Les Voyages De Samuel De Champlain

Posted onDecember 03, 2011 - 10:38 am by Admin | 0 Comments

Stage 17 – Briancon – Alpe d’Huez – 165 kilometres

Having not long before dropped his main rival for the overall title in Paris, a lone professional cyclist negotiates the final kilometres of l’Alpe d’Huez. Elegantly positioned on his bicycle, a perfect combination of power and pedalling class, he storms up the steep Alpine ascent and through a sea of crazed cycling fans. Just behind him with the car horn honking madly, is the Tour Director’s red Alpha Romeo 155. Via team radio, the rider learns that his fifty-second deficit heading into stage seventeen has become a ten-second advantage. Fuelled by visions of the race leader’s rainbow jersey, he takes one last gulp of water from a red, plastic, Coca Cola bidon and stomps on his pedals even harder.

With a hundred metres to the line and victory assured, the cyclist eases up, tugs down on his jersey to clearly show his team’s sponsors before throwing up his arms to the sky. Cameras flash and fans applaud as he crosses a finish line composed of Fiat strips placed flatly across the road. As he slows to a stop, he is immediately besieged by a horde of journalists asking the same questions but in different languages. Before he can answer, he is escorted through a gate and towards a stage where the “maillot juane” awaits. A top the podium, he stretches the yellow fleece over his head and waves to the crowd. On the jersey, the event’s sponsors – Credit Lyonnais, l’Equipe, and an array of Nike swooshes – are strategically placed. With only four days remaining in the race, the cyclist will be the main attraction of this immense, three-week travelling circus. The pictures taken and interviews conducted on this day and the remaining days that follow will be printed in newspapers across the globe thus enhancing the image of both rider and event.

A Nomadic State within the Borders of France

From its humble beginnings as a pseudo-event devised to increase newspaper sales, the Tour de France has evolved into the greatest yearly sporting event on the planet. According to cycling journalist Samuel Abt, the Tour de France – with its own motorbike police force, travelling bank, and over 2,000 subjects (of which only 170 are riders) – is virtually a sovereign nation. As for spectators, each July an estimated twenty million people line the roads in France to watch the race pass by while nearly a billion people follow each day’s stage on television. With an audience of this magnitude, it is no surprise that high profile companies such as Coca Cola and Nike spend millions of dollars to be race sponsors.

To a company sponsoring a team, a stage win in the Tour has more publicity value than a victory in any prestigious one-day cycling classic such as Milano-Sanremo, Paris-Roubaix, or Liege-Bastogne-Liege. To a racer, winning just one of the twenty one stages could mean higher appearance fees at the post-Tour de France criteriums, a more lucrative team contract for the following season and better bonuses from sponsors. Finally, to the event’s first sponsor and official newspaper – l’Equipe – the event helps increase circulation by over seventy-per cent in the month of July.

The P.T. Barnum of Professional Cycling

Things could not have been going much worse for l’Auto-Velo (eventually to become l’Equipe) or its editor Henri Desgrange in the autumn of 1902. Hired to head the sports daily at the turn of the century, Desgrange had failed to make gains on rival Le Velo’s market share. If Desgrange could do no right, Le Velo’s editor, Pierre Giffard, could do no wrong. Though his journal was not the first to sponsor a bicycle race, Giffard was shrewd enough to realise the growth potential of the bicycle industry and the impact the sport of cycling had made on the French populous. Thanks to Giffard’s foresight, Le Velo was France’s number one sports daily possessing a market dominance that was nothing short of intimidating


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