Now that we’ve come to the end
I’ve been trying to piece it together,
Not that distance makes anything clearer.
~ Paul Muldoon

The story of the Tour de France began in Paris. Montmartre to be precise. That was where the offices of  L’Auto-Vélo were located and where Géo Lefèvre first punted the idea that became the Tour de France. In order to put some symmetry on this thing, let’s draw this series of articles on aspects of the revenue-sharing debate to its conclusion by returning to Paris. Issy-les-Moulineaux to be precise. That’s where Amaury Sport Organisation is headquartered, next door to the offices of L’Auto‘s spiritual successor, L’Équipe.

Most days, the story goes, you’ll find the matriarch of the Amaury family dining in L’Équipe‘s staff canteen. While it is her thirty-something son, Jean-Etienne, who heads up the sporting arm of the family empire, it is Marie-Odile Amaury who is the Amaury Group’s chief executive. The buck stops with her. And, as a hands-on chief executive, she undoubtedly seeks to stay aware of all the bucks heading her way. She keeps a watchful eye over the affairs of ASO.

What does Amaury see today when she looks at ASO? She sees a Dakar Rally that is going from strength to strength. She sees a Tour de France that is back on an even keel. She sees ASO’s cyclo-sportif footprint growing, with the creation of new events like the Etapa Argentina and the acquisition of events like the Roc d’Azur.

But Amaury must also be aware of the storm clouds gathering on the horizon. There are the ever-present clouds of those who call for a greater share of ASO’s wealth, more money, a bigger slice of the cake, more crumbs from the table. Nor can Amaury be unaware of the threats posed by would-be sporting-magnates like Arnaud Lagardère.

Even if Lagardère proves to be the sort who would pull a gun in a fistfight, I’d like to think that the Amaurys would still be able to take the media-to-munitions mogul. They’re not without a few dirty tricks up their own sleeves, as Laurent Fignon discovered after he snapped up Paris-Nice from under their noses. But that is a fight that is unlikely to come to a single stand-up knock-down session. The Amaurys and Lagardère are digging in for a long war, an attritional war, each chipping away at the other bit by bit.

What of the other notable rival, the UCI’s new race-organising arm, Global Cycling Promotion? Could ASO take them? Fighting the UCI is not easy. Not because they don’t play by Marquess of Queensberry rules (the Amaurys can pay scant attention to them too, when the need arises) but because, as cycling’s sole governing body, the UCI ultimately write the rules and referee the fight.

The Amaurys – to their cost – know that fighting the UCI is not easy. I’m not just referring here to the ProTour Wars. There’s older history than that. Back in the eighties, when Hein Verbruggen set in motion the changes which would turn the UCI from being a toothless tiger into a force to be reckoned with, the organisers of the Tour attempted to halt him in his tracks.

Starting out as a marketing executive with the candy confectioner Mars, Verbruggen rose to power within the UCI’s professional arm, the Fédération Internationale du Cyclisme Professionnel  (FICP), before – following the death of Luis Puig in 1990 – taking the helm of the UCI itself. While still with the FICP, Verbruggen took an idea from Vélo magazine and introduced the FICP World Rankings, which put a value on the head of every rider in the peloton, based on the points they accumulated over the course of a season.

Then Verbruggen expanded his power base with the introduction of the World Cup, supplanting the Super Pernod Prestige Trophy. FICP points became the key to gaining entry into the World Cup races. Félix Lévitan and the men of the Société du Tour de France saw Verbruggen’s initiative as being an attempt to stake a claim on sponsorship income, an attempt by the UCI to bring their own sponsors to others’ events. A move which would ultimately, they calculated, see the UCI muscle in on the TV revenues generated by the race organisers.

The Tour’s organisers became résistants, fighting the UCI with word and deed. In 1988, with the Société du Tour de France in turmoil as race directors fell like flies (three leaving in the space of just eighteen months) the Tour’s organisers even offered Verbruggen the gig that would neutralise the threat he posed to them: become Jean-Pierre Courcol’s replacement as director of the Tour de France. The men of the Tour know the truth of the old adage about keeping your friends close, your enemies closer still.

Hein Verbruggen, though, was not for turning and declined the offer from the Société du Tour de France. The World Cup ploughed ahead, eventually morphing into the ProTour before being rebranded as the WorldTour. For sure, the Tour’s organisers won some important skirmishes. The battlements around the Tour’s TV revenue withstood the brickbats the UCI tried to throw at them. And the World Cup was never successful at attracting its own sponsorship income.

A story for you: if you’ve ever worked in the media industry, there’s a trick you might be familiar with when faced with new rivals (or when threatening existing operators in the market): sponsors (advertisers) are advised or induced to stay away from the new kid on the block. The new kid is left to slowly wither away, expenses mounting up, reserves being run down, little or no income coming in. Eventually they fold and go away. Some people call this bullying. Others call it business. Whatever the name, it’s a trick that the Amaurys are not unfamiliar with, on both the media and sporting sides of their empire.

Whether this is why the World Cup singularly failed to attract sponsors, or whether the World Cup was just a pointless event that no one could see any merit in, well that’s a question that remains unanswered. But it was an attractive enough proposition when Pernod used to sponsor it. Back then, though, L’Équipe were supportive of the Super Pernod Prestige Trophy and gave it plenty of column inches.

All victories come at a cost. ASO were made to pay a price for their defiance. Showing his contempt for the sport’s traditional stakeholders, Verbruggen rode roughshod over them. One example: he added a time trial to the UCI-organised World Championships. In doing this he killed ASO’s end-of-season time trial, the Grand Prix des Nations. The UCI’s lesson was clear: don’t fuck with us.

Back to the present. The storm clouds on the horizon. What threat does Global Cycling Promotion pose to ASO, when all ASO’s races are within cycling’s traditional heartland? GCP is, after all, supposed to be charged with bringing bike racing to the rising economies of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). Where’s the beef in that?

The beef is that all of ASO’s races are not within cycling’s traditional heartland. ASO, for a long time, have been involved with developing cycling in Africa, through their Tour du Faso. That seems to have slipped quietly off the calendar this year. The why and the how I don’t know, perhaps someone reading this will tell me one day. But Africa is not the end of ASO’s international interests. ASO are partnered with AEG, the organisers of the Tour of California. They’re also helping to bring cycling to the Arab world, with the Tours of Oman and Qatar. And ASO partnered with Oman in their bid for the 2015 World Championships.

With ASO’s cyclosportif footprint expanding into Argentina on the back of the success of the Dakar Rally, can it be long before they set their sights on organising races in countries visited by the Dakar (Argentina, Chile and Peru)? Or look at Indonesia. Earlier this year ASO had advisors at the Tour of Singkarak (a 2.2 event, held in June). Advisors, fans of military history love to point out, frequently turn into boots on the ground.

So the UCI, through GCP, are not the only ones trying to expand cycling beyond its traditional borders. As ASO’s Christian Prudhomme pointed out a few months back, none of this is new for the Amaurys. “Riding a bike is universal,” Prudhomme explained during this year’s Tour, “but cycling competitively isn’t yet. We have to go everywhere […]. International development is important for ASO.” He then went on to highlight the history of the Tours of Oman and Qatar, before offering his audience another slice of history: “But this isn’t new to us. In 1954, four years before the foundation of the common European market, we organised the start of the Tour de France in Amsterdam, outside France. We went to Berlin in 1987 before the fall of the Wall, etc.”

The UCI can, at times, be thin-skinned and Prudhomme’s boasting might have been seen by some as a put-down of the UCI’s efforts to internationalise cycling. The UCI never took kindly to Dick Pound’s little barbs. And, in more recent months, they were stung by comments from USADA’s Travis Tygart having to do with foxes and hen houses. If the UCI and ASO were really entering into another petty little struggle for the soul of cycling, the UCI could easily have responded to Prudhomme’s braggadocio by reminding us of all the non-traditional nations they have sent the World Championships to down through the years. Or maybe they could have just pointed out that the reason the Tour went to Berlin had little to do with bringing cycling to the Communists and everything to do with capitalism: the good burghers of Berlin paid the Société du Tour a king’s ransom in order to entice them across the Iron Curtain.

But would the UCI waste their time fighting ASO with words when they can fight them with deeds? Time to recall a story told in the first part of this series. Back in 1946, when the post-Libération fight for title to France’s Grand Tour was going on, the UCI settled the first round by choosing Jacques Goddet’s Tour de France over its rival – Ce Soir‘s Ronde de France – for the calendar slot. Today, the UCI still have control over those calendar slots. Events can be shifted around the calendar to rival existing events. Or new events can meet considerable resistance in their attempts to gain a calendar slot. And, of course, old events can always lose their place on the calendar. While we would all notice were the UCI to attempt to remove the Tour de France from the calendar, how many of you had heard of the Tour of Singkarak before ASO sent advisors there?

So let’s ask the question again: what threat does Global Cycling Promotion pose to ASO? Some drippy hippy shit here: if a smile is just a frown turned upside down, then a threat is just an opportunity in disguise. Rather than asking whether GCP represent a threat to ASO, we should wonder instead whether GCP are really an opportunity. ASO and the UCI have, after all, kissed and made up since the ProTour Wars. And ASO have partnered with the UCI to bring cycling to the Chinese. Those aforementioned words from Prudhomme, they were made at the media launch of the Tour of Beijing.

But aren’t ASO still fighting with the UCI? Despite Marie-Odile Amaury’s edict that L’Équipe should give over banging on about doping and report news rather than make it, wasn’t it L’Équipe who broke the story about the UCI’s Index of Suspicion? Had the UCI done something to upset the Amaurys, causing them to respond in such an unkind fashion?

That Index of Suspicion story, how did it really hurt the UCI? Why, it hurt them by showing that they suspected certain riders of doping more than they suspected others! That really is utter balls. The Index of Suspicion was exactly what many in the anti-doping community have long called for: greater use of intelligence-based target testing, as opposed to inefficient blanket testing. Wasn’t this exactly how the AFLD and the FFC caused such a stir at the 2008 Tour, by profiling riders in advance of the race and then using those profiles to draw up a list – an index – of who the testers needed to pay the most attention to? Look at how successful that was.

The people who were hurt by the Index of Suspicion were the riders. Their teams felt the pain too. Because the cycling community saw the Index of Suspicion as being an Index of Guilt, rather that what it really was, an index of priority for the testers, partly based on something as simple as when a rider was last tested. Whoever gave that list the title of the Index of Suspicion was a clever little operator.

When did the Index story break? May time, wasn’t it? Not long after the AIGCP’s deadline for “drastic action” should the UCI fail to rescind the ban on race radios. That drastic action, we all knew even before the May Day deadline, was a boycott of the Tour of Beijing. A race organised by the UCI in collaboration with (among others) ASO.

Step back in time to just a few weeks before L’Équipe revealed the leaked Index. Recall that little strop some managers pulled, walking out of a meeting with the UCI. Some of the managers claimed that their walkout was spurred by the UCI trying to give them a history of the bicycle, which is always a contentious issue, with the French and the British going at one another, each claiming they got there first. Only for the Germans to get chippy at their contribution being overlooked. And all the while the Italians just sit there looking smug, knowing that they hold the trump card, some doodles in one of Leonardo’s notebooks. It’s usually around that time that the fists start flying. There are days when I actually admire Pat McQuaid.

The day after that meeting, L’Équipe carried a report of its proceedings, a report which claimed McQuaid had informed the managers that, thanks to the bio-passport, he held precise information on each team’s riders, before brandishing “the spectre of public revelations that would cause damage.” One AIGCP member, Roberto Amadio (Liquigas), disputed L’Équipe‘s version of events but in doing so seemed to confirm that McQuaid had in fact threatened them with the public revelation of a list of targeted riders.

And then, by one of those strange coincidences life throws up all the time, such a list of targeted riders happened to find its way into the hands of someone at L’Équipe. Someone who, despite Amaury’s edict to the contrary, banged the doping drum and made the news instead of just sitting back and reporting what others had uncovered. Did a head roll in L’Équipe that day? There’s more than enough blood on Amaury’s carpet to suggest that, had the Index of Suspicion story offended her, the journalists and editors responsible would have faced the guillotine.

Am I just peddling a conspiracy theory here, demonstrating that I read far too many thrashy thrillers? Of course I am. For the UCI were hurt by L’Équipe‘s release of the Index of Suspicion. They were cut to the quick. They were shocked – shocked I tell you – that someone could leak such a list, quite possibly someone in their own organisation. And so McQuaid promised to do a George Smiley and root out the traitor in the UCI’s ranks. Except, of course, that I see McQuaid as less like George Smiley and more like George Stroud, from Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock.

And so when I picture Marie-Odile Amaury sitting in her Issy-les-Moulineaux office, gazing out at the Paris skyline and the storm clouds gathering on ASO’s horizon, I don’t see her frowning when she views the cloud caused by GCP. I see her smiling. Happy in the knowledge that ending the ProTour Wars was – for ASO – the right thing to do, for in so doing she finally enabled ASO and the UCI to unite in a common purpose: sharing the revenue to be generated by the global expansion of cycling.

Marie Odile Amaury, PDG du groupe Amaury (Crédits photo: HAMILTON/REA)

And I see her smiling, happy in the knowledge that Hein Verbruggen has left the stage and gone off to play World Mind Games with his new toy, SportAccord. But look closely at that smile. Is that a frown forming at its edges? SportAccord is, after all, just a new stage from which Verbruggen is waging his war to allow sports’ international federations to seize control of the TV revenues generated by their sports. The battlements around the Tour’s TV revenues are already being reinforced in preparation for Verbruggen’s next assault.

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.

Finding a solution to cycling’s ProTour Wars was – compared to some of the other challenges besetting the Amaury Group – child’s play for Marie-Odile Amaury. Elsewhere in the Amaurys’ media to sports empire, things are decidedly sticky.

The Tour de France may be the keystone of the Amaury empire, but its cornerstone is still the newspaper Émillien Amaury created in August 1944 on the eve of the liberation of Paris: Le Parisien (née Libéré). The combined sales of Le Parisien and its national edition, Aujourd’hui en France, give the Amaurys France’s top-selling daily newspaper (with L’Équipe in third and Serge Dassault’s Le Figaro slotting in between the Amaury titles to claim second place). But sales aren’t what they used to be and, across its principle titles, the Amaury Group is experiencing contracting circulation.

Figue 1: Circulation of EPA titles (in thousands, intl + bulk inc)
Source: OJD

Making the periodicals that the Group owns return a profit is the greatest concern facing the Amaurys today. And in the current media market, that is no easy task. Le Parisien‘s future is in doubt. Redundancies were considered but protests from the journalists’ union saw management backtrack. Today, the title – along with its sister title, Aujourd’hui en France – may (or may not) have a For Sale sign affixed to its masthead.

The manner in which Marie-Odile Amaury has dealt with problems on the media side of the family empire has led some media commentators to question her suitability for the role she inherited from her husband.

In the five years since Marie-Odile Amaury assumed control of the Amaury empire, various senior executives have been shown the door as its new chief executive tries to come to terms with the changed media landscape and the losses being made at Le Parisien and Aujourd’hui en France. Men like Christophe Chenut. Men like Claude Droussent. Men like Noël Couëdel. Men steeped in the heritage and traditions of the press. Men whose veins bleed ink. Media men.

Media men whose careers have been cut short – worse, cut short by a woman whose veins do not flow with ink – know how to settle old scores. And so the general portrayal of Marie-Odile Amaury in the French media seems to be somewhat coloured by the views of former executives who’ve been shown the door by her. This is not to suggest that those who criticise Marie-Odile Amaury are incorrect in their analysis and that she is a wronged woman: she may actually have the “sparrow’s brain in a spiked helmet” that one anonymous critic has attributed to her.

Rather it is to point out that some of the reporting of the affairs of the Amaury family is coloured by an agenda that you need to be conscious of. Many in the French media fear that Marie-Odile Amaury is less than sympathetic to the heritage and traditions of the press. Stories are told, comparing Marie-Odile Amaury unfavourably with her husband and calling into question her leadership of the Amaury Group.

Consider this story, told by Christian de Villeneuve, a former managing editor at Le Parisien, a man whose career was brought to an abrupt halt by Marie-Odile Amaury. Philippe Amaury was having breakfast one morning – this was back in 1999 – with Dominique Strauss-Kahn. DSK was, at this stage in his career, finance minister in Lionel Jospin’s government and looked likely to stand in the forthcoming Paris mayoral elections, from which stepping stone he would likely go on to succeed Jospin once the latter’s ascension to the Elysée Palace was assured. That’s what DSK’s future looked like anyway. Until that fateful breakfast.

The pair nearly choked on their croissants as they read Le Parisien: Amaury’s paper was breaking a story linking DSK to a financial scandal involving the student insurance company MNEF. No one at Le Parisien had bothered to inform the boss of the story they were about to break. And when Amaury read that story, he simply accepted it, in silence. No tears, no tantrums and no telephone calls to his editors. Even after DSK was forced to step down as finance minister. The moral of this story? Philippe Amaury was a hands-off media baron, even when it hurt his own interests.

Just about everything Marie-Odile Amaury has done since assuming leadership of the Amaury empire in 2006 has been questioned by former executives, from the way she changed L’Équipe‘s editorial line on doping through to the manner in which she has shown her critics the door. For her critics, that Philippe Amaury was as big a bastard as you’ll find in the media – more attuned to the diktats of marketing than reporting – is neither here nor there. He had earned the right to be a bastard. Marie-Odile Amaury? What right, they ask, has she earned?

The answer to that, though, may actually be quite simple: Marie-Odile Amaury has successfully demonstrated that she can be as cold and as calculating as her husband was before her. When rival publishers have launched or attempted to launch competing titles, the Group has responded with moves straight from Philippe Amaury’s playbook.

Back in 1994, to counter the launch of InfoMatin, he sought to pull the rug from underneath their feet by launching a national edition of Le Parisien – Aujourd’hui en France. When, in 2007, the German Springer group proposed the launch of a French Bild the Amaurys prepared a new title of their own – codenamed ‘Kill Bild‘ – to counter the German incursion into their market. The Germans retreated. The following year, when faced with a new sports daily, Le 10 Sport, the Amaurys launched a low-cost, low-budget sports daily of their own: Aujourd’hui Sport. Both titles ended as failures, but Le 10 Sport failed first, meaning the Amaurys won.

Elsewhere in the Group, the Amaurys have extended their interests in the online world. Sajoo.fr is an expansion into online gaming, in association with Bwin. And, on the sports side of the family business, they have created Amaury Sport International: ASO has grown to be France’s leading sports promotion business; now they are taking on the world. As part of that expansion, the new company – in which Alain Krzentowski, ASO’s éminence grise, is said to own a 20% stake – acquired a US company, Helios, which works with the IOC when it comes to assessing rival bids to host the Games.

Earlier this year the Amaurys acquired Sportys, a French events management and marketing agency, further extending the Group’s interests in the lucrative cyclo-sportif market. The Paris-Dakar rally has been renamed – the Dakar – and successfully relocated to South America, which has also afforded the Amaurys the opportunity to expand their cyclo-sportif footprint further, with the launch of the Etapa Argentina.

In these moves Marie-Odile Amaury has been aided not just by Alain Krzentowski, but also by the next generation of the family dynasty: her daughter, Aurore (on the media side of the Group), and her son, Jean-Étienne (on the sporting side). Both were recalled to the family business when their father was diagnosed with cancer. The third generation of the Amaurys are no longer in the wings, waiting to inherit the future. The future is what they – and, until she hands over the reins to them, their mother – make of it.

Whether that future will involve the Tour de France may be dependent upon the actions of the man at the head of another French family empire: Arnaud Lagardère.

Next: The man who would be king: Arnaud Lagardère’s plans for a global sporting empire

Previously: The Tour’s Wicked Step-Mother?

For the French media, the seventy-year-old Marie-Odile Amaury is an enigma.

Marie-Odile Amaury  (Photo courtesy lepoint.fr)

Despite her role at the helm of one of France’s wealthiest family businesses Amaury considers herself a private individual, not a public figure. She’s rarely photographed. Maybe it’s the lack of photographic evidence that causes so many commentators to note her blonde hair, blue eyes and freckled face. She is often presented in the French media as being somewhat reclusive or portrayed as an unlikely millionaire. Heavens to Betsy, commentators love to note she drives a Peugeot 308!

She herself claims to have no social life beyond work. Her pleasure pursuits, she says, are solitary. Books – biographies on the likes of Jean Malaurie, Christopher Columbus, Marie-Antoinette, Stefan Zweig – and music. Rock music. “Hard rock, to me, is a romantic music,” she said in a rare interview last year, “I never tire of the ‘grand ancients‘ like Led Zeppelin, Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, AC/DC. There is an excess of all kinds, in the instrumental, the voice and the characters. Maybe this is a way to stay young!”

The daughter of a Strasbourg optician, Amaury (née Kuhn) comes from solid Catholic stock. A typical Alsatian, she calls herself, with a strong work ethic. A BA in Modern Literature was followed by time at the Strasbourg School of Journalism. But after that it was to the world of marketing, not journalism, that she turned. In Paris she worked at Young and Rubicam and then Havas. The latter was also home to her late husband, Philippe, at the time he was fighting with his sister over their father’s estate. It was also home to Jean-Pierre Courcol: the man who helped Philippe Amaury soften Le Parisien Libéré‘s editorial line; the man who was the shortest serving of the Tour’s directors; the man who helped create ASO in 1992;  and the man who took the fall for the Amaury Group’s disastrous investment in the Futuroscope theme park.

Marie-Odile Amaury is a hands-on chief executive. Too hands on, some say, in reference to the influence she wields over the Amaury Group’s newspaper titles. That she influences the editorial line of Amaury Group titles is not a charge she denies. Though the manner of her influence she does question. As far as she is concerned, what she does is all proper and above board: once a year, editorial lines are drawn, she says, and then monitored and adjusted accordingly. Her ‘interference’ is nothing more that that, monitoring and keeping her editors in line.

As for the charge that, in 2008 and with the paper’s circulation in decline, she told L’Équipe to give over banging on about doping, she is reported as saying this: “Doping in sport is a hazard, it must be dealt with when a case breaks, but not as a subject in itself.” So there’s the setting of L’Équipe‘s editorial line for you: report the news, don’t make it.

Now there’s a story or two worth telling here, about previous editorial lines at L’Équipe. David Walsh, interviewed in 2009, spoke of how Pierre Ballester was effectively forced out of L’Équipe because his coverage of doping was interfering with his colleagues’ ability to do their job. The peloton – miffed at Ballester’s continual banging on the doping drum – had decided to boycott not just Ballester but his colleagues at L’Équipe too.

So Ballester’s colleagues complained to their editor. And he complained to Ballester. And Ballester laughed, pointing out how those self-same reporters were doping with the cyclists, enjoying the delights of Pot Belge and more when letting it all hang out. There was only one possible amicable outcome: Ballester was paid off and he left L’Équipe. In his absence the paper’s editorial tone softened and doping became less of an issue.

The riders had influenced the reporters who had influenced their editor who had changed the editorial line. That’s democracy in action. Or should that be democratic inaction?

There’s another story told by Walsh – in that same interview and also in LA Confidentiel – concerning a 1999 interview Ballester did with Lance Armstrong, mid-Tour. Ballester pressed all the right buttons, asking Armstrong directly about doping, multiple times. “Are you or have you ever been a user of EPO and/or corticosteroids?” – that sort of thing. And the interview, complete with all of Armstrong’s denials, ran in L’Équipe, during the race.

When the director of the Tour de France, Jean-Marie Leblanc, read the interview he was apoplectic. Now remember, not only was Leblanc a former staffer at L’Équipe – he was the guy who covered Cyrille Guimard’s trip to the States, where Guimard (with Bernard Hinault along as chaperone) publicly wooed Greg LeMond – but he was also a former cyclist himself. He knew how the sport worked.

However, he also knew the damage doping could do, being the man who inherited the directorship of the Tour after the Delgado affaire brought Jean-Pierre Courcol’s brief tenure to a sudden and unexpected halt. And Leblanc’s 1999 Tour was being marketed as the Tour of Renewal, a response to the Festina affaire of the previous year. Talking about doping was spoiling the image. Leblanc wanted stories of angels with winged ankles. Ballester was delivering stories of angels with dirty faces.

Leblanc first channelled his anger toward Ballester, complaining about journalism that was like a police investigation. After that Leblanc turned on the-then cycling editor at L’Équipe, Jean-Michel Rouet. He explained to Rouet what the party line was and told him it was time to toe it. And so L’Équipe‘s tone changed, softened. L’Équipe praised Armstrong, and stopped (for a while, at least) trying to bury him.

Here’s the important point you should note in those two stories: those successful attempts to soften L’Équipe‘s tone on doping were made without the intervention of Philippe Amaury, then the man in overall control of the empire that bears his name.

* * * * *

In the five years that Marie-Odile Amaury has been at the helm of the Amaury Group, cycling has continued to be central to the Group’s business. Under their new matriarch’s stewardship, the Amaury Group has continued to expand its interests in the world of cycling. In 2008 ASO took a 49% stake in Unipublic, the organisers of the Vuelta a España. In 2009 ASO partnered with the organisers of the Tour of California. In 2010 ASO acquired the Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré.

This year, ASO’s vast experience will be brought to bear on the running the Tour of Beijing, organised by the UCI’s event promotion company, Global Cycling Promotion (GCP). ASO will not be the only one with whom the UCI are using GCP to share the wealth. Sport for Television’s Alan Rushton – Pat McQuaid’s former business partner back in the days of the Nissan Classic – is getting a slice of the technical and logistical action. Australia’s Jump Media are doing, well, the media. The Tour of Beijing is, it would seem, the UCI’s way of saying thank you to friends old and new.

When Marie-Odile Amaury took over the Amaury Group, the idea of ASO and the UCI partnering to bring cycling to the Chinese would have been laughed at by most commentators. How the times change. The ProTour Wars already seem like they took place a long, long time ago. Those ProTour Wars – we all know what they were about so don’t need to rehash that here – were ended by Marie-Odile Amaury herself, in 2008, much to the surprise of many.

The previous year Alain Krzentowski – KRZ to those who struggle with his Polish surname – was recalled to ASO, seven years after he and Jean-Claude Killy had been paid off by Philippe Amaury and replaced by Patrice Clerc. ASO was being buffeted by a perfect storm: an advertising market that was in decline, a succession of Tours that had been blighted by doping scandals, and its on-going war with the UCI for the soul of cycling. Old hands, Marie-Odile Amaury decided, were needed at the wheel.

When Krzentowski analysed the problem, he must have looked to the future. New bike races in China. New bike races in Russia. New bike races in the Americas. New wealth. But would ASO be able to share in it? Not if the war with the UCI endured. Or, worse still, not if ASO carried through on its threat of secession and formed a breakaway cycling league. Looked at like that, it was clearly time to sue for peace.

Of the eventual peace treaty hammered out, Pierre Ballester – co-author with David Walsh of le sale tour (properly translated as ‘the bad experience’ but also a deliberately punning title) – has said that “by making peace with the UCI and [Hein] Verbruggen, ASO is guaranteed to be the operator of TV rights for new cycling events in Russia and Asia and to participate in tenders launched by the Olympic family.” And there’s the important point: ASO’s other sporting interests were threatened by the ProTour Wars. ASO’s war with the UCI was also becoming a war with the IOC, with threats of secession setting off alarm bells in the Olympic movement. If cycling suffered a schism, would other sports follow? Whither the IOC then? ASO’s war with the UCI was in danger of losing it friends in the IOC.

Bringing an end to the ProTour Wars was not straightforward. As far as the UCI were concerned, there was nothing to discuss and therefore no need for discussions. Previous efforts to bring the UCI to the peace table – by the teams, by the riders, by the French federation, by whomever – had all ended with failure.

Another ASO alumnus, Jean-Claude Killy, now wearing his IOC hat, was called on to facilitate the negotiations that eventually led to peace. The IOC had the power to do what no one else was able to do: get the UCI to sit down at the table and talk peace. Killy called on his IOC boss, Jacques Rogge, to put some stick about and force Pat McQuaid to sit down and talk.

It should be recalled that, at this time, the UCI was holding a somewhat weakened hand within the IOC. Not only was the UCI the centre of allegations that a bribe had been accepted to facilitate the introduction of the keirin to the Olympic track calendar, but cycling’s doping problems were also a problem for the Games. WADA’s chief, John Fahey, seemed to take particular pleasure in poking the UCI with a stick, suggesting that cycling would not fare well in the post-Games review of which sports would stay and which would go.

With the assistance of Killy and Rogge, Krzentowski was able to organise two meetings between Marie-Odile Amaury and Pat McQuaid during the 2008 Tour. The following month – during the Beijing Games – McQuaid waved a piece of paper above his head and declared ‘peace in our bloody time.’ Figuratively speaking. He didn’t wave any paper about. And he wouldn’t use a word like bloody.

All of this was done without anyone informing Patrice Clerc, the chief architect of ASO’s defiance of the UCI’s attempts to impose the ProTour upon cycling. Clerc, upon discovering what had happened behind his back, confronted Amaury, expressing his displeasure. Her response? “I am the boss, it’s me who decides,” she told him. He retorted with his resignation. Which can’t have been entirely unexpected.

Clerc’s departure was presented as part of a quid pro quo in the ProTour peace accords. ASO sacrificed one piece on the chessboard and the UCI sacrificed another: Hein Verbruggen. Except the UCI didn’t. Verbruggen remained in situ. The UCI did, however, drop its case against the FFC, under whose aegis ASO races had been run in 2008. ASO, in return, withdrew its threat of secession and put its plans for a new cycling league in the bottom drawer. The UCI were able to publicly claim victory, that their world calendar for the sport would finally go ahead. ASO were able to publicly claim victory, that they would have the right to decide who would ride their races. Everyone won. Just like on school sports day.

It’s worth noting here that, in the eighties, the Tour allowed entry to the 18 highest ranked teams in the peloton, along with four wildcard entries. After four years of infighting with the UCI, ASO now allow entry to the 18 ProTour teams – effectively the highest ranked teams in the peloton – and four wildcards.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même choses.

Tomorrow: Fighting for survival in a changing media landscape.

Previously: The Rise of the Amaurys.

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.