by Eric Reed
Perhaps most perplexing to new fans of the Tour and other multistage races
is that competitors rarely race their hardest or pedal their fastest. Even top
stars vying for the Tour crown spend most of the three- week event tucked
safely behind their teammates and exert themselves only for brief stretches of
time during a handful of the twenty or more stages. In an article in the Times of London summarizing the fi rst four days of the 1967 Tour, Ronald Faux
discussed why none of the Tour favorites had bothered to compete with one
another, and why lesser cyclists seemed to break away from the pack without
being chased down by the stronger ones. Faux explained that the stars were
“watching each other like hawks” in case of unexpected tactics and resting in
their teammates’ slipstreams to save strength for later duels with each other.
In fact, Faux pointed out, for the sake of energy conservation and aerody-
namic effi ciency, the whole peloton planned to pedal shoulder to shoulder at
a relatively leisurely pace for most of the early stages. Faux also highlighted the crucial role of team managers and coaches, who drive behind the pack,
relay food and information to the team, and decide on race strategies and
tactics. Only on the orders of a team manager would a star participate in
a breakaway in the early stages of the race.9 John Wilcockson explored this
theme, as well, in his preview of the 1981 Tour in the Times. Because the fi rst week of the Tour, to be raced in the mountains and hills of southern France,
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would be hot, dry, and exhausting, little racing would occur in the second
week of fl atland stages. Instead, Wilcockson warned his readers that most rid-
ers would spend the eight middle stages of the Tour recuperating and build-
ing up their strength reserves for the grueling Alpine stages in the event’s fi nal week, including the decisive Alpe d’Huez climb.10
Novelist Robert Daley covered the Tour de France and other European
sports for the New York Times for nearly a decade in the 1950s and 1960s.
Daley’s work painted American newspaper readers a detailed, intimate, and
compelling portrait of the Tour as an athletic event and cultural phenom-
enon. In a piece about “Mr. Average Bike Racer” in the 1961 Tour, Daley de-
scribed the race experience, physiognomy, and career trajectory of a typical,
hypothetical Tour participant. During a fl at stage Daley covered, which ran
between the Pyrenees and the Alps, Mr. Average did not race but “pedaled
easily . . . gossiped with his pals in the pack, and ate constantly” to rebuild his strength after strenuous Alpine climbs. He “weighs about 140 pounds,”
is covered in cuts, bruises, and scars from crashes, and is “thin and wiry,
except for his thighs, which are enormous” and “shaved smooth as a girl’s.”
Mr. Average’s “metabolism is so abnormal it borders on the freakish. His
heart probably beats only about forty times a minute.” His physical gifts al-
low him to “pedal swiftly over high mountain passes where the air is so thin
that a non- bike rider would have trouble climbing a fl ight of stairs.” Mr. Average consumes food and liquid constantly while pedaling to provide enough
calories for the ride — “sandwiches, fruits, chickens and two pounds of sugar
mixed with just enough water to make a thick syrup.” To sate his hunger or
thirst, Mr. Average “is not above snatching food and drink out of the hands of
spectators” and “fl ings bottles, chicken bones and the like over his shoulder
without regard.” Often, Mr. Average rides all day long without stopping and
“brags constantly about how good he is.” He “may earn $100,000 or more a
year” and will “buy a heavy insurance policy on himself ” in case of career-
ending injury, since he crashes fi ve or six times a year. To his team employers, Mr. Average’s celebrity is as important as his physical talents since “his name will draw fans to velodromes [and] is worth plenty to the apéritif, television
or refrigerator company to whose team he belongs.” Due to the rigors of the
profession, Mr. Average “won’t win much after about 34 but he can keep go-
ing on reputation until 40 or more.”11
English- language readers learned much about the broader cultural con-
text of the Tour in France, as well, which was important to developing the
uniquely “French” character of the race in their imaginations. American
sportswriters described in detail the daily routine of the Tour as a sporting
spectacle. John Hess, writing for the New York Times in 1966, described a
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typical Alpine morning for the Tour, which he characterized as a “moving
circus about one hundred miles long, all honky- tonk except for the band of
sallow heroes in the middle.” After leaving Bourg d’Oisans, near Grenoble,
at 11 a.m., following the departure of the publicity caravan, the pack ped-
aled through Alpine valleys toward the mountain climbs “with white tor-
rents roaring down the mountainsides from the melting snows.” Readers
also gained a sense of the excitement of a typical race day in the mountains
in Hess’s article. Race drama commenced as the pack began the fi rst climb
over the col de la Croix de Fer and several riders, including British contender Tommy Simpson, crashed and lost time, but continued to race. The pack
disintegrated as strong climbers pushed the pace and weaker ones faltered
and fell behind. Simpson sprinted into the lead over the second climb, the
col du Télégraphe, but was later caught by several Spaniards, who Hess noted
were renowned for their climbing skills. Spectators crowded the mountain
ascents where they had “huddled since dawn for a glimpse of the Tour.” On
the fi nal major climb, the col du Galibier, Simpson faltered and fell back into the pack of other race favorites that included French stars Raymond Poulidor and Jacques Anquetil, the fi ve- time Tour champion. Spanish veteran Ju-
lio Jiménez pocketed the equivalent of US $2,000 for reaching the Galibier
pass fi rst, while Simpson, who collided with a motorcycle and crashed for
a second time on the Galibier descent, crossed the fi nish line in eighteenth
place, bleeding profusely, and was awarded the prize for unluckiest rider of
the day.12 Simpson’s injuries forced him to abandon the race the next day.
American readers also gained a feel for the Tour’s commercial culture.
Frequently, writers placed readers in the position of on- site fans to convey
the experience of the publicity caravan’s passage. Readers of the Los Angeles Times learned about the experience of the roadside spectator as the publicity caravan passed. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen,” explained columnist
Mike Littwin.
An hour before the race . . . a caravan of trucks, vans and motorcycles and
cars equipped with sirens, fl ashing lights and loud speakers takes to the route the cyclists will soon follow. . . . Samples or written material are tossed to the crowds lining the route. There are even products for sale. At the end of the
route . . . the vehicles pass by with a commercial message read over the loud-
speaker. It’s a circus.13
Stanley Meisler’s depiction of the 1984 Tour as a “Gallic Carnival” in Blaye,
a town outside Bord
eaux, confi rmed Littwin’s impressions to Los Angeleans.
“Frankly commercial, the [Tour’s publicity] vans stormed down the street,
their loudspeakers bellowing out the nature of their wares,” wrote Meisler.
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Most represented sports or comics publishing houses, offering special pro-
motion packets of old periodicals and a new Tour de France souvenir cap
for 20 francs. Others sold more related goods, like miniature model bikes or
water cans that can be hooked to a bicycle. Some of the vans screeched to a
stop, ejecting a salesman who ranted to the crowd with his packets, selling as
many as he could before scrambling back into the van as it lurched off. Other
vans threw out free samples of boxed orange drink or canned tea. Others . . .
[pushed] things that have nothing to do with cycling and the tour [ sic]— an insecticide, France’s new high- speed trains, a breakfast cereal, Japanese electronics, banks, a skin spray.14
Such evocative passages revealed in detail to American readers the Tour’s
overtly commercial character.
Foreign papers also conveyed to their readers the debates about over-
commercialization of the Tour that transpired in the French press. In a 1958
article on the victory of Luxembourger Charly Gaul, for example, the New
York Times aptly described to its readers the Tour’s successful formula, para-phrasing language often employed by the Tour’s organizers: the event was a
“unique mixture of sporting event, mammoth publicity campaign, and pop-
ular circus.” Yet the article questioned whether such overt commercialism
undermined the sporting character of the race. The reporter lamented that
witnessing dancer and fi lm star Ludmilla Tchérina, who was on hand to kiss
the cheeks of Charly Gaul and was festooned with “the name of a leading in-
surance company across her comely bosom,” seemed “vulgar,” like imagin-
ing “[cricket hero Fred] Trueman bowling in a Lord’s Test match with ‘Persil’
written all over him.”15 Following the 1966 Tour, the New York Times quoted Tour Director Jacques Goddet’s venomous indictment of sponsors’ deleteri-ous effect on competitiveness. Goddet attributed “unspecifi ed ‘misdeeds’” in
the 1966 race to “the very nature of the system that accentuates more and
more a certain form of corruption, the introduction of habits born of sub-
mission to fi nancial interests.” The Times journalist, John Hess, speculated correctly that Goddet would end corporate sponsorship of racers and reinstitute the national team formula the following year.16 Michael Katz, writing
for the New York Times, argued that omnipresent, oppressive Tour marketing was endemic of a broader hypercommercialism in French popular culture.
Katz joked, “It is said that if the French ever send an astronaut to the moon,
chances are that he will have ‘Perrier’ or ‘Bic’ inscribed on his space helmet.”17
Important to the emerging French image of the Tour was the style of
writing developed by English- language journalists in their Tour coverage. As
with their French counterparts, British and American journalists employed a
self- referential, historical style of coverage, which helped to establish a sense
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of continuing tradition around the Tour outside France. For example, in a
report on the 1958 Tour, Robert Daley evoked tragic heroes of the Tour’s past
to convey to contemporary readers the compelling qualities of failure and its
centrality to the Tour’s French traditions. Daley described the collapse during the previous year’s Tour of 1958 favorite Spaniard Federico Bahamontes, who
famously fl ung his cycling shoes into the gutter in an act of self- loathing after he quit the race during the ninth stage. The New York Times journalist sum-moned great failures of the past to contextualize Bahamontes’s failure. Daley
recalled Italian rider Pierre Brambilla, who buried his bicycle in his garden
in disgust after he became the fi rst cyclist to lose his lead on the last day of racing during the 1947 Tour, won by Frenchman Jean Robic in a dramatic
breakaway on the road to the Paris fi nish line. Daley also mentioned “Giant
of the Road” Eugène Christophe’s amazing feat during the 1913 Tour. After he
suffered a broken front fork on his bicycle while traversing the col du Tour-
malet, Christophe “trotted nine miles to a blacksmith shop and hammered
out a replacement” part for himself, fi nished the stage, but lost his chance
to win the Tour’s overall title.18 In a 1991 article explaining why battles in the exhausting mountain stages decide so many Tours, Samuel Abt recounted the
famous tale of French Tour champion Octave Lapize’s condemnation of race
founder Henri Desgrange as an “assassin” for incorporating steep Pyrenean
mountain climbs in the itinerary for the fi rst time in 1910.19
So famous were certain Tour locales, especially legendary mountain
climbs, that the English- language press wove mention of them into articles
that had nothing to do with the race, thereby linking the Tour to tourism in
France’s geo- historical regions, much as French journalists did. For example,
in a piece evaluating “popular legends” about the Auvergne region, Patrick
Brogan, writing for the Times of London, described the area’s most stunning geologic feature and site of many dramatic Tour battles, the 10,000- year- old
Puy de Dôme lava dome that looms above the Massif Central near Clermont-
Ferrand, as being famous because “the Tour de France labours up it every
year.”20 In an article on tourism around Carpentras, the Times noted that Mont Ventoux, a stunning, windswept outcrop that towers over the celebrated vineyards of Provence, is a “stiff climb” even for tourists riding in
cars and is often included in the Tour de France as part of time trial stages.21
English- language newspapers alluded frequently to the incredible popu-
larity of the Tour in the provinces and highlighted the event’s character as a
primarily rural sporting event. Linked to analyses of the Tour’s provincial
popularity were discussions of the race’s unique spectator experience. Para-
doxically, in the same passages in which the foreign journalists bemoaned the
event’s enthrallment by modern commercialism, they characterized the Tour
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as a throwback to older, premodern days of sports fandom, before pay- to-
watch stadiums that separated physically and spiritually spectators from the
contests they observed. The Times recreated a hypothetical provincial scene in 1966 in the following poetic prose:
The Tour de France . . . plunges into the foothills of the Pyrenees. . . . The
route in the depth of the country, 37 miles from nowhere, is lined with avid
spectators. Granny, in her shiny black vest, gnarled and shawled like some-
thing out of the French Revolution, has brought her favourite armchair out of
the cottage to sit beside the road. The hayfi elds are deserted for miles around, pitchforks thrown down . . . a French schoolboy shrieks with laughter at the
incredible ignorance of the British journalist who wants to know why every-
one is chanting “Pou- Pou” (the nickname of popular French rider Raymond
Poulidor).22
The foreign press also highlighted, in much the same way as
the French news-
papers, the intimacy of the event, with fans lining the roads as the peloton
passed, close enough to touch their favorite stars. Foreign journalists paid
much attention to the frequent physical interactions between fans and riders
on country roads, especially those that infl uenced the race action. They com-
mented on the common practice of fans pushing tired riders up mountain
climbs or dumping cool water on their heads; the overabundance of crowds
in tiny villages and atop mountain passes that choked roads, inhibiting the
peloton’s passage; accidental collisions between fans and riders, such as the
one during the 1999 Tour between a picture- snapping fan and Giuseppe
Guerini that nearly ruined the Italian cyclist’s victory on l’Alpe d’Huez; and
occasional instances of crowd violence against riders, such as the incident
during the 1950 Tour when Basque peasants thrust umbrellas into the spokes
of an Italian rider to foil his victory.23
Foreign journalists strove to place the Tour in the broader context of
France’s evolving postwar popular culture, as well. They developed a body of
stock metaphors, analogies, tropes, and stories to convey to their readers the
central importance of the Tour to French sporting culture. One journalist,
writing in 1984, even commented on the work of historian Theodore Zeldin,
who highlighted France’s unique love affair with the bicycle since the fi n- de-siècle, and invoked Roland Barthes’s classic 1957 treatise, Mythologies, which characterized the Tour as one of French popular culture’s central, socially
constructed mythological reference points.24
Above all, journalists in the United Kingdom and the United States tried
to convey the intense popularity of the Tour in France in sporting terms that
their English-
speaking readers could comprehend. American journalists
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characterized the Tour as a “combination of World Series and World’s Fair,”
“the World Series, Kentucky Derby and Rose Bowl game all rolled into one,”
and “France’s three- week version of the Super Bowl.”25 British journalists