The 1960s and 1970s were a period of great change in French politics, society and culture. Demographically, the boom in the birth rate in the late 1940s was, by the early 1960s, beginning to feed into the adult popu-lation and workforce; France was a younger country than it had been for decades, and the younger citizens had new social, political and cultural aspirations and terms of reference, some of which led to the explosion of discontent at the Gaullist state and its ordering of society that occurred in May–June 1968. Politically, the return to power of General Charles de Gaulle in June 1958 led to the replacement of the Fourth Republic by the Fifth Republic later that year and a gradual rebuilding of the appa-ratus and efficiency of the state as part of de Gaulle’s drive to bring France into phase with the century, and to restore the grandeur that he felt was natural to France. Economically, the industrialization and growth that had accelerated from the mid-1940s produced transformations in society and the economy that prompted the celebrated sociologist and econo-mist Jean Fourastié to suggest that by the mid-1970s, ‘30 glorious years of growth’ had created ‘two Frances’, one stagnant for millennia until 1945, and the new France of technological development, urbanized industrial society and technocracy (Fourastié, 1979). Although from about 1975 France suffered the effects of the oil crisis much like other western European nations, with inflation and unemployment, its economy had indeed been radically modernized, partly due to the leading technocratic role of the Gaullist state since 1958. The state also had a stake in sport, accompanying what have been termed a ‘première sportivi-sation’ in 1958–75 (Chantelat and Tétart, 2007: 33) and an ‘explosion des pratiques sportives’ from the late 1960s onwards (Attali, 2007: 63).
The Popular Front in the 1930s, then the Etat françaisin the 1940s and to a lesser extent the Fourth Republic in the 1950s had all increased the French state’s involvement in the organization of sport and recreation (Callède, 2000). It was during the 1960s, in the early years of the modern-izing, technocratic and ambitious Fifth Republic, that the state’s interest
159
in promoting sport would reach its peak (Chifflet, 1995). As popular interest in the Tour de France continued, and was heightened by new approaches to its mediatization through television and by continuingly innovative approaches in the written press, the Gaullist ambition of creating ‘la France qui gagne’ found some realization in the resounding success of national track cycling teams and individuals in the 1960s and 1970s.
In this chapter we will examine how the professional cycling industry, in terms of its organization of the economics of competition, reflected new demands and constraints in the mediatization of the Tour de France and developments in the Tour’s own continually evolving model of racing. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Tour was frequently won by French riders, whose exploits and rivalries came to symbolize themes in the ongoing modernization of French culture and society, and we will therefore look in some detail at the significance of iconic champions such as Jacques Anquetil, Raymond Poulidor and Bernard Thévenet. The duel between the often victorious Anquetil and the (almost always) losing Poulidor can, for example, be interpreted as a metaphor of France’s modernization, which was rapid and ruthless, but came at the expense of various categories of French citizens (the rural working classes, for instance) who were less well-placed than others to profit from ‘the fruits of growth’. We shall also examine the evolving role of the cycling media, and consider the success of Olympic track stars such as the multi-cham-pion Daniel Morelon.
Pro-cycling: economics and competition
The 1950s were essentially the ‘Golden Age’ of French professional cycling competition. The Tour de France, which naturally dominated the sporting calendar and the industry as a whole, had recovered from the interruption of the Occupation and Liberation and had developed into an ever-more popular summer saga of sporting heroism. French cham-pions such as Robic, Bobet and Anquetil had recreated the myth of the géants de la route for the post-war public, and growing affluence was allowing more and more fans of cycling either to follow the Tour on their summer holidays or to absorb the burgeoning press, radio and television media coverage of the event. But the Tour was struggling to define its own rules concerning rider participation: should competitors ride as members of national teams or as representatives of commercial teams?
And behind this question of the structure of the Tour lay complicated
developments in the nature of the cycling industry and its relations with L’Equipeand the Tour de France, organizers of the majority of profes-sional races. In the 1960s and 1970s the Tour and profesprofes-sional cycling in general were required to change their approaches to competition, as the economics of the sector evolved.
The Tour in 1962 – a return to commercial teams
Commercial teams had originally been banned by Desgrange in the Tours of 1903–08, before being permitted from 1909 to 1913, banned again from 1919 to 1924, authorized again from 1925 to 1928, and then, from 1930 to 1962, durably replaced by national teams (Reed, 2003).
Desgrange’s constant innovations and changes of approach reflected his search for a way of organizing the Tour that would ensure L’Auto’s control of the competition. What lay behind the issue of commercial teams was not only the nature of the Tour itself, but also who was in control of professional cycling. Desgrange was concerned that running the Tour with commercial teams tended to create a race in which true competition was stifled and perverted by strong financial interests and by the inevitable agreements between teams and their sponsors to provide results satisfactory to all. For L’Auto, the Tour had to be a spectacle of competition that the newspaper could sell to its readers and advertisers as a feuilleton sportifof uncertainty and heroism, where success could turn to failure in a single stage; but a sponsor of a commercial team was happy to see their ‘champion’ heading the classification all through the race, by fair means or foul.
Commercial sponsors could be of two main kinds: companies directly involved in the cycle industry (manufacturers of frames, bicycles, compo-nents) or businesses from outside the industry, known as extra-sportifs, seeking to use the publicity and advertising of the Tour and professional cycling to promote their products. Traditionally, until the early and mid-1950s, professional cycling was financed by commercial interests directly related to the sport, but during the 1950s the huge public interest in cycling champions such as Bobet, Coppi, Bartali and others began to attract new financial backers, keen to use cycling to exploit the develop-ment of consumer society. At the same time as these new sponsors began to appear, traditional financiers of professional cycling started to feel the squeeze of a flagging cycle industry, sapped by competition from cyclo-moteurssuch as the Vélo-Solexand various mobylettesand motorcycles, as well as by increasingly affordable cars.
By 1956 finance from outside the traditional confines of the cycle industry was responsible for more than half of advertising in cycling Cycling’s Glory Years 161
competition, and in partnership with the riders, rather than the race organizers or the manufacturers, these new sponsors were putting pres-sure on the long-standing stakeholders of professional cycling to modify its organization, most strikingly through the reintroduction of commer-cially sponsored teams, replacing the convoluted systems of national and regional teams (and other arrangements) used by the Tour since 1930 (Calvet, 1981: 182). In a position of weakness, traditional industry spon-sors worked with race organizers to modify international rulings on cycling sport: for example the Association internationale des organisa-teurs de courses cyclistes (AIOCC) successfully lobbied the UCI to redefine ‘groupes sportifs’ as mixed ‘industry’ and ‘hors-branche’ part-nerships. The cycle industry and the new commercial sponsors also worked together to present a united front in negotiations with race organ-izers in the Association française des constructeurs et associés sportifs (AFCAS) (Calvet, 1981: 182).
During the late 1950s the Tour was systematically undermined by the new sponsors of professional cycling teams, which either prevented their star riders from taking part (Rik van Looy and Jacques Anquetil missed the Tour in 1960, as did Raymond Poulidor in 1961) or inter-fered in the competition by pressuring their riders working in national teams not to help riders sponsored by other advertisers. France arguably lost the 1959 Tour when divisions caused by sponsors within the main national team allowed the Spaniard Federico Bahamontes to win, at the expense of the French rider Henri Anglade, who was riding for a French
‘regional’ squad. Despite L’Equipe’s desperately repeated claims to the effect that ‘Ce ne sont pas les champions qui font le Tour; c’est le Tour qui fait les champions’, the pressure exerted on the Tour was such that in 1962 the national teams were abolished, putting in place the model of race organization and of professional cycling overall that is still, essen-tially, current today.1
The recreation of cycling ‘stars’ – finance and television
During the 1960s and 1970s the new structuring of professional cycling contributed to a recreation of the sporting hero in cycling. Although Bobet, for example, in the 1950s had been an exemplary star of his era, the new organization of teams and finances in cycle sport led to a rede-finition of the nature of racing and of champions. The changes that came about resulted essentially from the increased money available in spon-sorship and from television’s increased coverage of the Tour.
In the new commercial teams, stability of employment and of career development was much weaker than in the previous system, where a
progression through amateur riding to national team was possible and where experience could be gained gradually. The sometimes fleeting attachment of non-cycling sponsors to Tour de France teams meant that results were required rapidly (if not immediately) and that teams were built piecemeal from combinations of riders, organized as a team only in so far as the majority of the members of the squad were employed specif-ically to support the team leader, who was usually an already established champion. One of the automatic structuring effects of this strategy was a reduction in the number of ‘champions’ overall, as each team would normally only have a single leader (not always good enough to win major races), and if one rider and his squad were dominant, then he would be able to monopolize racing as long as his talent remained and his team was preserved intact. Jacques Anquetil was a prime example of this system in the 1960s, as was the Belgian Eddy Merckx in the 1970s and Bernard Hinault in the 1980s, and an accompanying feature of their overall dominance in the Tour and in other professional racing was a reduction in the ‘uncertainty’ (Yonnet, 1998) of competitions: for cycling fans, competition could even seem boring. Because of the amounts of money now flowing into cycling, team leaders of established ability were paid good salaries to provide results based on the support of their équip-iers, and so the professional teams were structured along strongly hierarchical lines, with supporting riders being expected to sacrifice themselves to facilitate victory by a team leader. In comparison with the 1940s and 1950s, surprises in the stages of the Tour, for example, were few and far between, and the durability of what we might here term
‘super’ champions such as Anquetil or Merckx was much appreciated by their team financiers.
In an attempt to reintroduce competitive uncertainty into the racing of the Tour, in order to make the competition more exciting, its organ-izers invented a variety of features – sprint bonuses, time bonuses and so on – whose overall effect on the attractiveness of the event was never-theless debatable. Often, since the bonuses and extra competitions were sponsored by the same companies that financed the teams and attracted money to the Tour, their impact seemed slight, and as with the multi-plicity of competitions within the Tour as a whole (King of the Mountains, sprint jersey, leader under 21, and so on), opportunities were ample for teams and riders to ‘manage’ racing uncertainty by trading positions and bartering compromises in one aspect of the race against another.
Another innovation that partially contributed to the recreation of the cycling star was television, which increasingly in the 1960s and 1970s Cycling’s Glory Years 163
became the prime medium through which the public was informed of professional racing (Wille, 2003). Television’s concentration on riders as visible advertisements for their sponsors – sandwich-board men moving at 40 kph through the French countryside – reinforced the need for cham-pions almost to ‘perform on cue’, supported by their teams, at the same time as it demonstrated that sport was subordinated to commercial inter-ests rather than the nobility of pure athletic competition. The focus of broadcasts on the concluding kilometres of stages led to concentration on team pursuits of lone breakaways, where sponsors’ jerseys and equip-ment could be shown to best advantage. Cycling champions of the past had certainly been associated with particular makes of bicycle or partic-ular team sponsors, but arguably the advent of television introduced a change in the public’s perception of their heroes, alongside a change in the nature of the racing itself.
New pressures to dope – new campaigns against drugs
Cycling’s new financial model from the end of the 1950s and from the reinstitution of commercial teams from 1962, although in many ways improving the lot of both star and journeyman riders alike, also brought new pressures to bear on professional riders. The sociologist, economist and historian of cycling Jacques Calvet has suggested that there were three main reasons why the job of the professional rider became more difficult in the 1960s. Firstly, because commercial sponsors were keen to maximize the advertising potential of their squads, teams of riders were required to compete as much as possible during the whole length of the season and were thus more fatigued than under the old model of spon-sorship, in which manufacturers and race organizers had been more sensitive to the riders’ needs for recuperation. Secondly, the patterns of racing became more unpredictable and varied, with periods of calm progress alternating with extreme efforts often linked to sponsored sprints, bonus points or minor competitions, or the final televised section of a stage or race. Thirdly, competitions such as the Tour de France became increasingly intensive, with fewer rest days, more frequent tiring transitions from one ville-étapeto another, and generally the requirement for racing to fit the schedules of advertisers, radio, television, the press and host towns (Calvet, 1981: 194–96).
Although doping had a long and seamless history in professional cycling (Mignon, 2003), it seems probable that it was in the 1960s, in these conditions of enhanced pressure on riders, that the contemporary phase of performance-enhancing drug-taking was introduced. Pressures on riders of all categories – champions and domestiques (supporting
riders, fetching and carrying and protecting the elite team leaders) alike – to perform at high levels throughout the season and on demand, allied with the fluid and unstable composition of professional squads where riders were hired and fired in the building of competitive units destined for success in specific races, created the context for systematic recourse to doping. Additionally, the increasingly modern approaches of riders, trainers and teams towards physical preparation and medical support meant that opportunities and strategies for doping seemed all the more
‘scientific’, rational and acceptable.
It was during the 1960s that the French state first became actively involved in the detection and repression of doping in sport, partly at least because of growing concern in professional cycling over the ever-increasing incidences of blatant performance-enhancement. Calvet suggests that doping was only identified as a problem within cycling when its negative perceptions in public opinion began to detract from the commercially attractive myth of the géants de la route (Calvet, 1981:
185). In this perspective, extrapolating from Calvet’s argument, drug-taking in the period before 1962 had been tolerated and hidden by all involved (riders, organizers, sponsors) both because the attitudes of society in general were more tolerant towards substance abuse and because the commercial model of professional cycling was not of a kind or nature to be destabilized by nascent or partial concerns over doping.
In the 1960s the rapid modernization of French society and social values led both to increased belief in individual freedoms and a breakdown of deference towards authority and established patterns of behaviour: it was perhaps a combination of these trends that allowed Jacques Anquetil to defend his own doping practices by declaring that it was idiotic for anyone to think that professional racers did notuse drugs (he was happy to declare to all and sundry that races were not run and won on mineral water). It would seem that Anquetil was articulating the view that it was his right to organize his professional life as he saw fit, given the demands imposed on him by the stakeholders in professional cycling, and notwith-standing the bad faith and dishonesty of attitudes towards doping in the past. Additionally, of course, the status of Anquetil, as a multiple Tour-winner and national champion, and especially the personal wealth provided for such a champion by the new model of pro-cycling, gave him the sporting capital to speak forthrightly. Anquetil’s other famous decla-ration that to win by more than a second was a waste of effort is also, intriguingly, a rational response to the system of competition in which he found himself during the 1960s: in a context where commercial concerns seemed to dominate sporting values, winning by any margin is Cycling’s Glory Years 165
what matters to publicize one’s sponsor (he also, perhaps cynically, defined the difference between amateurism and professionalism as residing principally in the fact that amateurs do not pay tax on their winnings).
Anquetil’s carefully studied and almost cynical approach to racing was somehow ‘technocratic’, whereas the less successful style of another of France’s cycling heroes, Raymond Poulidor, seemed evocative of the less thrusting France of the 1930s and 1940s. We now turn to an unpacking of the social and cultural symbolism of these heroes of the Tour.
Anquetil, Poulidor, Thévenet: the meaning of Tour champions Sporting champions have an iconic status, and the cycling champions of France’s national race exercise a particular hold over the popular imag-ination, as we have seen in earlier analyses of cycling stars such as Bobet and Robic. In the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, as the mediatization of the Tour reached new intensity, and as France continued to negotiate her developing identity in a period of social and cultural change, Tour winners such as Anquetil and Thévenet, and the ‘nearly-man’ Poulidor,
Anquetil, Poulidor, Thévenet: the meaning of Tour champions Sporting champions have an iconic status, and the cycling champions of France’s national race exercise a particular hold over the popular imag-ination, as we have seen in earlier analyses of cycling stars such as Bobet and Robic. In the late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, as the mediatization of the Tour reached new intensity, and as France continued to negotiate her developing identity in a period of social and cultural change, Tour winners such as Anquetil and Thévenet, and the ‘nearly-man’ Poulidor,