by Eric Reed
into brand recognition and profi t for his team sponsors. For example, bicycle
manufacturer Stella hired young talent Louison Bobet in 1946 and developed
him into a three- time Tour winner in the early 1950s. Bobet’s successes and
growing celebrity helped Stella to grow from a small manufacturer with a
regional customer base into a nationally recognized brand of bicycles with
a nationwide clientele.32 Famous cyclists were especially important to the
* The slogan “It’s Toasted” was printed in English. L’Auto, July 2, 1930.
t h e f r e n c h s c h o o l o f c y c l i n g
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extra- sportif fi rms which began to sponsor teams in the 1950s. A star cyclist’s fame was more valuable to extra- sportif fi rms than his victories, since such businesses had no connection to the sport other than sponsorship.
Because of these factors, the biggest stars and their teams participated
in intensive promotional campaigns, often to the detriment of their train-
ing. Twelve- time Tour participant Raphaël Geminiani retired and became
the manager of penmaker Bic’s racing team. He recalled that publicity was
more important than endurance conditioning during his team’s early- season
workouts in southern France in the mid- 1960s. One of Bic’s marketing execu-
tives, Christian Darras, attended most of the camp and treated the Bic team
as “publicity billboards” rather than world- class athletes and insisted that
the riders attend “interminable” publicity photo sessions. In Darras’s mind,
Bic’s cyclists served as the company’s public ambassadors, and he implored
the team to “Think Bic, Be Bic!”33 Raymond Poulidor’s manager, Antonin
Magne, attributed his young rider’s infamous failures in the Tour to a lack of
preparation due to the heavy “commercial obligations” placed upon Poulidor
by team sponsors Mercier and British Petroleum in the 1960s.34
Because of the singular importance of the sport’s stars, professional bicycle
racing developed a body of rules and strategies that was unique to the sports
world. Prestigious races usually offered prizes for the top teams but primarily rewarded individual achievement and victory. Furthermore, although racers
vied for a myriad of individual prizes and titles during important competi-
tions, the media lionized riders who won the overall titles in the year’s biggest races. As such, the goal for each team at the start of a racing season was to
devote all of its collective energies to ensuring the team leader’s victory in
famous races, the most prestigious of which was the Tour de France.
Top riders demanded large salaries, and the vast disparities in compensa-
tion between famous riders and their domestiques, or “servant” support riders, underscored the powerful position of stars in the French cycling world.
According to Mercier- BP team manager Antonin Magne, sponsors typically
offered a fi rst- year professional rider a salary of 25,000 francs per month
in 1959. Meanwhile, French stars such as Tour winners Louison Bobet and
Jacques Anquetil earned salaries of up to 300,000 francs per month by 1957,
which was nearly double the salary of a senior business manager and almost
nine times the salary earned by an unskilled worker.35 Star cyclists also gar-
nered appearance fees when they competed in some of the thousands of local
races staged throughout the country. Despite these disparities, the profes-
sional and fi nancial interest of all cyclists lay in perpetuating the star system.
The victory of a star cyclist often led to more prize money for the whole team, including the domestiques, higher salaries from team owners who hoped to
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preserve a winning formula, or even more lucrative contract offers from a
competing sponsor eager to hire away a successful champion or his best sup-
porting riders.
The Tour de France remained at the heart of the star system after the Second
World War. The event was the stage upon which champions built their profes-
sional reputations. The race forged new champions or reaffi rmed the domi-
nation of existing ones. It allowed the public to cheer for their favorite stars in person and as they watched on their television screens. Riders’ Tour victories
made them famous, enhanced their popular appeal, and increased their mar-
ket value. Yet many professional riders and their sponsors believed that the
Tour’s pre- 1962 national team formula undermined the French star system.
The problem was that a dynamic similar to that of professional teams gov-
erned the national team’s racing strategy. Ever since the creation of the Tour’s national team format in 1930, the squad manager selected one or two cyclists
to challenge for the Tour’s title and instituted a strict hierarchy whereby all the members worked to ensure the victory of the chosen riders. The other
national team cyclists, each of whom was a champion and a star in his own
right, subordinated their own chances for glory to those of the team leaders.36
In the minds of sponsors and many top riders, this formula diminished the
commercial value of cycling’s stars — at least the ones that did not win the
race. Team sponsors also incurred substantial opportunity costs when their
riders competed in the national team Tours, since they lost the services of
their stars for nearly a month at the height of cycling’s racing season.
Goddet’s decision to resurrect the corporate team formula in 1961 allowed
the Tour’s organizers, the media, and sponsors to exploit athletic celebrity
even more effectively. After 1961, each French (and foreign) cycling star had
his own team. France’s bicycling heroes competed against one another, as
well as stars from other countries — riders from fourteen European countries
participated in the Tours of the 1960s — which increased the sheer number of
champions vying for the yellow jersey and piqued fan interest in the Tour.37
Each cycling star had the opportunity to imprint his “dramatic signature”
on the Tour, since he alone — with the help of his dedicated, contract- bound
domestiques— created his own victories and his own glory. The successes of the post- 1961 formula underscored the commercial importance of the star
system to Tour and the sport of cycling in general.
4. Peasant Stars of the Tour de France in the Postwar Era
Even in the television age as overall circulation declined, French fans pur-
chased L’Équipe and other daily newspapers to read in- depth analyses of
t h e f r e n c h s c h o o l o f c y c l i n g
93
results and expand their knowledge of their favorite sports and champions.
Edouard Seidler, L’Équipe’s chief editor in the mid- 1970s, pointed out that sales generated 80 percent of L’Équipe’s revenues, as compared to only 20 percent generated by advertising.38 Seidler asserted, “Whether they are from the
world of politics, art, or sports, stars sell . . . [and their stories] guarantee high sales for the sporting press.”39 Thus, creating and glorifying stars and
profi ting from their celebrity were commercial imperatives. As L’Équipe and other sports- related publications fashioned a role for themselves as providers of supplementary, in- depth, behind- the- scenes, biographical coverage of
cycling’s stars, other media followed suit.
The sport developed a c
omplex public relations system that allowed fa-
mous champions to interact with their fans directly in television and the
press and in the process increase their commercial value. Television created
a more intimate relationship between famous riders and the French public,
since the new medium allowed fans to see and hear their favorite riders and to
witness their triumphs and defeats fi rsthand and in real time. Star cyclists —
often with the help of personal managers and team coaches — participated
more and more in the creation and dissemination of their public personas by
choreographing encounters with journalists and by writing autobiographies
in which they discussed their private lives and professional careers. Famous
riders began to lead completely public lives, and their private worlds increas-
ingly became the public’s domain.
Because of their enormous visibility, celebrity bicycle racers emerged as
contested symbols of change in France, for good or for ill. The public images
of famous Tour stars were composed of distilled virtues, fl aws, and contradic-
tions inherent in the French as they endured the upheavals of the twentieth
century. The dramas, triumphs, and tragedies that played out on the roads of
the Tour, as well as in the personal lives of its stars, were allegories steeped in the dreams, confl icts, and fears that accompanied change and modernity
in the French imagination.
In the period before the Second World War, the Tour often served as a
metaphorical arena for the class confl ict endemic in the French Third Repub-
lic’s cultural and political fabric. The hyperbolic fame of the Tour’s greatest French stars, many of whom came from working- class backgrounds, challenged the bourgeois- dominated status quo that race founder Henri Des-
grange intended the Tour to celebrate. Desgrange considered cycling to be
an important tool for the moral instruction of the working class at a time
when industrialization and urbanization encouraged moral degeneration
and threatened to undermine traditional social authority. Desgrange called
the cyclists “pedal workers” ( ouvriers de la pédale) and often depicted bicycle
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racing as a form of industrial labor rather than as play or leisure. He charac-
terized Tour participants as mechanical beings and drew analogies between
cycling and the workplace. Cyclists also couched the Tour in the language of
class confl ict and workers’ struggle for rights in the workplace, as evidenced by the Pélissier brothers’ “galley slaves of the road” scandal in 1924. Public
dialogues about cycling after the Second World War continued to revolve
around the characterization of cycling as labor, especially as more and more
doping scandals erupted and fed skepticism of the seemingly superhuman
performances of top cyclists.40
After the Second World War, the media and riders, using newspapers, au-
tobiographies, and television, created new character archetypes that became
standard points of reference in the construction of cyclists’ public images.
“Peasant” or “provincial” character traits became the building blocks of the
images crafted by many postwar Tour champions, and almost every French
Tour winner alluded frequently to his provincial roots. The media developed
a lexicon that endowed famous cyclists with provincial personas. Nostalgia
and the popular taste for “authenticity” may account for this shift. As France
became a more urbanized society after the war, the French exhibited a nos-
talgic fascination with the disappearing provincial lifestyle.41 In part, this
trend resulted from the rapid growth of mass tourism after the war. Growing
numbers of French men and women sought refuge from city life by taking
rural vacations and purchasing provincial vacation and retirement homes.
The peasant became a powerful cultural icon that connected the French to
an idealized vision of their heritage and to a romanticized value system that
was threatened by modernization.42 The peasant icon also served commer-
cial purposes: increasingly, businesses capitalized on the popular idealiza-
tion of peasant life by creating products, marketing campaigns, and vacation
packages based on peasant or provincial stereotypes and themes.43 More and
more, the French craved authentic experiences and sensations, whether that
meant booking Club Méd vacations to exotic yet fabricated locales or cheer-
ing for heroes like Raymond Poulidor who, in the public imagination, em-
bodied traditional, rural worldviews and lifestyles.44
Tour de France winners often pioneered new methods of image making in
the sports world. Italians Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali dominated the early
postwar Tours. The two rivals competed ferociously with one another in races
throughout Europe. The Italian champions introduced to French cycling a
new public relations tool, the champion’s autobiography. In 1949, the elder
Italian, Bartali, published his memoirs in France, and Coppi followed his ex-
ample a year later.45 Their autobiographies appeared at the heights of their
racing careers: Bartali won his second Tour title in 1948, ten years after his
t h e f r e n c h s c h o o l o f c y c l i n g
95
fi rst win, while Coppi won the race in 1949 and 1952. Many French racing stars followed the Italians’ example and the champion’s autobiography became a
staple tool for famous cyclists to establish or refi ne their public images.
Coppi rose to prominence during the Second World War and was the
prototype celebrity for France’s postwar cycling stars. The Italian was one of
the fi rst foreign athletes to be embraced as a star in postwar France.46 In 1940, Coppi won the Tour of Italy. Two years later he set the one- hour world speed
record, a mark that stood unbeaten for fourteen years. By 1950, the year that
he wrote his autobiography, Coppi’s victories and fame had made him, in his
own words, the “greatest cycling champion of all time.” In his autobiography,
however, the Italian champion hoped to unveil to his fans “another Fausto
Coppi, one who has suffered, who used to be cold and hungry, who was with-
out hope.”47 In hyperbole- laden, melodramatic style, Coppi described his
childhood in poverty- stricken, rural Italy, his rags- to- riches tale of athletic success, and his idyllic family life. Coppi was born in Castellania, a rural village in Italy’s Piedmont region, in 1919. His father, a “true Piedmont native,
as poor as Job, as courageous as Julius Caesar,” was an agricultural laborer.48
As a young boy, Coppi rode his bike every day to the nearby village of Novi-
Ligure to work as an apprentice in a butcher shop. The Italian teenager’s love
of bicycling drew him to enter races. Coppi insisted that he had not been
seduced by wealth and fame and remained a humble, moral man who was
deeply attached to his Piedmont village and who used his wealth to care for
his loved ones. He described his courtship and marriage to Bruna Coppi, “a
country girl from my province who was more frightened than attracted by
my fame,” as “the most beautiful story in the world.”49
The 1951 autobiography of Louison Bobet, who dominated French cycling
for much of the 1950s, conform
ed in many ways to the formula established by
Coppi. Bobet was born in 1925 in Saint- Méen, a small village of 2,600 inhabi-
tants near Rennes. Bobet’s father was a baker, but young Louison dreamed of
racing bikes. A chance meeting with his idol, Breton cyclist Jean Fontenay, in
1938 after a small race in Saint- Méen, inspired Bobet to pursue a career as a
cyclist. By the time he wrote his autobiography, Bobet was arguably the best
rider in France: he was a two- time French national champion, had won or
placed highly in most of the important national and international competi-
tions, had captured several stages of the Tour de France, and had been named
“Sportsman Number One” for 1951 by But et Club magazine.50 Despite his
growing fame and wealth and his well- known love of fast cars and airplanes,
Bobet insisted that he remained a Breton and a small- town provincial at heart.
He described his hometown as “the most beautiful village in the world: it’s the one where I feel like I’m home, where I was born, where I know everybody.”51
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After Bartali, Coppi, and Bobet, almost every French Tour champion of
the postwar era wrote an autobiography. Many of the autobiographies were
highly formulaic and offered the public detailed but often facile portraits of
a racer’s childhood, education, home life, and athletic triumphs. Star cyclists began their autobiographies by detailing their humble upbringings (often in
poor peasant families in the provinces) and discussing their formal schooling
(many obtained certifi cats d’aptitude professionnelle, or licenses to practice a manual trade). The major dramatic turning point of each cyclist’s personal
narrative occurred at the moment when he decided to eschew his family’s
expectations, throw caution to the wind, and pursue a career in professional
cycling. Each star analyzed his great triumphs, described his personal back-
ground, discussed his attitudes toward professionalism, and paradoxically,
offered refl ections on the diffi culty of maintaining his privacy amid celebrity.
The growing importance of personal managers as business and public
relations agents for top riders in the 1950s and 1960s may account for the
similarities among the autobiographies of the postwar Tour stars. Before the