From Foreign Policy, June 28:
The grueling cycling competition has a rich political history.
By Cameron Abadi, a deputy editor at Foreign Policy, and Adam Tooze, a columnist at Foreign Policy and director of the European Institute at Columbia University. Sign up for Adam’s Chartbook newsletter here.This year’s Tour de France cycling race will be 3,492 kilometers traversed over 21 grueling stages, across a mix of flat, hilly, and mountainous terrain. It is the leading event on the men’s professional cycling calendar, with riders from around the world training their entire careers to win the event—or even just to finish it.
How does the Tour make money today? How have working-class politics polarized the event? What sort of technological improvements has the bicycle seen over time?
Those are a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast that we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.
Cameron Abadi: The Tour de France has its origins in a business competition between two rival sports newspapers. It was also a competition that was tied to early 20th-century far-right politics. Could you unpack what exactly was going on?
Adam Tooze: Yeah, it’s an amazing story that I wasn’t familiar with until we embarked on this. At the turn of the century, the Third Republic in France was a notoriously divided polity. And in the 1890s, it split bitterly over the so-called Dreyfus affair, which was a situation when, in 1894, a Jewish officer in the French Army was scapegoated as a German spy by reactionary antisemitic groups. And the left wing and the liberal press sided with Dreyfus and eventually secured a retrial and his acquittal. And so it became like a key rallying point of the French center and left. It’s the precursor to the Popular Front of the 1930s, which is now being reprised again in the effort to try to keep [National Rally leader Marine] Le Pen and her party away from power in France. But there’s always been a right-wing, aristocratic, pro-business, and profoundly antisemitic politics in France, and they struck back in the early 1900s.
And the leading sports newspaper of the day, Velo, was a pro-Dreyfus paper. And the anti-Dreyfus folks, including notable industrialists like Michelin, the tire company, and de Dion, who’d made cars and bicycles, were infuriated that the dominant sports newspaper of the day was pro-Dreyfus. They found themselves imbibing, if you like, radical pro-Dreyfus news while just trying to get the scores and decided to set up their own newspaper, their own sports newspaper called Auto-Vélo, which, when they set up in 1903, was kind of floundering against incumbents. And so they were looking for a big coup, some sort of publicity affair. And being nationalists and modernist because, you know, de Dion, Michelin, they’re in the business of modernizing France. France was a huge producer of bicycles and motor cars in the early 20th century. And so they thought, how about having a self-consciously modernist exploration of France by the relatively new-fangled device of a bicycle?
And so it became this tour of France. By the ’30s it was hugely successful. The right-wing sports newspaper was garnering 800,000 circulation during the Tour of 1933. Predictably, given their politics, they ended up then collaborating during the Nazi period. They were shut down in the aftermath of the war, but L’Équipe, which is, to this day, France’s main sports newspaper associated with the Tour, emerges from the wreckage and is still associated with the Tour all the way down to the present day. And one of the things about all professional bike racing is that you can’t successfully compete as an individual. You have to compete as part of a team, because it’s crucial to maintaining the momentum of a very fast, very long ride. Long riding is having a team around you for psychological support, but also aerodynamic. You can sit behind your other riders and spare your legs. And what’s really striking about the Tour is that very, very many of the teams are corporate teams. They ride for Telecom, for, you know, the Emirates. They ride for brands, though the individual riders, as you say, are heroes of particular stages or the race overall.
CA: Today, the Tour is now run by a private company that’s called the Amaury Sport Organization. How does the Tour make money these days?....
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