Selling the Yellow Jersey

by Eric Reed

  Several of L’Auto’s direct competitors also possessed vast fi nancial resources because they were members of emerging press “groups,” usually built around

  one of the large Parisian dailies. Miroir des Sports, a subsidiary of Le Petit Parisien, emerged as Desgrange’s main competitor in the late 1920s. With the support of Le Petit Parisien, Miroir des Sports could afford to send reporters

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  all over the world to cover sporting events, just as L’Auto did. Furthermore, the Petit Parisien group offered potential advertisers a complete publicity package: its publications were complemented by a private radio station, Le

  Poste Parisien, whose signal blanketed the airwaves of the Paris region and

  large parts of northern France.

  Despite these threatening trends, Desgrange’s post- 1929 business strat-

  egy worked effectively in the early 1930s. A steady stream of new and repeat

  corporate sponsors has fi nanced the Tour ever since. Other cycling events

  in France and throughout Europe followed Desgrange’s example and estab-

  lished publicity caravans of their own to help defray their costs of organi-

  zation. This strategy helped ensure that cycling remained the major outlet

  of sports- oriented corporate sponsorship funds in France. Moreover, the

  French national team and its riders dominated the Tour during this decade:

  Frenchmen won the race each year from 1930 to 1934 and again in 1937, and

  the national team triumphed four times. The national team formula and the

  French successes created a new generation of French sports heroes like André

  Leducq, Antonin Magne, Charles Pélissier, Georges Speicher, Roger Lapébie,

  and René Vietto and rejuvenated public interest in the event. This interest

  boosted L’Auto’s circulation signifi cantly in the early 1930s. By 1933, circulation had rebounded to 730,000 copies per day during the Tour and 364,000

  copies daily for the entire year (See appendix, table 1: Circulation of L’Auto, 1903 – 1938).

  Thus, the commercialization of the Tour advanced rapidly, thanks to the

  event’s nationwide media coverage and fan base and to Desgrange’s nimble

  management of the race. The success of Desgrange’s dramatic retooling of the

  Tour’s business and competitive underpinnings presaged the deepening and

  broadening of the ties among business, sport, and the media in France that

  would characterize subsequent decades. Furthermore, the penetration of the

  Tour by a broad range of business interests also mirrored the growing com-

  mercialization of popular culture in general.

  4. The Early Global Tour

  Traces of the Tour’s global presence were evident even in the event’s fi rst years.

  The Tour gave shape to professional bicycling around the world. Imitation is

  the sincerest form of fl attery; by the 1930s, competitions had been created

  across Europe that mimicked the Tour in conception, rules, fi nancing, and

  culture. The Tour of Italy (Giro d’Italia, created in 1909), was the fi rst major national tour outside France. The Giro was a three- week, multistage road

  professional race organized by La Gazzetta dello Sport, Milan’s major sports

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  c h a p t e r t w o

  daily. Unlike the Tour, however, the Giro was dominated solely by the Italian

  professionals. No non- Italian won the Giro before 1950, when Swiss rider

  Hugo Koblet triumphed. The 1930s witnessed the establishment of other na-

  tional tours — the Tour of Spain (Vuelta a España, 1935), the Tour of Swit-

  zerland (Tour de Suisse, 1933), and the Tour of Germany (Deutschlandtour,

  1931)— that resembled the Tour de France. In 1933, Canadians and Americans

  even attempted to stage a 4,300- mile, transcontinental professional race — the

  “longest bicycle race in the world”— from Montreal to Vancouver meant to

  trump the Tour de France. The event included sixty- nine cyclists and was to

  visit hundreds of North American sites over the race’s thirty- three- day span, including the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. The competition disintegrated, however, after only ten days because the organizers could not pay border crossing

  fees for the race bicycles and vehicles.66 Despite the failure of America’s fi rst

  “Tour,” the Tour de France’s infl uence clearly reached across the Atlantic and beyond. The Tour was the model event that stood at the center of the professional road racing world.

  The athletes who participated in the event played an important role in

  broadening the Tour’s infl uence. Riders from France, Belgium, Italy, and

  Luxembourg dominated the Tour in its early decades and accounted for the

  vast majority of participants in the race. Between 1903 and 1939, riders from

  those countries won every Tour. Despite the predominance of these nations’

  cyclists, the Tour welcomed an unusually diverse cross section of riders. Dur-

  ing the pre – Second World War era, riders from fourteen countries besides

  France, Belgium, and Italy competed in the event. Contestants hailed from

  such distant places as Argentina, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Tunisia, and

  Algeria. Participants brought back stories of the Tour to their nations’ sport-

  ing communities. Furthermore, the national team formula of the 1930s ce-

  mented the place of the Tour as the epicenter of road racing, the place where

  the world’s best gathered to compete.* Even in the United States, which had

  no riders compete in the race in this era, the press acknowledged cycling as

  France’s national sport and the Tour as the unoffi cial world championship of

  the sport.67

  The press played the most important role in transmitting knowledge

  about the Tour to global audiences in the pre – Second World War era. Even

  in faraway New Zealand, the most distant nation from France on the planet,

  * The number of participations in the Tour by country between 1903 and 1939, including repeat participations by the same rider in different years, were: Algeria (1), Germany (84), Argentina (3), Australia (7), Austria (5), Denmark (1), Japan (2), Luxembourg (49), Spain (37), New Zealand (1), Romania (4), Switzerland (120), Tunisia (2), and Yugoslavia (4).

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  at least three newspapers carried coverage of the creation, departure, and

  conclusion of the fi rst Tour in 1903. The Wanganui Herald, published in a small town on the North Island, characterized the Tour as “one of the sensations for the upcoming season” and a “monster road race.”68 News of the

  race traveled rather slowly, however. It was not until mid- September that the

  results of the Tour, which had concluded on July 19th, appeared in the Otago Witness, a weekly newspaper in Dunedin, on New Zealand’s South Island.69

  In the race’s fi rst years, reporting occurred in other New Zealand newspapers, as well. For the most part, coverage was limited to stories combed from British press agencies and relayed basic data such as the Tour’s distance, prize

  money, dates of competition, and the name of the overall winner of the race.

  Gradually, coverage expanded to include race analysis, some corporate

  advertising, and even seemingly esoteric subjects like France’s law and road

  racing culture. A story in the Otago Witness about the results of the 1908 Tour included descriptions of the race profi le (fourteen stages, 2,788 miles); prize money paid to the top fi nishers; the ind
ividual stage results of the overall

  winner, Lucien Petit- Breton, who fi nished fi rst, second, or third in thirteen of fourteen race stages; weather and road conditions during the three- week

  race; “fetes [ sic], dinners, and excursions” in the fourteen stage towns; and the “enthusiasm” of the French crowds on the roads and at the fi nish line

  in Paris’s Parc des Princes stadium.70 Another article included discussion of

  the special prizes that Dunlop Tire Company offered to cyclists riding on

  their brand products.71 New Zealand cycling columnists even conveyed to

  their readers rumors about the Tour’s demise. One article on the 1904 Tour

  speculated that the numerous instances of cheating during the race, as well

  as the extended offi cial inquiry into them, meant that “the days of the road

  race in France [might be] numbered.”72 Another article in the Grey River Argus speculated that a new French law forbidding road racing without prior government permission might mean the end of the Tour de France and other

  classic road races.73

  The Tour attracted cycling adventurers from around the world even in its

  early years. Marlborough, New Zealand, papers carried coverage of a team

  of four star Australian and New Zealander riders who sailed to France in late

  1913 to break into the European professional circuit. The four riders were

  captained by Don Kirkham, who had set world record times at the 25- and

  100- mile distances and was “recognized as one of the fi nest road riders Aus-

  tralia has produced.” The team planned to compete in all the major French

  road races in the upcoming 1914 season, including the Tour de France.74 The

  Dunlop Rubber Company of Australia sponsored the trip and helped the

  four adventurers to recruit Georges Passerieu, an English- speaking French-

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  c h a p t e r t w o

  man and a top Tour contender in the early years of the race, as a teammate

  and coach.75 The four fared poorly in the early season and abandoned plans

  to ride in the Paris Six Days race.

  The Phebus-

  Dunlop team selected Kirkham and his teammate, Ivor

  Munro, to compete in the Tour. The pair’s inexperience in European- style

  racing and mountain climbing made it impossible for them to keep up with

  the top contenders. Describing a mountain climb during the Tour in a letter

  to the Dunlop Rubber Company, Munro explained, “You just keep climbing

  up, up, up, thinking you will never reach the top. . . . The strain is worse going down. . . . You are stiff and numb with cold. . . . On one side of the mountain you feel as if you would melt — on the other side you are frozen.”76 Kirkham

  crashed early in the event and suffered a head injury that impaired his racing.

  The pair did not contend for the title and fi nished in seventeenth and twenti-

  eth places, respectively, more than nine hours behind winner Philippe Thys.

  Kirkham nevertheless made waves in the French cycling community. To

  resolve a dispute with French riders over the validity of his 25- mile world

  record time, Kirkham hopped on a bicycle and, without special preparation

  or training, beat his own mark.77 Upon his return, however, Kirkham himself

  characterized the voyage to Europe as a failure and a disappointment. The

  Australian won only £150 in prizes in nearly nine months of racing, called the

  cream of Australian cyclists “drafthorses” compared to European “thorough-

  breds,” and urged competitive cyclists to “adapt themselves to Continental

  conditions and practices.”78 Kirkham did not race in Europe again, retired in

  1925 after being hit and badly injured by a drunk driver during a training ride, and died of tuberculosis in 1930 at age forty- four.

  In 1928, bicycle entrepreneur Bruce Small corralled a contingent of four

  top racers from Australia and New Zealand and accompanied them to Eu-

  rope to race in the Tour. Small built an Australian manufacturing and sales

  empire around his “Malvern Star” bicycle that included more than a hun-

  dred shops and a thousand dealers by the late 1920s. Hubert Opperman led

  the Australasian team, which raced under the banner of a Melbourne cycling

  club. The Perth Western Mail described the twenty- three- year- old Opperman as a “teetotaler” and “non- smoker” who consumed fi fteen oranges a day

  while in training.79 The team departed by ocean liner in early 1928 and spent

  the entire racing season in Europe. Australian newspapers commented exten-

  sively on the global importance and dimensions of the Tour de France. In an

  article printed just before the contest began, the Melbourne Argus explained, Cycling is the leading sport of Europe, and each year the Tour de France attracts all the “crack” road riders of the Continent. . . . In the 25 years since its

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  inception [it] has become the most important road race in the world, and in-

  terest in the contest has increased enormously, extending beyond the borders

  of France and the boundaries of Europe to many parts of the globe.80

  A piece published a day before the Tour’s departure explained in detail the

  competition’s rules, conventions, and racing strategies, the importance of

  teamwork and corporate sponsorship, and the qualities of athletic consis-

  tency and “unbending resistance” that riders needed to survive the ordeal.81

  The New Zealand Truth carried a large article on the 1928 Tour experiences of Harry Watson, a member of the team and New Zealand’s only participant

  in the pre – Second World War era. Although his talented team captain, Op-

  perman, fi nished the race in eighteenth place, Watson and the other two rid-

  ers endured a “perfectly hopeless” Tour. When the four riders disembarked

  in France several days before the start of the Tour, they discovered to their

  dismay that the Melbourne club had not prearranged an adequate welcome

  for them. The article castigated the Australian team sponsor, which “must

  have shoved its corporate head into a large bag, pulled the string tightly, and run round in hectic circles until it banged its head against the fi rst sort of arrangement” it could fi nd. The coach hired by the Melbourne club knew

  nothing about cycling and “guided [the] team into queer street.” No one had

  purchased any of the equipment that the racers would need to compete in

  the 3,000- mile contest. The lodging secured for them was remote and primi-

  tive. The French climate stifl ed the riders and the local cuisine did not agree with them. Watson and his comrades had to pedal three miles to the town of

  Versailles to bathe. While other competitors trained, Watson and the others

  spent the days before the Tour purchasing bicycles, inner tubes, food, tools,

  and the services of masseurs with money out of their own pockets. Watson and

  his teammates would have “fl oundered about in a state of complete bewilder-

  ment” during the race had it not been for the spontaneous assistance and en-

  couragement of the Alcyon team and the French press.82 Despite the diffi cul-

  ties, Watson fi nished the event in twenty- eighth place, a solid result in a very diffi cult Tour in which only 41 of the 168 starters managed to complete the race.

  Australian newspaper coverage corroborated the New Zealand Truth’s

  account. It was clear that the four- person contingent was at a major disad-r />
  vantage because of its small size, poor fi nancing, and relative lack of talent.

  The Canberra Times lamented halfway through the race that the Australasians might have a better chance if they could add “half a dozen more Oppermans”

  to the team.83 The team suffered numerous crashes, saddle sores, equipment

  failures, stomach ailments, and even lacked adequate food during certain

  stages of the race. Despite the hardships, Opperman impressed European

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  c h a p t e r t w o

  sponsors and coaches. He received numerous appearance- fee offers to race

  throughout Europe, and the powerful Alcyon team offered the Australian star

  a contract to appear in the 1929 Tour. Opperman did not race in the 1930 Tour

  but placed twelfth in the 1931 Tour, won the Paris – Brest – Paris race, and set several endurance world records, including one in which he raced a thousand

  miles on a track in just under 29 hours.84

  Upon his return to Australia in late 1928, Opperman commented half-

  jokingly that “his legs had never felt so inadequate to the occasion.”85 Like

  Kirkham in 1914, both Opperman and Harry Watson argued that it was im-

  perative for Australians and New Zealanders to adopt French racing styles

  and equipment. Watson derided Australian cycling equipment as “old fash-

  ioned” and called for Australasians to adopt French long- distance race train-

  ing methods.86 “The only way we can improve the standard of road racing

  in Australia . . . is by introducing the French style of racing,” implored Op-

  perman as he disembarked from a train upon his return to Melbourne. “The

  present [Australian] system is considered obsolete in France.”87 Opperman

  remained an infl uential apostle of French- inspired cycling in Australia after the Second World War. By 1953, Opperman was a member of the House of

  Representatives and used his infl uence to arrange fi nancing for a nationwide

  series of multiday races that culminated in a fi ve- day “Commonwealth Jubi-

  lee Tour.” The race “inaugurated many continental ideas into stage racing in

  Australia” and included features “adopted from the famous Tour de France,”

  including a caravan of race vehicles and in- stage sprinting prizes.88

  Coverage of the Tour de France grew in complexity and depth in the