primary fi nancial motor mir-
rored trends in other professional sports in France46 and elsewhere. Euro-
pean soccer depended ever more heavily on television- based business mod-
els as media deregulation advanced. In France, team revenues relied heavily
on ticket sales and municipal subsidies until the 1980s. Between 1984 and
2003, the number of hours of soccer broadcast in France ballooned from
989 to 56,118, nearly all of which was on private, subscription television.47
By 2002, television accounted for 51 percent of the First Division / Ligue 1’s
revenues.48 In Britain, soccer match attendance declined by half from the
1950s to the 1970s.49 In 1992, the richest and most competitive clubs split
from the 104- year- old Football League and formed the “Premier League” to
profi t more effectively from the evolving sports marketplace. The new align-
ment included popular, powerful teams like Manchester United, Arsenal,
Liverpool, and Tottenham Hotspur. The Premier League secured lucrative,
worldwide broadcasting contracts. By 2007, 85 percent of Premier League’s
£595 million in revenues came from broadcasting fees.50 Overseas fees rep-
resented 37 percent of all Premier League broadcasting rights contracts
in 2011.51
American sport developed in a different context than in Europe, but with
similar results in the long run. America’s media networks evolved as private,
for- profi t businesses and injected overt commercialism into broadcasting
earlier than in Europe. American law permitted professional sports fran-
chises to collude and engage in monopolistic business practices.52 Fear and
ambivalence shaped American professional sports’ early relationship with
television broadcasting, as the case of baseball illustrates. Attendance at ballparks declined dramatically between 1950 and 1970 as Americans retreated to
the suburbs and spent their leisure time and incomes on other pursuits and
152
c h a p t e r s i x
consumer goods.53 Franchise owners enforced “blackout” rules that forbade
local stations from televising games to boost attendance, to little effect.
Television emerged as baseball’s commercial savior. The gigantic audi-
ences and rights fees generated by the televised World Series changed baseball
owners’ minds. The 1951 World Series drew 70 million viewers, more specta-
tors than had witnessed the event over its entire 48- year history.54 Between
1961 and 1990, television rights fees became the most important component
of baseball revenues. The revenues from Major League Baseball’s domestic
television contracts, divided equally among franchises, rose from $9.4 mil-
lion per year in 1961 to more than $700 million in 2012.55
Tour de France and other sports throughout the Western world. At the same
time, Félix Lévitan emerged as the Tour’s primary decision maker and initi-
ated a process that would transform the race into a global commercial spec-
tacle. Lévitan experimented with the event’s itinerary and invited competi-
tors from new countries to participate in the Tour to enhance the spectacle’s
international appeal. He expanded the Tour’s global television audience and
courted more international race sponsorship. At the same time, the sport of
competitive cycling expanded and the number of non- European professional
riders and races ballooned. Amid these changes, the Tour solidifi ed its posi-
tion at the heart of world cycling.
3. Road Racing Abroad: The American Experience
Road cycling grew into a major professional sport outside Europe beginning
in the 1980s. The story of American attempts to create sustainable, Tour- like
cycling events illustrates the growth of the sport beyond the European cycling
heartland as well as the direct infl uences the Tour exerted on the evolution of professional racing outside France. In the early 1980s, American fascination
with bicycle racing blossomed, as is evidenced by the mini- genre of cycling
fi lms that piqued public interest in the era. The 1979 fi lm Breaking Away became a hit, was nominated for fi ve Oscars, and won an Oscar for Best Origi-
nal Screenplay. The fi lm recounts the coming- of- age story of Dave Stoller,
a Bloomington, Indiana, teenager so obsessed with Italian road racing and
culture that he wore Cinzano- brand racing attire everywhere, rode his Ital-
ian racing bike incessantly, chided his friends and enemies with melodra-
matic but meaningless Italian phrases and gestures, and romanced his love
interest with Italian arias. Breaking Away sparked the birth of a mini- genre of entertainment focused on the melodrama of road racing, including a short-lived, eponymous television series starring pop singer Shaun Cassidy as Dave
t h e t o u r ’ s g l o b a l i z i n g a g e n d a
153
Stoller. Between 1975 and 1
986, the American press periodically mentioned
rumors of an anticipated fi lm version, never realized, of the 1973 Ralph Hurne novel, The Yellow Jersey, about an aging, retired cyclist lured back into competition to help his protégé win the Tour de France. Director Michael Cimino
( The Deer Hunter) spent several summers in France beginning in 1975 scouting locations and planned to shoot scenes during the Tour de France to lend
the fi lm authenticity. Dustin Hoffman followed the Tour for several years
in the early 1980s while preparing to play the lead role before the fi lm’s fi -
nancing fi nally fell through in 1985.56 Other notable and popular road racing
movies in the United States included American Flyers (1985), which starred Kevin Costner and recounted the tale of two brothers training to compete in
a Tour- style “Hell of the West” bicycle race in Colorado;57 director Tim Bur-
ton’s Pee- wee’s Big Adventure (1985), in which the lead character awoke from a dream about winning the Tour de France on his magic, vintage Schwinn to
discover that his beloved bicycle had been stolen; and Les Triplettes de Belleville (2003), an Oscar- nominated, French animated movie that features an orphan, Champion, who trained obsessively for years to compete in the Tour
de France only to be kidnapped during the race by mobsters.
American professional road racing’s rise accompanied the growing in-
terest in competitive cycling and the Tour de France. New, multistage road
races in the United States fashioned themselves after the grand French clas-
sic. Those involved in organizing and fi nancing the new events, including
the Coors Brewing Company, Donald Trump, and chemical giant DuPont,
considered America to be a vast, possibly lucrative, and unexploited mar-
ket for professional cycling. The United States Cycling Federation claimed
that its membership tripled in the 1980s and that by the late 1980s, 85 million Americans considered themselves to be bike riders.58 Len Pettyjohn, a race
promoter and team director whose amateur and professional cyclists partici-
pated in road races “all over the world,” explained, “Cycling in Europe is pla-
teauing, not growing. . . . Europeans see major corporations getting involved
in the United States [and] fear the power in the sport will shift [there].”59
Contemporary American road racing dates its birth to the Coors Classic