France’s fading yellow jersey

Nothing symbolises the French summer like the Tour de France. The sight of the yellow jersey flying through the idyllic countryside is a hallmark of July across the channel. However, an event that has a special place in many people’s idea of France may be losing a certain je ne sais quoi. 

It’s not just that no Frenchman has won since 1985 — although that doesn’t help. Le Tour is gradually succumbing to the crosswinds of globalisation: French riders find it harder to win, and France’s teams are in resolute decline, outcompeted by foreign money. An event which began as a French revolution is undergoing a global one. 

Diversity, however, is reserved solely to sponsors. Cycling in France remains an overwhelmingly white sport, and as the peloton rolls off the start ramp, it races further and further away from the multicultural reality of modern France. Le Tour, caught between corporate dominance from abroad and identity at home, is not just a bike race but another battle in France’s struggle to define itself. 

La Grande Boucle has always been more than a sporting competition. This seems cheap in a world where Gary Neville lectures us about the holiness of England’s football pyramid, but le Tour is a physical representation of France and its society. Birthed in fin de siècle Paris to promote a new anti-Dreyfus sports newspaper L’Auto, from its inception in 1903 le Tour strove to define the French nation. Henri Desgrange, the editor of the yellow-tinted newspaper from which the Maillot Jaune got its name, saw the project as a “great moral crusade” against the dégénérescence which he thought typified late 19th century France. The early Tours were in Desgrange’s mind a “re-union over thousands of kilometres” of a nation pulled apart by the politics of the Third Republic. 

 For this reason, the early editions doggedly stuck to the contours of France. The Tour’s organisers saw it as a vehicle for the modernisation of France’s forgotten regions, or what we now call “la France profonde.”

 During the first edition, L’Auto wrote that along the itinerary of the race “cities dead to sport are awaking” and that the riders were “unconscious messengers of progress.” After only a few years, a national myth had been born. Fifty years on philosopher Roland Barthes would say the Tour “is the best example we have of a total myth.” For him the race was an “Odyssey”, the highest form of epic. But like the ancient Odysseus, the modern Tour is trapped, not by the gods, but things far more powerful: the politics of identity, and the effects of globalisation. 

“White demons … at top speed as if in flight.” So said journalist Géo Lefèvre at the sight of the arrival of riders into an isolated village in 1903. One hundred and twenty three years later, his words still ring true: the pro peloton remains overwhelmingly pale. Cycling is still — helmets excluded —  a sport which from a distance, looks very much like it did in the 1980s. While the French national football team might be as diverse as could be, one will not see a single black or brown French cyclist at the Tour. On this year’s startlist there will only be one African rider — the 2024 Green Jersey winner, Eritrean Biniam Girmay. There are no ethnic minority riders from anywhere in Europe.

This was not always the case. More than seventy years ago the French North African team brought several Algerians to la Grande Boucle. Nord Afrique was included like other French teams, at a time when only regional or national squads went to the Tour. In stage 12 of the 1950 edition from Saint-Gaudens to Perpignan, two Algerians — Abdel-Kaader Zaaf and Marcel Molines — would famously ride off together in a 200km breakaway. Zaaf would collapse due to the heat, and have to be sheltered under a tree to recuperate while his teammate won a legendary victory — the first for a rider born in Africa. Sadly Algeria’s presence at the Tour would end with the resurgence of hostilities in l’Algérie Française, but this participation makes today’s homogenous bunch look ever stranger.

Then, the Tour was used to try and forge France together. Now, no such effort is made. Cycling retreated from the front pages following the doping scandals of the 90s and 2000s, de-developing into a highly regionalised sport. The French peripheries which once had cycling brought to them are now the heartlands of the sport. Road cycling is the domain of the small town, the farmer,  the countryside. Le Tour sank into la France profonde and as it now regains popularity, it throws up a challenge to the urban, multicultural image of the nation depicted by the media. 

Of course there have been a few exceptions to the otherwise homogeneous French peloton. Kevin Réza was the only Black rider in the peloton at the turn of the last decade. A decent rider, but never winning a pro race, he reported numerous instances of racism in the peloton — although none of these ever ended up in a significant sanction. More infamously Nacer Bouhanni, a former boxer, was notable for his aggressive and sometimes dangerous moves in sprints.  

Neither of these two ever accused any of their bosses or teammates of racism. Réza even seemed embarrassed by his prominence during the era of Black Lives Matter telling Eurosport, “I have a bit of trouble speaking about diversity because we’re all the same, and we try to do our jobs the best we possibly can.” Both Réza and Bouhanni bounced around French teams, but they were both in a world which seemed slightly foreign to them. This was because it was.

In 2020 Réza said it was “up to young black riders to show they’re capable of succeeding like me, to not give up and say it’s a white sport, not at all.” Four years after his retirement, no young Rézas have emerged. To use his own words, road cycling seems destined to remain a “white sport.”

For some, cycling may represent a mythical world isolated from mass immigration, and the social changes of the last fifty years

Le Tour was designed as a crusade to bring both a moral and industrial revolution to the nation.  Now it is something closer to a cottage industry, centred on the rural, conservative France it was supposed to transform. For some, cycling may represent a mythical world isolated from mass immigration, and the social changes of the last fifty years. This conclusion is hard to avoid as the pale peloton traverses Normandy’s fields, Auvergne’s hills and the Giant of Provence. Isolated as the Tour may seem from French society, it now faces a further challenge to its idea of France: global finance.

Cycling’s modern financial story starts with doping. The scandals of the 90’s and 2000’s led to the departure of many European brands from the sport including Rabobank, T-Mobile and Festina. The fall of Lance Armstrong also triggered a retreat of American investment, and only the arrival of Britain’s Team Sky and the antipodean Orica-Greenedge did anything to resist the retreat of corporate sponsorship.

Absent these “Anglo-Sajones,” as the Spanish would call them, the sport’s finances were increasingly held up by oligarchs and nation states. My idol, Alberto Contador, rode for Team Tinkoff, named after its owner Russian businessman Oleg Tinkov. Previously, Contador had raced for Astana, a team run by the Kazakh government, and partly aimed at improving the Central Asian nation’s reputation following the release of Borat earlier in the 2000s. 

Amid all this change French cycling rumbled on as normal. While Italian teams such as Lampre, famous for their pink kit, have been replaced by the boring white of UAE-Team Emirates, in France everything stayed the same. As the sport enjoys a resurgence of popularity, due to a collection of genuinely epochal stars and thrilling racing, France’s teams are under threat. 

Last year two French teams — Arkéa-B&B Hotel and Cofidis — were relegated from cycling‘s top division, with Arkéa subsequently closing down. This year 2nd tier team TotalEnergies is also losing its titular sponsor, with the oil giant abandoning a team once the home of French housewives’ favorite Thomas Voeckler. Perhaps worse, the company is staying in the sport, becoming a co-sponsor of Manchester United owner Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos Grenadiers. 

The reason for the crisis in the French peloton is money. As  large multinationals such as Lidl, Red Bull, or Visma inflate budgets to unprecedented levels, it is harder and harder to compete. There is hope, however,: attracted by growing audiences, shipping giant CMA CGM has joined the peloton as a co-sponsor alongside Decathlon, aiming to create a French superteam to challenge these foreign giants.

Beyond teams even the route itself is being taken from its homeland.  In 2017 Marine Le Pen cosigned a motion which argued the Tour’s ever more frequent sojourns on foreign soil were “denaturing” it and making it not a “Tour de France, but a Tour of the European Union.” Last year’s start in Lille may have been a return to L’Hexagone, but this is very much an exception. Florence and Bilbao hosted the previous two, and Barcelona will see the Grand Départ in a few day’s time. 

This crisis of cyclisme could become even more serious. For years there have been rumours about a Saudi-backed project which would try to genuinely revolutionise the financial model cycling is based on. As of now, Tour de France teams get no share of the TV rights or sponsorship money the race brings in. They rely solely on their own sponsors. Riyadh’s “OneCycling” project would seek to change this, giving teams equity in races and a corresponding cut of race earnings. While Italian and Flemish race promoters were reported to be on board, the mighty Tour de France owner ASO seems to have seen off the threat. For now. 

Even without this proposed Middle Eastern entry into the sport, the Tour becomes less French by the year. For many young fans now the Yellow Jersey will chiefly be associated with the indomitable Slovenian Tadej Pogačar. The Green Jersey’s bright green was once inseparable with the bookmaker’s PMU, an inescapable sight in any French village, along with the pensioners smoking outside it. Now it is a dull darker green for the new sponsor, Skoda.

Only in one year has the Tour gone without a French stage winner — 1999, the year of the now-cursed Lance Armstrong’s first victory. In recent times, France has barely scraped by with one stage win per Tour, as was the case last year (although Valentin Paret Peintre’s triumph on Mont Ventoux made up in quality what it lacked in quantity). As racing tactics have been professionalised, there are fewer opportunities for hometown riders to sneak into a breakaway and win stages. In this era of “cannibals” — chief among them reigning champion Pogačar — opportunities for Frenchmen are drying up.

There is one man who could change this. 19 year old Paul Seixas is the hero France has been waiting for. He has already assumed the martyr’s crown claimed by all of cycling’s mythical popular champions. Collapsing bloodied into his father’s hands after a crash caused him to chase all day at the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes – a warmup race to July’s main event- not even 20 he seemed to have entered legend. 

The 19 year old has produced numbers which only Pogačar and his rival Jonas Vingegaard can match, but the pressure and the level required to win is unimaginable.  He rides for the French proto-superteam of Decathlon-CMA CGM but time will tell if they can adequately support him. The task is as daunting as this year’s double summiting of Alpe d’Huez: he races against the greatest rider ever, Pogačar, and Visma-LAB, the most tactically astute team in a generation, led by two-time Tour winner Vingegaard. 

The first great test will come on stage six when the peloton crosses the Col de Tourmalet. Octave Lapize the first rider to cross this col in 1910 famously shouted “vous etes des assassins” at the race directors for making him and his colleagues endure such a test. This year they will probably break the record for the climb, but the question will be whether Seixas can hold on. Not since Laurent Fignon’s 8 second loss to Greg LeMond in 1989 has France produced a rider of this level. The ride over the Tourmalet to Gavarnie with its Homeric cirque promises to be epochal. If Seixas can’t hold the wheel then, perhaps, neither can his nation. It will be France suddenly going backwards too.

 While the race’s vocabulary —  le peloton, les cols, domestique — remains firmly français, an event which was designed to unite France in modernity is losing the essence which made it a national symbol. An early 20th century racer Hippolyte Aucouturier wrote that the new Tour “will revolutionise the lives of all those people.” The wheel keeps on turning.