Selling the Yellow Jersey

by Eric Reed

  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

  sense of identity that was built on the diversity of experiences in the French

  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