The Tour de France commemorates the French Revolution, the Great War and even the Normandy landings. If the Tour is interested in history, conversely the Tour interests historians. It reveals in particular the economic and social developments at work in XXe century.
The 2014 Tour de France route commemorates the hundred years of the Great War: it stops in Belgium at Ypres, the first place where mustard gas was used, then in the towns “ martyrs » of Reims and Épernay. Already, in 1994, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Normandy landings, the Tour passed through Utah Beach and Sainte-Mère-l’Église – it was a German rider who won the Memorial prize in Saint-Lô. In 1989, for the bicentenary of the Revolution, the Tour offered a bonus of 17,890 francs per kilometer 1,789.
Exploits, advertising and sponsorships
While at the end of XIXe century the English aristocracy and the Olympic movement advocated love “ free » sport, cycling is organized like a professional sport. Newspapers organize cycling races to increase their circulation ; bicycle and tire companies sponsor riders to participate in these races and thus advertise their products ; sponsored runners fight to win the race prizes awarded to the winner ; and the public buys sports newspapers which recount the battles and exploits of champions.
It is in this context, but also against the backdrop of the Dreyfus Affair, that in 1903 the sports daily The Auto created the Tour de France. The Tour was so successful that L’Auto doubled its sales every July, which increased the newspaper’s advertising revenue and allowed it to eliminate its competitors. The Auto In 1919, it also gave the color of its pages – yellow – to the leader’s jersey of the event.
Initially, the Tour show is therefore intended to be read. From the 1930s, it was also broadcast on the radio, which led the organizers to significantly modify the appearance of the race (number, distance and duration of stages, number of rest days, etc.). Then, from the 1950s, the Tour was broadcast on television. It is precisely the very sharp increase in television broadcast rights for the Tour, due to competition between television channels to obtain these rights and the related advertising revenue, which profoundly transformed the event from the 1980s onwards: between 1980 and 2000, the Tour’s turnover increased from around 5 million to around 50 million euros (in constant 2013 euros).
The quantitative data recently made available by the organizer of the Tour make it possible to objectify the history of the event, itself revealing various socio-cultural developments: the rise of the consumer society, the civilization of leisure, mass media and more generally of a mass culture, globalization of the nationalities of runners, widening income inequalities between the best athletes and the others, etc. While viewers from more and more varied countries are demanding a cycling spectacle where their national champions can triumph, not only does the Tour de France garner increased television rights, but these television broadcasts also increase the price that sponsors pay. and advertisers are willing to pay to expose their brands to the world.
Runners in the salary hierarchy
The Tour de France being a profit-making event, both for the organizers and for the riders and team sponsors, how have riders’ earnings evolved since 1903? ? For the organizers, it is a question, within the limits of the possibilities set by their budget, of offering prizes high enough to attract the best runners, as well as to motivate them, once present in the race. These bonuses reward the best riders in the different classifications (general classification, by points, best climber, best young person, team) and the best placed riders during each stage (line stage or time trial, intermediate sprints). ) and are added to their fixed monthly salaries.
While until 1929 a rider earned in bonuses approximately 1 to 2 months of the average net monthly salary of French employees, from 1930 to 1939 this gain increased to approximately 8 to 16 months of the average salary (black curve). This sharp increase in premiums in the 1930s can be explained by the introduction of the “ caravan » of the Tour, cars which pay for the Tour to be able to take the same route as the riders and to be able to expose to spectators the logos of their sponsor brands (in the 1930s, Menier chocolate, La Vache qui rit, Delft rusks or again Noveltex textiles). The position of cyclists in social stratification – or at least in salary stratification – was then at its peak.
Then, from the 1950s to the early 1980s, riders only earned 2 to 6 months of the average salary. It was only from the beginning of the 1980s that riders’ earnings rose again compared to those of employees: the average rider, who in 1980 earned 2 to 3 months of the average salary in bonuses, gained in 2000 almost 8 months of this salary. This recent improvement in the relative remuneration of runners has also gone hand in hand with a transformation of their social origins: while, until the 1970s, runners were mainly of peasant and working-class origin, since the 1980s their origins have been more varied. , even if they remain disproportionately of popular origin.
As for the earnings of the winner of the Tour compared to the average rider, they tended to decline until the 1970s: whereas, until the 1930s, the winner earned 10 to 30 times more than a average runner, at the beginning of the 1970s the winner only earned 4 times more (gray curve). But, after an initial increase between the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, the winner’s earnings exploded: the winner of the Tour, who in 1980 won “ only » 8 times more than an average runner, earned, in 2000, 25 times more than him.
Motivate runners
Why in the 1980s did the Tour organizers increase the riders’ bonuses and, particularly, those of the winner? ? As riders’ fixed wages increase, the additional premium that is needed to motivate them to participate and fight is increasingly higher, due to the diminishing marginal utility of income for riders. This is all the more true as within the teams, all the riders’ bonuses are redistributed equally among them, so that in the absence of high bonuses each rider may be tempted to let their teammates work hard for the team. ‘team.
Furthermore, as the economic theory of tournaments shows, the incentive that participants in a sporting event have to expend all their energy to win depends crucially on the differences in prize money between first place and second, between second and last. third, etc. In other words, it would be to continue to motivate the teams of riders to fight for the victory of their team leader – which conditions the sporting interest, the spectacle of the Tour – that the organizers would have increased the winnings of the winner much more strongly than other gains.
The structure of the Tour’s monetary prizes has undoubtedly always aimed to motivate the riders to fight, rather than allowing them to distribute the bonuses with less effort: in 1952, when Fausto Coppi crushed the race in two stages , the organizers of the Tour, fearing the resignation of the riders and the lack of interest in the race that would have followed, doubled the bonuses for the second and third places.
No doubt the Tour de France would not be such a great competition if the lure of profit had not led newspapers to organize the race, companies to sponsor teams, and riders to win the event. The quantitative history of the Tour de France also allows us to objectify and better understand the developments of various aspects of the race: the regulations of the event, the number of participating riders and their nationalities, the route of the race and its difficulty. , its spectacular and strategic nature, as well as doping practices.
The history of the Tour offers a striking overview of economic, social and cultural, but also political, developments from France to XXe and at XXIe century.