places for themselves in it. Their stories demonstrate that the construction
of the Tour’s commercial and cultural traditions was a continuous but rather
uneven process that was strongly infl uenced by the changing interests, econo-
mies, and identities of small communities during the twentieth century.
6
i n t r o d u c t i o n
3. Celebrity Athletes and “Frenchness” in a Global Age
Finally, the Tour’s history offers an opportunity to explore the powers of ce-
lebrity in the global age. The race’s stars were instrumental in globalizing
road cycling in the twentieth century and helped endow the sport with a par-
ticularly French character. This process began early in the twentieth century.
The Tour stood at the pinnacle of a “French School” of cycling clubs, com-
petitions, and business interests that identifi ed, cultivated, and graduated
into stardom many of world cycling’s greatest heroes. Because of the French
School’s preeminence on the world stage, the French cycling establishment
furnished much of the language, competitive and commercial framework,
and celebrity heroes that became common cultural points of reference for
cycling’s emerging global networks of competitors, fans, and consumers.
In France, the star power of the race’s heroes helped to maintain the
event’s enduring popular and commercial appeal. French cycling stars also
served as cultural and social sounding boards as the French struggled to con-
textualize rapid change in turbulent times.13 Great riders appeared to embody
certain universal, enduring ideals of sporting “Frenchness”14— especially the ability to perform superhuman athletic feats with panache and endure un-imaginable suffering and competitive martyrdom heroically. Yet as the times
changed, such heroic meanings were constantly contested, sometimes ap-
peared anachronistic or irrelevant, and often confl icted with harsh, unsavory
realities like cycling’s cult of celebrity, hyper- commercialism, and pervasive doping. As the Tour globalized, so, too, did the contested meanings and legacies of its heroes.
Tour heroes became global stars and shaped international cycling cul-
ture. For example, as Anglophone audiences read about the Tour triumphs
and controversies surrounding French star Jacques Anquetil, the world’s
dominant rider in the 1950s and 1960s, they learned much about the nature
of French athletic heroism and its tenets. Many of these readers joined the
sport’s burgeoning global fan base. Even as the demographic cross section
of professional cycling globalized beginning in the 1970s, and even as French
riders won fewer and fewer races against international competitors, France
remained the epicenter of professional development of cyclists and the pre-
eminent proving ground for future champions. Tour winners Greg LeMond
and Lance Armstrong, who captured a combined ten Tour titles after 1986,
were not merely exported American athletes who dominated a French com-
petition. Rather, they were cyclists trained in France, forged into champions
on French country roads, and returned as heroes to the United States, where
i n t r o d u c t i o n
7
their victories helped to popularize the race. All the while, Tour organizers
sold television coverage of their triumphs to American broadcasting net-
works and used sponsorship funds from American companies like Coca- Cola
and Nike to pay for the race. These trends were symptomatic of the globaliza-
tion of a quintessentially French cultural phenomenon. The stories of these
cyclists serve as case studies in celebrity in the global era, and how athletes and mass media shaped visions of athletic excellence in the Atlantic world.
1
Sport, Bicycling, and Globalization in the
Print Era: Convergences and Divergences
The Tour de France was the greatest of the early twentieth century’s bicy-
cle racing spectacles. The race was also one of the few professional sporting
events that spectators could watch free of charge with their friends, family,
and neighbors along country roads, in town squares, or even from the front
doors of their homes. Writer Colette, in 1912, described the roadside as a
“family picnic blanket” for the hundreds of spectators watching the Tour pass
through the Paris suburbs in the last stage of the race.1 Nearly a century later, Jacques Goddet, the Tour’s organizer for nearly a half century, and important
sponsors continued to characterize the spectacle as a “family event.”2 The
author’s own experience in 1999 standing at “Dutch Corner” amid hundreds
of raucous, orange- clad Dutch cycling fans as Lance Armstrong and his chal-
lengers toiled up the steep switchbacks of the Alpe d’Huez an arm’s length
away confi rmed the special character of the Tour. It is a singularly intimate
sporting spectacle with no physical barriers between the spectators and the
action.
Nevertheless, only a tiny handful of people — a few hundred journalists,
race organizers, sponsors, and racing team personnel— see the entire Tour de
France in person. The Tour has always been a spectacle that most fans follow
from start to fi nish only in newspapers or on television. The media audience
of the race has surpassed the number of roadside spectators since the Tour’s
fi rst days.3 In the new millennium, Tour organizers claim an annual potential
audience of two billion telespectators in 170 countries, although the number
of actual viewers is much smaller.4
During the “print era” of the event, from 1903 to the Second World War,
the French experienced the Tour in an increasingly simultaneous time frame
as more and more of them read about it in their daily newspapers. At this
s p o r t , b i c y c l i n g , a n d g l o b a l i z a t i o n i n t h e p r i n t e r a 9
time, too, the press lay at the heart of the Tour’s commercial strategies. It
was through newspaper coverage and print advertising that the race orga-
nizers, bicycle manufacturers, sponsors, host towns, and cyclists associated
with the event reached their audiences and reaped publicity, profi ts, sales,
and celebrity. The Tour stood at the heart of an ever- expanding community
of fan readers upon whose patronage the event’s commercial stakeholders
depended. The Tour’s evolution in its early years demonstrates how the mass
press helped to establish modern regimes of consumerism and leisure in
France.
The Tour’s history is one example of the new kind of interconnectedness
that arose during the industrial era thanks to the rise of mass media and the
increasingly rapid exchange of goods, services, people, and culture across
vast distances. Similar, convergent processes were underway in France and
elsewhere that fueled the emergence of modern, global sporting culture into
which the Tour was born. Millions across the globe rode bikes, played soc-
cer and baseball, and became spectators and fans of the professional sports
that established themselves at the same time. But, of course, no “world head-
quarters” for globalization existed. Local histories of sport diverged, despite burgeoning interconnectedness and the emergence of common athletic practices and structures. Communities,
nations, and regions catalyzed the glob-
al ization process as they managed their interactions with the broader world
in accordance with their local desires, outlooks, and commercial or political
imperatives. Furthermore, as the pace and scale of global interactions esca-
lated over time, local practices and identities defi ned themselves and evolved in relation to such interactions. Despite the perceived homogenizing effects
of exchange in the modern era — such as the adoption of common practices,
language, and work and leisure regimes — often globalization reaffi rmed the
sacrosanct position of the local.
1. Modern Convergences
The symbiotic relationship between mass consumption, mass leisure, and
mass production drove the industrialization process forward and instigated
a sea change in leisure and labor throughout the modernizing world. The
emergence of modern sport across the globe beginning in the late nineteenth
century illustrates these convergent trends, and not just in France. As millions began to ride bicycles and play soccer, baseball, basketball, and other sports, industries arose to satisfy the mass demand for sporting goods. Modern sport
began as an urban phenomenon. Inhabitants of expanding cities spent more
and more of their increasing cash incomes on new leisure pursuits, including
10
c h a p t e r o n e
buying tickets to sporting events. Both trends spurred the rise of commer-
cialized spectatorship and athletic professionalism. More people traveled for
work and play. In the process they disseminated their culture, world views,
and leisure practices, including their sports, across distances. The history of modern sport, then, is tied to the broader commercialization of mass leisure
culture that has taken place since the Industrial Revolution.5
Newspapers played a key role in these transformations. The mass press
taught their readers about new sport and leisure activities. The press encour-
aged the practice of modern athletics and, through the advertisements they
published, dictated consumer tastes and desires and stimulated mass con-
sumption of sporting goods. In these ways, the press fostered sporting com-
munities where none existed. American baseball historians, for example, have
argued that journalists’ invention in the mid- nineteenth century of common
statistical measures such as batting averages and pitching earned run averages
established a common language that could be spoken and understood even
by casual fans in and outside the ballpark. Fans followed the games in ab-
sentia thanks to the printed box score, a statistical narrative of how the game played out over time as well as the individual contributions of each player to
the contest. The new baseball language created a common frame of reference
that allowed supporters of teams in different parts of America to talk to each
other about the sport in meaningful ways. It also stimulated the development
of a self- referential, historical understanding of baseball, since reporters and fans could compare, contrast, and argue about players and teams of different eras using standardized statistical measures.6 Today, baseball is played on four continents and its unique statistical system and lexicon provide a common frame of reference and sporting language for the sport’s fans and players
around the world.
More broadly, the press helped to constitute new kinds of communities
and connections among people where none existed before.7 The rise of mod-
ern communications systems, including the mass press, since the Industrial
Revolution facilitated increasingly rapid and complex exchanges of ideas,
languages, technologies, information, and culture. Important cultural and
psychological changes also accompanied the elaboration of new communica-
tions structures. Scholars have analyzed extensively the centrality of the mass press in fostering modern national political identities — that reading, especially newspaper reading, helped to engender a consciousness of belonging
to a community that shared a common heritage and destiny and that experi-
enced a common history simultaneously, even though most members of the
nation never came in physical contact with one another. The development of
these new political identities accompanied and helped to spur the process of
s p o r t , b i c y c l i n g , a n d g l o b a l i z a t i o n i n t h e p r i n t e r a 11
nation building that has gone on since the political and economic revolutions
of the late eighteenth century.8 Sport and sporting competition embodied the
emergent sense of the imagined national community and identity in many
Western societies as the nation- and empire- building process moved forward
in the nineteenth century.9 Even more, increasing specialization and com-
mercialization of the press industry — including the rise of niche periodicals like those dedicated to sports — in the late nineteenth century helped to constitute new, increasingly specialized, transnational communities of readers
based on common political interest and cultural outlooks.10 By the turn of
the twentieth century, the feeling that technology and imperialism had con-
densed the world and erased the perceived distances among people created
a feeling that Westerners existed in an “expanded living space” that included
much of the globe.11
Sport occupied an important place in this increasingly interconnected
world. Imperialism and expanding travel and educational networks seeded
new sports around the globe and sparked unanticipated athletic and cul-
tural exchanges. In the Francophone world, sport helped engender a shared
imperial diaspora. Philip Dine argues that the development of modern,
European- style sporting culture after 1870 in Algeria — a colony annexed to
metropolitan France in 1834 — facilitated the “emergence of [a] self- aware
and self-
assertive settler culture in colonial Algeria.”12 European sports,
brought by colonists and appropriated by North Africans, became memes
in a perceived “pan- Mediterranean culture” and touchstones of postcolo-
nial reconciliation and lingering animosities between France and its former
colony after Algerian independence in 1962.13
The British, too, carried sports like cricket, soccer, and rugby with them
as they expanded their formal and informal empires in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. It was believed that playing sports like cricket
and introducing them to imperial subjects would instill in British males the
manly discipline necessary to rule the empire, create a cultural bond that
would hold the empire together in the competitive era of “New Imperialism,”
and cultivate in Britain’s imperial subjects the moral character necessary to
achieve the “civilizing mission.”14 Beyond the formal empire, British busi-
nessmen and bureaucrats brought soccer to nations that had signifi cant com-
mercial links to the United Kingdom — Argentina, Uruguay, Switzerland,
Denmark, the Netherlands, and France.15 Tourism and migration also fi gured
highly in the spread of British sports to other societies. British expatriates and tourists brought rugby to the French capital and provinces. British subjects
living in Paris established the f
i rst French rugby club in 1872 and the “English
12
c h a p t e r o n e
Colony” of wealthy tourists who wintered in Pau, in southwestern France,
established the section Palois rugby club and supplied many of its players until the Great War.16 Expanding education and travel networks also facilitated the
informal proliferation of new sports. Cuban students who studied in Missis-
sippi introduced baseball to Havana in the late 1850s. By the 1890s, the depth
of Cuban baseball talent was so profound that dozens of Cuban baseballers
played on American professional teams.17
In such trends lie the roots of contemporary global society. The long-
term social and cultural reconfi gurations that accompanied the rise of the
mass press in the nineteenth century began the process of uncoupling the
sense of community from a physical location, an important shift that under-
lay the development of national communities and a global consciousness.
The press and, later, other mass media also facilitated the constitution and
reconstitution of novel cultural and social networks and communities that
transcended barriers of nations, time, and distance. More and more of these
new communities developed around the emerging leisure and sports culture
in modernizing nations.18
Sports that in the twentieth century became global ones with standard-
ized rules, business practices, and transnational fan communities found their
origins in nineteenth- century local settings. Soccer, the twentieth century’s
most popular sport, was originally the pastime of English public school boys,
whose alumni codifi ed the rules of the game in London in 1863. By the early
twentieth century, soccer clubs, associations, and leagues using the English-
style rules had been established across the planet.19 Baseball was codifi ed in New York City in the 1840s by lower- middle- class merchants, clerks, fi re-fi ghters, and coopers who enjoyed the “American Pastime” on a rented fi eld
in Hoboken, New Jersey.20 By the late nineteenth century, baseball was played
widely in North America, the Caribbean, and Japan, spread by both Ameri-
can and Cuban travelers and refugees.21
The history of the bicycle illustrates many of these same convergent