Book Read Free

Selling the Yellow Jersey

Page 25

by Eric Reed


  the city from a backwater administrative seat and sleepy winter resort into an

  important commercial and industrial center.132 Elf- Aquitaine’s colonization

  of the Southwest in the 1950s and 1960s spurred the development of chemical

  and energy fi rms that employed 20 percent of Pau’s industrial workforce.133

  Hosting the Tour became, in some ways, more of a burden than a benefi t

  for Pau’s hotels and restaurants. By the 1970s, many of the downtown hotels

  that lodged the Tour caravan each year had joined national hotel chains. Al-

  though lodging a cycling team during the race’s stay bestowed a measure of

  local recognition, many of Pau’s hotels relied on their national chains to refer customers to them and generate publicity outside the region.134 More signifi cantly, local hotels and restaurants came to depend on business travelers

  rather than on tourists. Hosting the Tour’s caravan became somewhat of an

  inconvenience. Tour planners reserved entire hotels up to a year in advance

  but only for a single night, which often disrupted the travel plans of business people visiting the town. In hotels that lodged cycling teams, Tour organizers

  demanded that owners close their restaurants and other facilities to outside

  customers to allow riders to recuperate and dine in privacy. Frequently, the

  Tour’s entourage requested special security arrangements in their hotels, and

  hotel restaurants had to accommodate the special dietary needs and strange

  dining schedules of the cyclists, which often required hiring additional hotel

  staff during the race’s stay.135 Because of these factors, the Tour’s arrival often disrupted the normal operations of Pau’s hotels and restaurants and resulted

  in lost revenues and business.136

  t h e t o u r i n t h e p r o v i n c e s

  137

  Town offi cials instead used the Tour’s passage to publicize important local

  initiatives to the nation. In 1969 and 1970, Pau cooperated with the nearby

  town of Mourenx to host the Tour. Beginning in 1956, Elf- Aquitaine had

  subsidized the construction of Mourenx as a brand- new, planned, ultra-

  modern urban center to house the thousands of workers at the Lacq produc-

  tion facilities.137 Pau and Mourenx arranged the Tour’s visits to celebrate the close ties between the two towns — as well as between the two towns and

  Elf- Aquitaine — and to acquaint the rest of France with Mourenx. The 1969

  Mourenx fi nish became one of the Tour’s legendary stages: Eddy Merckx’s as-

  tounding victory sealed the fi rst of his fi ve Tour victories and earned Merckx the nickname “Cannibal” in recognition of the way he devoured his opponents on the road to Mourenx. Pau employed the Tour’s media coverage on

  other occasions, as well, such as to announce the grand openings of the Palais

  des Sports athletic complex in 1991, the Zénith concert hall in 1992, and the

  Palais des Congrès conference facility in 1999.

  In the postwar era, as its economy transformed, Pau enjoyed a prolonged

  “love affair” with the Tour that grew beyond commercialism and touristic

  promotion. The race’s prominent place in Pau’s summer sporting calendar

  exemplifi ed how local popular culture evolved. The Palois abandoned the

  English- inspired sporting culture that had been a central component of the

  local identity. A comparison of a visitor’s guidebook produced by Pau’s tour-

  ism offi ce in 1932 to promotional materials and press releases disseminated in recent years reveals how the local populace embraced a new sporting culture

  after the Second World War in which modern, popular sports like cycling,

  soccer, basketball, and rugby fi gured highly. In its 1932 guidebook, Pau’s tourism offi ce devoted two of the twelve chapters to sport. The guidebook fea-

  tured lengthy descriptions of Pau’s English- inspired, amateur sporting scene,

  which was dominated by the wealthy elite that wintered in Pau. A discussion

  of the town’s famous fox hunts and hunting- dog kennels spanned two pages,

  and the guide featured several pages of photographs depicting the hunts and

  the hunting grounds. The guide devoted two pages to winter horse- jumping

  competitions in Pau and two pages to the town’s Wright Brothers – founded

  fl ying school. It also included descriptions of Pau’s annual dog show, the nu-

  merous golf courses in the area, local tennis courts, and polo competitions

  organized by the “foreign colony.”138

  By the 1990s, the focus of Pau’s sporting culture had shifted to predomi-

  nantly popular, professional sports. Locally produced promotional materials

  trumpeted the victories of Pau’s professional teams such as the Élan Béarnais,

  a four- time champion of the French basketball league since the 1970s; the Sec-

  tion Paloise, a three- time champion of the French professional rugby league;

  138

  c h a p t e r f i v e

  and the Football Club de Pau, which climbed to the French fi rst- division soc-

  cer league in 1995. By 2014, the city’s offi cial Internet site included no mention of fox hunting, fl ying schools, or polo. The site listed the Tour de France in fi rst place, however, just before the Grand Prix automobile race, as part of

  Pau’s local sporting heritage and declared that the Béarnais capital is “on the podium” of towns that have welcomed the Tour the most frequently.139

  *

  The history of the Tour in its host towns sheds light on how Pau and Brest

  engaged the broader world and participated in the construction of France’s

  evolving national culture. Eugen Weber formulated a classic model of how

  France’s contemporary national culture emerged during the Third Republic.

  In Weber’s analysis, the centralized state played the key role in transforming

  France’s traditional, regional cultures and in disseminating modern, “Pari-

  sian” culture to the provinces by building schools, railroads, a modern army,

  and a politically active and republican- minded electorate.140

  Although historians correctly stress the crucial function of Paris and the

  centralized state as disseminators of common cultural practices and tradi-

  tions, other forces also shaped France’s popular culture. The case studies of

  Pau and Brest illustrate how provincial communities contextualized a na-

  tional cultural institution in different ways and used it for their own ends.

  In Brest, a town ravaged by war, the Tour developed into a novel cultural

  conduit and mode of commercial communication. Younger generations of

  provincial Breton leaders used the race’s ever- growing media coverage to

  promote their integration into the national, European, and global economies

  in new ways. Pau valued the Tour as a tool to restore its position in the evolving global tourism industry. As Pau developed a more diversifi ed economy,

  the original commercial purpose of the Tour receded to the background. The

  Palois paid the Tour to visit each year because the community cherished the

  event as part of its annual summer festival calendar.

  The Tour should be understood as a national and global phenomenon

  that was largely experienced — and constructed — on a local level. The con-

  tinuous and complex negotiations between the Parisian organizers and the

  stage towns, which played themselves out in the newspapers, chambers of

  commerce, and city halls of twenty different French cities each year,
heavily

  infl uenced the Tour’s development. The construction of the Tour’s commer-

  cial and cultural traditions was a continuous but rather uneven process that

  was strongly infl uenced by the changing interests of local communities and

  that was intimately tied to their evolving identities and economies.

  6

  The Tour’s Globalizing Agenda in the Television Age

  Greg LeMond was the fi rst non- European to win the Tour de France. French

  television captured the moment in 1986 when the young, dirty- blond Ne-

  vadan mounted the podium on the Champs- Élysées. Paris mayor Jacques

  Chirac awkwardly squeezed LeMond’s hand, passed him a yellow jersey, and

  helped the new champion pull the shirt over his torso. To LeMond’s right,

  second- place fi nisher and teammate Bernard Hinault, the French fi ve- time

  winner of the Tour, grinned sheepishly, shuffl ed from foot to foot, stood

  with hands on hips staring at the ground, and chatted distractedly with by-

  standers as the American national anthem played over the loudspeaker. The

  French television announcer, Robert Chapatte, recognized that the Ameri-

  can’s victory was an “historic moment” that heralded a potential passing

  of the torch to a new, foreign generation. The announcers invited a former

  LeMond- Hinault teammate, Frenchman Marc Madiot, to comment during

  the ceremony. Madiot concluded that although LeMond prevailed, the 1986

  Tour should have had “two victors” because Hinault had “done at least as

  much as Greg to win it.” “We have to respect the American, I think,” con-

  ceded Chapatte.1 The reactions to LeMond’s crowning moment captured the

  ambivalence with which the French faced professional road cycling’s ongo-

  ing globalization and the prospect of declining French fortunes in the Tour.

  Following Hinault’s fi nal yellow jersey in 1985, the French endured decades

  during which no French rider won the Tour. The American rider’s victory

  confi rmed, however, that France’s national bicycle race remained in the van-

  guard of the sport’s globalization.

  Globalization in the postwar era instigated a new kind of interconnect-

  edness, especially in the Western world. The rise of novel regimes of mass

  consumption and leisure, growing economic interdependence, ever- more-

  140

  c h a p t e r s i x

  complex, voluminous, and intertwined networks of economic and cultural

  interaction, and the maturation of new technologies such as airline travel,

  telecommunications, and the Internet sparked this sea change. These trends

  initiated quantitative and qualitative changes in the way that people inter-

  acted across distances.2

  International contact and interaction became more deeply embedded

  in everyday life in the electronic age. Global mass tourism and increasing

  migration in the postwar era created new human diasporas and enhanced

  awareness of cultural and social practices among disparate societies. At the

  same time, electronic mass media and communications facilitated instant

  conversation among people separated by national and natural boundaries

  and allowed them to consume media content simultaneously, in real time.

  Furthermore, the mass consumer and leisure revolutions that characterized

  France’s “Thirty Glorious Years” occurred around the world, albeit at differ-

  ent times and paces in different regions, with the result that global networks

  of business, marketing, production, and consumption broadened and deep-

  ened. Together, these phenomena led to ever- growing exchanges of ideas,

  language, taste, practices, and culture that transpired beyond the contexts of

  locality, nation, or region.

  Sport held a signifi cant place in the emerging global cultural economy

  after the Second World War. Communication technologies like television

  and the Internet transformed well- established international sporting events

  like the World Cup soccer tournament and the Olympic Games into inti-

  mate shared experiences for hundreds of millions of spectators around the

  planet.3 Phenomena such as South Koreans in Philadelphia watching the 1988

  Seoul Olympics via satellite feed epitomize the growing disjuncture between

  place and experience brought about by globalization, as well as the signifi cant place of sport in fostering the novel networks of identity and community

  that have become possible in the digital age.4 Moreover, sports, like other

  industries, took on global proportions in the postwar era. The development

  of worldwide broadcasting engendered new transnational business structures

  and relationships of commercial interest among athletics, industry, and the

  media that linked professional sport throughout the world. Increasingly fl uid

  international exchanges of athletes accompanied such commercial linkages,

  especially in global sports like soccer, baseball, and cycling.5

  The Tour’s evolution as a business and sporting event mirrored these

  trends, and the event’s organizers pursued an agenda that took advantage

  of them. As the television economy of professional sports matured, Tour or-

  ganizers crafted the race into a made- for- television spectacle that showered

  publicity on its biggest corporate sponsors, continually expanded the event’s

  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

  141

  viewership, and transformed the Tour into a worldwide television event. As

  these transitions occurred, some of the characteristics that had differentiated the business of French sport from those of other Western nations disappeared.

  The context of the nation did not disappear, however, as the Tour became

  a global phenomenon.6 The Tour’s particularly French character, qualities,

  structures, and cultural symbolism were mimicked, reproduced, and dis-

  seminated outside France. The race’s masters exerted a powerful infl uence on

  the rules, ethics, competitive structure, commercialization, and scheduling

  of professional road cycling, which by the 1980s had become a global profes-

  sional sport with numerous Tour- inspired races around the world to fi ll the

  competition calendar. During this time, too, Tour organizers courted partici-

  pants and sponsors from regions outside the heart of European professional

  cycling, including the United States, Central and South America, Eastern Eu-

  rope, and Australia. Paradoxically, this infl ux of new blood brought an end to the overwhelming French predominance of the Tour and its commerce but at

  the same time helped to promote the association of Frenchness with profes-

  sional cycling outside Europe.

  1. The Persistent Power of the Press

  Until the late twentieth century, the printed press remained the medium in

  which most spectators outside France followed the Tour. The medium con-

  tinued to play a powerful role in establishing and disseminating the event’s

  quintessentially French image and character around the world. The fact that

  extensive television coverage of the race did not exist, except in a handful

  of European markets, until the late 1980s helps to explain this trend. Tour

  press coverage outside France expanded signifi cantly and developed greater

  nuance and complexity after the Second World War. A
n examination of

  English- language press in the United States and Britain reveals that mass

  print media conveyed deep knowledge of the Tour to readers and fans on

  two continents. In other words, in their daily newspapers and magazines,

  foreign readers followed race narratives, but also learned about the event’s

  rituals, stars, history, controversies, commercial structure, and central place in French popular culture. Thus, the press played a central role in developing

  abroad a fairly refi ned, profound understanding of the event and its mean-

  ing to the French. This deep knowledge of the Tour abroad promoted the

  association of the race, as well as its values, meanings and rituals, with all of professional cycling. Only in the late 1980s and 1990s did television and the

  Internet rival newspapers as the global Tour’s primary media outlet.

  In the postwar era, foreign press coverage of the Tour resembled more

  142

  c h a p t e r s i x

  and more that found in French newspapers. Before the Second World War,

  newspapers outside professional cycling’s core countries in Western Europe

  wrote copy using wired or mailed press releases and fi rsthand accounts of-

  fered by shipbound travelers months after the fact. Frequently, wired or

  mailed press releases were written by Paris- based general correspondents

  who were not sports reporters, did not witness the race in person, and had

  little expert knowledge of the Tour. After the war, hundreds of foreign jour-

  nalists joined the Tour caravan and followed the race in person for extended

  periods of time.7 Often, they rode in the same vehicles, slept in the same

  hotels, ate in the same restaurants, and took in the same French radio and

  television coverage of the event as their French counterparts. Just as the Tour and other French road races were the proving grounds on which the cream

  of world professional cycling honed its skills and mettle, the media caravan of the Tour became an academy in which foreign journalists gained a profound

  understanding of the event and its French journalistic conventions, which

  they then conveyed to their readership at home.8

  Journalists offered their English- language readers extensive commentar-

  ies on the complex, impenetrable tactics and strategies of cycling, a sport that, to the uninitiated, appears to have little of either. Such commentaries developed in foreign readers a basic understanding of an inherently arcane sport.

 

‹ Prev