Let’s go back to the beginning. The Tour de France was originally just one of more than a dozen sporting stunts announced by L’Auto in early 1903, all with the express purpose of boosting the newspaper’s circulation. In this the Tour was remarkably successful. From a low of 20,000 L’Auto‘s circulation shot up to 65,000 during the first Tour. Le Vélo, the newspaper which L’Auto had been created to rival, was driven out of business in 1904. Within a decade L’Auto‘s circulation was touching 320,000 during the Tour.

During the first world war, with its pagination reduced to just two pages and Henri Desgrange himself away from the farm, earning a Croix de Guerre as a volunteer infantryman, L’Auto‘s circulation slipped to just 22,000. Post-war, this climbed to 162,000 in 1920. Throughout the ‘twenties L’Auto‘s circulation roared, climbing to 298,000 copies generally and topping out at 650,000 during the Tour in 1930. In 1933, circulation peaked, hitting 364,000 copies generally and touching 730,000 during the Tour.

Then came the decline. By 1938 L’Auto‘s circulation had fallen to 200,000. Not through lack of interest in the Tour: quite the reverse. The Tour had become so popular that L’Auto‘s rivals were giving it their whole-hearted support. They too were getting a large benefit from L’Auto‘s hard work.

Henri Desgrange had tried to tread a delicate line on this issue. Initially, in 1903, when Le Vélo tried to ignore the Tour in the hope that it and its sponsoring newspaper would go away, he complained bitterly. Then, when the race began to boom and L’Auto‘s circulation began to soar, Desgrange tried to block other papers from covering his race. It took him until 1922 to admit defeat and allow rival journalists to follow the Tour. A caravan of fifteen press cars was soon in pursuit of the peloton, five of them belonging to L’Auto.

By the second half of the thirties Paris-Soir – a general interest newspaper – were putting a team of forty journalists on the Tour, supported by two planes, five cars, five motorcycles and a bus. Better still, Paris-Soir, being an evening newspaper, were able to beat L’Auto to the punch by producing an edition of their paper that carried all the news from that day’s racing. Readers of L’Auto, on the other hand, had to wait until the following morning to discover how the race was unfolding.

It wasn’t just rival newspapers that were numbing the effect of L’Auto‘s circulation-boosting stunt. Radio soon discovered the joys of the race. The Tour became a multi-media event and fewer and fewer people relied upon L’Auto to tell them how it was unfolding.

With the arrival of Émilien Amaury in the 1940s, a new order went out: the Tour was no longer to be treated as just a circulation-boosting stunt for his own Le Parisien Libéré and Jacques Goddet’s L’Équipe. The Tour had to grow up and start paying its own way. While revenues from the race did increase over the next two decades, so too did its costs. It wasn’t until 1974 – according to Félix Lévitan – that the Tour started to turn a profit. Think about that a moment: for its first seventy years the Tour didn’t pay its own way. Talk about children refusing to grow up and stop living off their parents, eh?

Let’s jump forward in time. What impact do you think the Tour has on L’Équipe‘s circulation today? Would you be correct in assuming that every July, L’Équipe sees its sales peak? If that’s the case, you’d be wrong.

Fig 1: Combined monthly sales of L’Équipe & L’Équipe Dimanche, 2005-2010 (millions)
Source – OJD

Only once in the last six years has L’Équipe‘s total sales peaked in July. In 2006. Floyd Landis, eh, what a guy? Uum, no. Chapeau instead to Zinedine Zidane and the French World Cup squad.

If the Tour is no longer about selling more newspapers then, what is it about? Well, let’s zip back to the seventies again. In 1973, the Tour was put into the hands of La Société d’Exploitation du Tour de France (the ‘exploitation’ part –wisely – being dropped in 1980). The following year the race turned its first profit. How? Principally through the generosity of host towns.

In 1974, Lévitan was able to squeeze 1,800,000 French francs out of Brittany’s market gardeners and vegetable growers in return for granting them the Tour’s grand départ (some perspective for you: the Tour’s total prize-fund that year was 802,650 French francs). In return for their barrow full of French francs, Brittany’s market gardeners got the prologue and two stages of the 1974 Tour. A third stage – up and down a dual-carriageway in England – was paid for by the operators of a ferry service between Roscoff and Plymouth. The money these opening stages generated was a coup for Lévitan but the racing was, at best, anaemic (of the English stage, the wags at the Daily Mirror were prompted to run the headline ‘Can Forty Million Frenchmen Be Wrong?’). But at that point it was the money that mattered the most.

Towns, cities, whole départments had been paying for the privilege of hosting the Tour for years, providing an important source of revenue for the race organisers. It was Lévitan’s job to squeeze every last centime out of them. And this was something he was the Mr Kipling of finance at: exceedingly good. As he demonstrated in 1974. And continued to demonstrate until his ouster in 1987.

The cost of hosting the Tour has risen as the years have gone by. In 1977 Rennes paid 200,000 French francs for the privilege. According to the-then Mayor, the town “saw the riders for ten minutes and the publicity caravan for three hours.” Almost thirty years later – 2006 – Rennes had to pay €76,000 to host the Tour again, roughly the equivalent of 500,000 French francs.

By the time the Tour came to Ireland in 1998 the cost of hosting a foreign grand départ was something in the region of 5 million French francs. Less than a decade later London coughed up €1.5 million – call it 10 million French francs and you wouldn’t be far wrong – for the 2007 grand départ.

The Tour has other income sources, such as jersey sponsors and the publicity caravan. Important as all these are to the financial well-being of the race, their contribution to the Tour’s coffers is dwarfed by the men who really control the Tour today: the television companies.

The modern Tour is inceasingly a televisual event. And he who pays the piper calls the tune. As France Télévisions demonstrated when they summoned Pat McQuaid to a meeting some years back and told him that race radios were killing the Tour and had to go. With plans for his own races, and the need to sell their media rights for as high a price as possible, McQuaid did his best Michael Flatley impression for the executives at France Télévisions.

It is on the Tour’s television rights that the revenue-sharing debate has recently focused. Quite how big those rights really are we’ll come to later in this series. For now it is sufficient to note that putting a value on them is not straightforward.  Putting any values on the Tour’s revenues and expenses – on its profits – is not easy. While the Société du Tour de France used to file annual accounts, once the race fell under the control of ASO in the early nineties a shroud was pulled over the race’s profitability.

With the Tour’s finances under a shroud, attention shifts to ASO itself. Since the creation of ASO new events have been added to the Amaury’s sporting empire. In 1998 ASO acquired the Marathon de Paris, previously the property of Stade Française. In 2002, they acquired Paris-Nice and created the Tour of Qatar. In 2003 they added l’Open de Golf de France to their stable of events.

In that year – 2003 – out of a total 117 days of sport organised by ASO, 74 of them were cycling (motor sports accounted for 21, golf 16, equestrianism 4, and athletics 2). In total, cycling contributed 70% of the company’s revenue (motor sports accounted for 21%, athletics 4%, golf 4%, and equestrianism 1%). ASO’s total income – somewhere between €110 million and €120 million – was split between TV rights (44%), marketing (39%), competitors’ rights (12%), and local communities (5%).

In 2004 the Rencontres Internationales des Disciplines Équestres (RAID) was added to ASO’s roster. They also added the Paris-Dakar. In 2008 they took a 49% stake in Unipublic, organisers of the Vuelta a España. The following year a partnership was announced with the organisers of the Tour of California. The next year they liberated the Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré from its previous owner. All of these acquisitions – and the various ones not listed here – have had an impact on ASO’s revenue and profitability.

Last year, the cycling world finally decided to shine a light on ASO’s revenues and profits. Someone released a set of numbers showing a jump in ASO’s revenue between 2008 and 2009 of €24 million and a profit of €32 million. Many leapt to the conclusion that all of this was down to the Tour de France. Then, heaping foolishness upon foolishness, they credited it all to the unretiring Lance Armstrong. John Wilcockson and VeloNews treated those claims with the scorn they deserved, going back to 2002 to show the true picture.

Figure 2: ASO Revenues and Profits, 2002-2009.
Source – VeloNews / ASO accounts

The big drop in revenues in 2008, Wilcockson explained, was down to the last-minute cancellation of the Dakar. When the Dakar returned in 2009, so did the revenue. Or most of it. That ASO’s revenue in 2009 was less than the figure for 2007 is telling: the world of sport is as credit-crunched as the rest of the global economy.

The numbers shown in the chart above are central to the revenue-sharing debate. While the debate has, so far, focused on the alleged $200 million of TV revenue generated by the Tour, the real argument is about getting ASO to share more of the total wealth cycling generates for the Amaurys. Instead of feeding back into the pockets of the Amaurys (and Arnaud Lagardère) the teams would like to see more of the wealth feeding back into their pockets.

How wealthy are the Amaurys? The question may not seem relevant to cycling’s revenue-sharing debate, not when you consider the full scope of the Amaurys’ empire (see An Empire at the Crossroads, part 4 of this series). But it is worth considering if only to realise what’s in this for the Amaurys and why they didn’t simply accept Arnaud Lagardère’s offer last year to take the whole kit and caboodle off their hands.

Connections magazine in France produces a French rich list. As with all rich lists a certain amount of salt should be pinched when you consider these numbers. Numbers are plucked out of thin air and estimates are heaped upon estimates to arrive at a final figure. Most rich lists are just fun colour pieces, not to be relied upon. With that caveat in mind, here’s how the family’s wealth has been estimated over the last few years:

Figure 3: Amaury Family Wealth, 2004-2011.
Source – Connections

Most of you will have noticed the big drop in the family’s wealth between 2007 and 2008, from €450 million to €228 million. You will remember that the patriarch of the clan, Philippe Amaury, died in 2006. Death duties on his estate presumably wiped out a lot of the family’s fortunes. But unlike the situation when he finally secured his inheritance in 1983 – when he had to sell a quarter stake in the empire to Arnaud Lagardère’s father – this time around the surviving Amaury’s had enough reserves to be able to pay the state its dues without having to cede more control of their empire.

The Amaurys were not without offers of help after Philippe Amaury’s death. Some people just like to be nice and help someone out when they find themselves in troubled times. Charitable sorts, some people are. Ever eager to lend a helping hand. That the Amaurys refused these offers of aid is worth remembering. Having refused to sell the family silver when they were at their lowest ebb, and having refused other offers since, it’s hard to see the Amaurys simply walking away from the family business today. Not without a fight. Or a very, very generous offer.

It is equally hard to see them giving in easily to the entreaties of the AIGCP that the pocket money paid to the teams should be increased at the cost of ASO’s profitability. Not without the AIGCP offering to do something nice for the Amaurys in return. Is the AIGCP’s promise to spend more money on anti-doping sufficiently nice? Or would the Amaurys be skeptical of such a pledge and want to protect the teams from themselves and their tendency to out-bid one another in their quest for the shiniest riders in the shop window? Only time will tell.

Previously: The man who would be king.

Next: The UCI’s role in the revenue-sharing debate.

In the Summer of 2010 two newspapers owned and operated by the Amaurys – Le Parisien and its sister title, Aujourd’hui en France – were put up for sale. The bankers at Rothschild valued the combined titles at €200 million, with a reserve of €170 million. Expressions of interest came from rival publishers like Serge Dassault (Le Figaro) and Vincent Bolloré (Direct Matin, Direct Soir, Direct Sport). There was also some interest from Belgium (the owners of La Voix du Nord), Germany (the Springer group, owners of Bild) and from the UK (Mecom, David Montgomery’s struggling wannabe media empire).

But no one was biting at the €200 million asking price. The Belgians valued the titles at just €100 million and only wanted to buy 80% of them. Dassault – whose other interests, like those of Arnaud Lagardère, also extend into the world of warfare – offered no more than €130 million. The “For Sale” signs, the Amaurys declared, were taken down.

Why were the Amaury’s willing to dump Le Parisien? Had they simply had their fill of the trouble and strife – declining circulation and a truculent workforce – owning it brought them? One reason given by some is Arnaud Lagardère, whose media to munitions empire has owned 25% of the Amaury Group since the eighties.

Media mogul Arnaud Lagardère     photo: Reuters/Phillippe Wojazer

Like Marie-Odile Amaury, Arnaud Lagardère has only relatively recently taken control of the family business. In the case of Lagardère, that business was originally created by his father, Jean-Luc Lagardère. From humble beginnings as an engineer with the aircraft manufacturer Dassault, Lagardère Senior began to create an empire that ranged from munitions (the armaments and missile company Matra) through to media (the radio station Europe 1, the publisher Hachette). When Jean-Luc Lagardère died in 2003 it fell to his son, Arnaud, to take the helm of the empire his father had created.

Like Marie-Odile Amaury, Arnaud Lagardère has encountered a certain amount of resentment simply for inheriting the family business. Frequently he has found himself compared unfavourably with his father, in the same way that Amaury has been compared unfavourably with her husband. “I am an heir, therefore I am stupid,” Lagardère once pointed out to a biographer. “That is the way we see heirs in this country …” For some in France, dynastic succession in business is seen as being too close for comfort to the concept of royalty. The French know how to deal with royalty.

But whereas Marie-Odile Amaury seems determined to remain true to the ideals of her husband and preserve the family empire, Arnaud Lagardère seems to be rebelling against his dead father and has set himself the task of disassembling the empire he inherited, in order to build it anew. Much of that empire was made up of minority holdings in different enterprises. Recently, Lagardère has decided to extricate the business from these investments. Stakes in Marie Claire (42%), Canal+ (20%), La Dépêche (15%), l’Alsace (20%) and others are all up for sale. A large part of Hachette has already been sold to Hearst and his stake in Le Monde‘s online division has also been sold.

What, though, of Lagardère’s 25% stake in the Amaury Group? Curiously, when it came to the Amaurys, Lagardère didn’t want to be a seller. He wanted to be a buyer. In the spring of last year he publicly made the widow Amaury an offer he thought she couldn’t refuse: sell him the whole business or he would dump his minority holding.

Why, if he’s unloading his media interests elsewhere, did Lagardère want the Amaurys’ business? Simple: Lagardère has looked at the sporting landscape and sees gold in them thar hills – a $100 billion global market – and has struck out for the end of the rainbow, shovel and pick over his shoulder. Last year he consolidated his Group’s existing sports interests – which date back to the sixties when his father oversaw the sponsorship on the Matra-Ford F1 team – in a new vehicle, Lagardère Unlimited, whose objective is modest: to become the premier player in international sports marketing and media rights within five years.

Key to Lagardère’s plan is growth through acquisition. The Lagardère Group has already absorbed companies like Sportfive, which handles European media rights (mostly football); IEC In Sports, which deals with sports rights for Olympic sports; Upsolut, a German organiser of sports events; Prevent, organiser of tennis events in Sweden; World Sports Group, which handles media rights in the Asian market (mostly football, cricket and golf); and Best, which is involved in athlete representation, event management, and the sale of media rights in the US.  Lagardère has also taken a minority stake in Saddlebrook, an academy which seeks to train the basketball, baseball and football stars of tomorrow.

An attempt to buy into IMG – the company Lagardère seems to measure his own success or failure against – failed. And the widow Amaury showed her mettle and rebuffed his advances too.

Lagardère responded like a lover spurned. He accused the Amaurys of having a conflict of interest, between L’Équipe, the events organised by ASO, and the company’s stake in the online-gaming site Sajoo.fr. Never mind the fact that he himself is looking to build a vertically-integrated sports marketing and management empire that would see him training athletes, managing them when they turn pro and organising events at which they might compete. That’s neither here nor there. What matters, he would have the world believe, is the Amaurys’ conflict of interests. Not his.

Having been brushed off by the Amaurys, Lagardère now wants to cash in his stake in the Amaury Group. And the Amaurys need to finance the buy-out of their dissident shareholder. Hence, it is argued, the abortive proposal to sell Le Parisien and Aujourd’hui en France. How much the Amaurys need to raise is open to debate. For a start it depends on how much they have sitting idle in the petty cashbox. Which got a bit of a boost last year when the Amaurys sold L’Écho Républicain, a small, local paper which it originally bought in 1999 (from, as fate would have it, the Lagardère Group).

Of bigger import though is the valuation of Lagardère’s shareholding in the Amaury Group. Some have valued the Amaury Group at €2 billion. Lagardère himself says his 25% stake is worth €200 million. The Amaurys say it’s only worth €100 million. Between the ask and the offer there is clearly a lot of ground to be made up. Ground which representatives from each side will have to negotiate (Crédit Agricole representing Lagardère, Rothschild presumably representing the Amaurys).

That is, of course, unless one can convince the other to change their mind: either the Amaurys persuade Lagardère to hold on to his shares; or Lagardère convinces the Amaurys to give him what he most wants – the Tour de France and the rest of the Amaury Group’s stable of sporting events and media-rights-management interests.

A third option would see the Amaurys sitting back and letting Lagardère sell his shares and then learning to live with his replacement, whomever that might be. Not many people, though, want a 25% stake in a private company given how little control over its affairs that offers them. Or the exit strategies open to them.

How much of a competitor is Lagardère Unlimited to ASO? ASO’s principle sporting interests are event management and media rights. Lagardère Unlimited’s principle interests are athlete management and media rights. On the event side of its books, Lagardère Unlimited has twenty events across eight disciplines (American Football, Basketball, Cycling, Figure Skating, Football, Golf, Tennis, and Triathlon), none of them having the status of something like the Tour or the Dakar. In cycling, there are just two events, both built around the model of a pro race plus a cyclo-sportif: the Skoda Velothon in Berlin and the Vattenfall Cyclassics, which incorporates Germany’s sole contribution to the UCI WorldTour series. Compared with the Amaurys’ stable of cycling events, Lagardère Unlimited must seem like a gnat, of no great consequence.

But even gnats can sting. And Lagardère has stung the Amaurys: in the most recent bidding for control of the European TV rights for the Winter and Summer Olympics – covering the 2014 and 2016 Games – the Amaurys lost out to their dissident shareholder.

Despite cycling itself not being central to Lagardère’s plans – his preference is for sports with balls – the little interest he has shown so far in the sport leaves questions to be answered. Such as just what was he discussing with Lance Armstrong when the two had a meeting during the Tour of Murcia last year? Could he have been attempting to sign the American to his athlete management agency? Or was he discussing his bid for the Tour de France with a man who himself made a putative attempt to buy the Tour from the Amaurys?

And given the year the sport has gone through – with threats of secession by some team managers and the AIGCP generally trying to reorganise the way the sport is run so that the teams take a larger slice of the sport’s revenues – it would also be interesting to know who else within the sport Lagardère has had meetings with in recent months. He is a known associate of Johan Bruyneel, but of whom else in the cycling world does he have an ear?

How serious Lagardère is about turning the family business into a sporting giant, though, is a question some in France have been asking. Previously, his sporting interests – Team Lagardère and Lagardère Paris Racing – have seemed like little more than vanity projects. Lagardère is seen by some as being just another dilettante blessed with a substantial inheritance.

Over the course of the summer, the divorced father of two only added to this view when he became something of a French YouTube sensation, star of a video showing him and his girlfriend (now fiancée), Jade Foret, preening and posing for a magazine photoshoot. The three-decade age gap between the two – he’s 50, she’s 20 – has amused some, prompting the usual questions of quite what she sees in the diminutive billionaire or he sees in the leggy model.

For others – keen to put Lagardère on the couch and play Freud with him – the fact that his father’s second wife was also a statuesque model (he towered over her in age, being her senior by eighteen years) is enough to set them off in a chin-stroking reverie (“Ah, he really is his father’s son, eh!”). How these people reacted to Lagardère’s comment that what attracted him to Foret was that she reminded him of his mother you can only wonder at (and some among you will no doubt now be stroking your own chin and wondering if it wasn’t just an inhibited Oedipus complex he and Armstrong were discussing in Murcia).

In the staid world of French finance, though, this silly-season story led to some calling into question Lagardère’s suitability to take the helm next year of EADS, the Franco-German aerospace and armaments giant in which the Lagardère Group holds a 7.5% stake. And which his father before him once presided over. The leadership of EADS is a political prize that rotates between Germany and France and the deal ensuring Lagardère’s ascension to the throne was brokered between Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy is now being called upon to reconsider his choice of Lagardère. Who would have thought that the French would find it hard to accommodate the notion of a middle-aged man marrying a model who towers over him and think that such a relationship should debar him from taking the reins of power?

But Lagardère should not be underestimated. If the chin-strokers are right and Arnaud Lagardère really is his father’s son, then he will be as determined as his father before him to make his mark in the world of business. To be a success. The equal – at least – of his father.

Lagardère has been brought up to believe that success can be bought, as evidenced by the number of companies that have been acquired in order to grow the Lagardère Group’s sporting interests. Influential friends can also be acquired. Lagardère’s little black book has some very interesting entries. Over the years he has – through business and through things like his patronage of Paris’s failed bid for the 2012 Olympics – cultivated relationships with the likes of Nicolas Sarkozy, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Alain Juppé, Martin Bouygues, Bertrand Delanoë, and Laurent Fabius.

In the same way that Émillien Amaury first built the Amaury empire by cultivating friendships with those who wield power, Arnaud Lagardère understands the need for friends in high places. And how to use them to get what he wants.

Next: Back to basics – the Tour de France in numbers.

Previously: An Empire at the Crossroads.

Having talked his way into co-ownership of the Tour de France in 1947, Émilien Amaury put one of his own men inside the Tour to watch over his interests. That man was Félix Lévitan, the editor of Le Parisien Libéré‘s sports pages.

Eddy Merckx talks with TdF race organisers Lévitan and Goddet Photo: © AFP Photo courtesy of CyclingNews.com

The Tour’s Godfather

Félix Lévitan had begun his working life at the magazine, La Pédale, in the late thirties before taking up a position with L’Auto. During the war, amid the various round-ups of Jews, he was interned first in a military camp in Paris, then later in Dijon. After the Libération, Amaury appointed him as head of sport at the newly launched Le Parisien Libéré.

Amaury charged Lévitan with turning the Tour into a business and not just a circulation-boosting stunt. Given that L’Équipe and Le Parisien Libéré were not the only ones whose circulation got a boost from the Tour, this was the sensible thing to do. Lévitan’s role in the development of the Tour into a self-sufficient commercial enterprise was vital. “The Tour would not have become what it is today without Lévitan,” claimed Hein Verbruggen. “He developed the sponsorship agreements with the host towns and realized the economic potential offered by television.”

In 1962, Lévitan officially became co-director of the Tour, Goddet ceding a share of the limelight. In 1975 Lévitan was the instigator of two major changes to the Tour: the introduction of polka-dot jersey for the best climber and switching the finale of the race to the Champs-Élysées.

That same year, Émilien Amaury was showing how much of a hard-nosed businessman he really could be. With Le Parisien Libéré‘s circulation in decline in the early seventies, in 1975 he set about firing several hundred staff. Most of them were printers. If you know anything about the newspaper industry the world over you will know the power of the print unions and the manner in which they wield it. Amaury’s cut-backs led to a lengthy and vicious dispute with the sacked printers, which lasted for more than two years. During this time Amaury was able to continue printing and distributing Le Parisien Libéré, using workers from the socialist Force Ouvrière union instead of the communist Fédération du Livre.

The dispute led to protests at the Tour de France, but pointing that out seems a little self-centred when you consider what else happened during the strike. An attempt was made on the life of Le Parisien Libéré‘s editor, Bernard Cabanes, in the form of a bomb outside his home. But the people who planted the explosives picked the wrong Bernard Cabanes and murdered instead the editor in chief of Agence France Presse, who happened to have the same name. André Bergeron, the leader of the socialist print union whose workers were helping Amaury break the strike, was injured in a second attack that same night.

Émilien Amaury died in 1977, aged 67, after falling from his horse and before the dispute with the printers was settled. Peace was finally achieved in the late Summer of 1977 – in the interregnum between the death of Amaury and the arrival of his heir – when the striking workers were given jobs at the Nouvelles Messageries de la Presse Parisienne (NMPP, now Presstalis), the company which distributes newspapers in the Île-de-France area. The NMPP was half owned by the French publishing house Hachette, with the member journals owning the rest of the shares. In effect, the salaries of Amaury’s surplus printers were taken up by his rivals. The cost to Le Parisien, though, was not cheap: before the dispute it had enjoyed sales of more than 700,000 copies daily. Afterwards, that figure dropped to 350,000.

The Step-Father of the Tour

It was just as well that no one waited for arrival of Amaury’s heir before settling the dispute with the printers, for the death of Émilien Amaury was followed by a long battle for control of his empire between his daughter, Francine, and his son, Philippe. The daughter was the preferred successor, the son being overlooked by his father. Finally in 1983, after six years of legal battling, an amicable arrangement was reached. It saw the daughter taking control of the group’s weekly titles – Marie-France and Point de Vu Images Du Monde –  with the son retaining the dailies. And, through them, control of the Tour de France. What happened to the Tour in the eighties was his handiwork.

Before coming to that, though, it is worth first looking at what happened at Le Parisien Libéré under its new owner. Working with Martin Desprez and Jean-Pierre Courcol – two of his colleagues from the marketing agency Havas – Philippe Amaury radically altered the editorial line of the newspaper his father had created. Under Émilien Amaury the paper had been, not unlike many tabloids, xenophobic and chauvinistic. Philippe Amaury put in place a new editorial directive and the paper became softer, less radical. In 1986, the title changed to Le Parisien. In 1994 – in response to the introduction of InfoMatin – Amaury launched a national edition of the paper, Aujourd’hui en France. The combined sales of the two titles make Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui en France France’s most popular daily newspaper.

Philippe Amaury’s legal battle to secure his inheritance did not come cheap. At the end of it, not only did he have a large legal bill to pay, he also had a not-insubstantial bill for death duties on his share of his father’s estate. And, after its long union dispute, the Group was not exactly flush with cash. To raise funds, Amaury sold 25% of his shareholding in the media group he had just fought so hard to inherit. The initial buyer was the publishing house Hachette, then headed by the Gaullist Jean-Luc Lagardère. Today, those shares are owned by Lagardère Active, part of Arnaud Lagardère’s media to munitions empire.

The Tour itself initially saw no impact from the change in ownership of its parent papers. That changed in 1987, when Félix Lévitan came unstuck, caught breaking a cardinal rule of business: he lost money. Worse, he’d buried the loss in the Tour’s books. The basic story of what happened is straightforward enough: Lévitan had dreamed of organising a Tour in America for several years. In 1980 he had punted the notion of a Tour of Florida. The next year he had the crazy dream of a Tour of California. Then the company responsible for selling the Tour’s TV rights in the States – Broadcast Rights International Corp (BRIC) – came up with the idea of a Tour of America, a three-stage race from Virginia to Washington, to be held in 1983. Lévitan was brought on board as an adviser.

Unfortunately, for all concerned, BRIC’s race ended up losing money. A not insubstantial sum of money. Lévitan – bless his cotton socks and kind intentions – decided to subsidise BRIC’s losses. To the tune of $500,000. Without consulting his bosses. This being the case, he couldn’t just write BRIC a cheque for half a million dollars. So he engaged in a little creative accounting. It was hardly the most clever accounting fraud I’ve ever seen, but it was – until it was discovered – effective. We’ll go into in more detail in a future part of this series of articles.

Lévitan’s little financial irregularity was discovered in the Spring of 1987 and he was unceremoniously booted out. He turned up for work one morning to find his offices locked. After that he went into a long sulk and didn’t even turn up at the Tour again until 1998.

The period between Spring 1987 and Autumn 1988 – the eighteen months following the ouster of Lévitan – was one of the rockiest in the Tour’s long history from an organisational point of view, with three different men taking charge of the race in the space of a year and a half.

The first of these was Jean-François Naquet-Radiguet, a 47-year-old businessman with a Harvard MBA, formerly the manager of the Cognac company, Martel, and their Latin American interests. In 1963, while a young Turk with 3M, he had followed the sticky-tape company’s cars in the Tour’s tacky publicity caravan. That was, more or less, his sole previous connection with the race. He was a total outsider.

Naquet-Radiguet managed to upset a lot of people with reforms he planned for the Tour. The who and the how isn’t clear, all that is clear is that a month before the start of the 1988 Tour – just twelve months into his reign – Naquet-Radiguet departed the scene. Jean-Pierre Courcol – who had helped Philippe Amaury change the editorial line at Le Parisien Libéré and was by then an editor with L’Équipe – was parachuted in to take over from him. He only lasted through to the Autumn of that year, choosing to stand down after becoming disillusioned by the mess of the Delgado affaire. Courcol was replaced by Jean-Marie Leblanc, whose tenure lasted through to the new millennium.

Out of those three men, Courcol is the one we want to pay attention to next. Unlike Naquet-Radiguet, Courcol stayed within the Amaury Group after standing down as director of the Tour, and became instrumental in the next step in the Group’s evolution. It was Courcol who introduced the idea of the Tour being the jewel in the crown of a sport events company. Thus was ASO born in 1992. ASO inherited L’Équipe‘s existing events – which included Paris-Roubaix and the Tour de l’Avenir – and added new events.

At this point Jean-Claude Killy was brought on board. A former skier – triple Olympic champion in 1968 – Killy had successfully turned his sporting fame to his financial advantage. He retired from sport at the age of 25 and became a client of Mark McCormack’s global sports marketing agency, International Marketing Group (IMG). With IMG’s help he became a star of Madison Avenue, ‘loaning’ his name and image to clients like Canon, Chevrolet, General Motors, Moët et Chandon, Rolex, Schwinn and United Airlines. By the time he joined ASO his personal wealth was estimated at 120 million French francs. As co-chair of the Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games in Albertville in 1992 (think, perhaps, Seb Coe, only with sex appeal), he had a Rolodex to die for. Philippe Amaury wasn’t quite ready to die for it, but he was willing to pay for it, generously.

With the aid of Alain Krzentowski, Killy took the Tour by the scruff of the neck and shook it. In just seven years ASO went from being worth 30 million francs to 60 million. Killy, though, refused to share the spoils of war. Growth of the Tour’s prize fund lagged behind, going from 10 million francs in 1992 to 15 million in 1999. By the end of the nineties, though, the good times seemed to be running out.

Among the various probable and improbable excuses offered for the eruption of the Festina affaire in 1998 is the role of Philippe Amaury and the Amaury Group. One version has it that Amaury’s public support for Jacques Chirac set opposing political factions against him. Thus, it is claimed, the Communist Party sports minister, Marie George Buffet, gladly seized on the opportunity to muddy Amaury’s face when it presented itself. Alternatively, it is also claimed Buffet was driven by the conflicts between Amaury’s press group and print unions, the latter being supported by the Communist Party.

One man who was not responsible for the Festina affaire was Killy. In fact, while much of it was unfolding, he was in the States, attending a Coca-Cola board meeting in Atlanta. When he did express a view on the events unfolding at the Tour, he dismissed the whole thing as being minor and of no great consequence. Coca-Cola – who had entered into a twelve-year sponsorship contract with the Tour in the mid-eighties and extended that annually when it ran out – didn’t quite agree with Killy and decided that, in the wake of Festina, they would immediately reduce their financial involvement with the race by 80%.

In 2000, Philippe Amaury felt that Killy and co had grown too powerful within the Group. An amicable parting of the ways was agreed. Killy departed ASO with a golden parachute of 50 million francs (circa €7.6 million). Krzentowski left with him, trousering 32 million francs (circa €4.9 million).

The year 2000 also saw Amaury extend his Group’s interests in another direction, paying €42 million to purchase the Futuroscope theme park, situated near Poitiers and which has hosted the Tour on a number of occasions since its opening in 1987. Within two years of having invested in it – having already lost a small fortune on the project – Amaury cut his losses and ran. In the Autumn of 2002, he sold the majority of his share-holding (the minority stake he retained was finally sold in 2006). For the princely sum of €18.5 million local representatives took the theme-park off Amaury’s hands.

The €23.5 million capital loss – plus an estimated €12 million in operating losses – kind of puts Félix Lévitan’s American troubles into perspective. And, as with Lévitan, a head had to roll. Jean-Pierre Courcol – whose bright idea the Futuroscope investment had been – was shown the door. Nearly two decades of loyal service to Philippe Amaury meant nothing when set against such a financial cock-up.

Perhaps Courcol’s biggest fault, in the end, had been a sense of invincibility which drove him to take an aggressive approach to problem solving. Between imitating Amaury’s catastrophic investment in Futuroscope and the Group’s eventual withdrawal from the ailing themepark, Courcol turned his attention to the NMPP. Courcol decided to orchestrate Le Parisien‘s withdrawal from the newspaper distribution entity, cutting the paper’s links with the troublesome print workers who had gotten jobs there following the union dispute of 1975-77. The short-term pain of another dispute with the Fédération du Livre, Courcol argued, would be offset by gains in the paper’s circulation. Those gains never materialised and, to many observers, Courcol looked like he was merely settling an old score.

If anyone thought that the aggressiveness of Amaury executives would be curbed by the dismissal of Courcol they had a rude awakening when the man who was appointed in 2000 to lead ASO into the new millennium declared war with the UCI over the latter’s attempt to impose the Pro Tour on the cycling calendar. It was a war that had been brewing since Félix Lévitan first argued with Hein Verbruggen over the introduction of the World Cup in the eighties. Under the leadership of Patrice Clerc, ASO and the UCI faced off in a dispute that would push cycling to the brink of destruction, with ASO threatening secession and the UCI trying to bring down the Tour.

In 2006, with the Pro Tour Wars dragging on, Philippe Amaury died of cancer at age sixty-six. Unlike the tussle for succession that followed the death of his father, there was a smooth transition after Philippe Amaury’s death: his widow, Marie-Odile Amaury took the helm of the Amaury Group.

Next: The widow Amaury: the Tour’s wicked step-mother?

Previously: The Man Who Sold The Tour.