* * * * *

In 1930, a non-appearance fee was paid by the Giro organisers. Alfredo Binda had by then established a stranglehold on the corsa rosa, winning in 1925, 1927, 1928 and 1929, in all of them riding for Legnano. It wasn’t just that Binda kept winning, it was the manner of his victories. In 1927 he had won twelve of the fifteen stages, in 1928 seven of twelve and 1929 nine of fourteen. In all, that’s thirty-three out of forty-one stages in three years. Giro boss Emilio Colombo was getting more than a little bit bored by il campionissimo. More to the point, La Gazzetta dello Sport‘s readers were getting bored by il campionissimo: circulation was down. So a plan was hatched between Colombo and his sidekick Armando Cougnet on one side and Legnano owner Emilio Bozzi and his direttore sportivo, Eberardo Pavesi, on the other: Binda would be politely asked to bugger off.

Alfredo Binda (Source: Cycling Hall of Fame)

Bozzi was willing to play ball because Binda taking a dive made commercial sense: another Binda victory wasn’t go to help sell many more bikes. But, at the same time, Bozzi didn’t want to simply surrender and allow Maino or Atala or Bianchi to step in and bag an easy victory. Here Pavesi came to Bozzi’s assistance, promising that he had a talented young rider waiting in the wings who could, quite possibly, profit from the absence of Binda. Pavesi was also concerned that Binda was having life just a little too easy, and had stopped taking cycling as seriously as he should be (or, at least, as seriously as Pavesi thought he should be).

With everyone else on board, it was time to pitch the deal to Binda. He listened to what was being told to him. And he agreed that yes, he was strangling the Giro and that yes, that was unfortunate. It would be best if he stayed away. You can imagine the sigh of relief this must have elicited. Only then Binda delivered an upper cut of sheer elegance. He demanded that, if Colombo really wanted him to stay away, he’d have to pay a non-appearance fee: the equivalent of the first prize, plus six stage wins, plus the bonus Bozzi would have had to pay him if he won. All in, the thick end of 22,500 lire. And even there, Binda claimed, he was being exceedingly generous, as failure to win the Giro would cost him a packet on the post-Giro critérium circuit (even then, riders needed the appearance fees paid on the critérium circuit). Colombo swallowed hard but saw he had little or no choice in the matter. The deal was done. Colombo, having stared down the demands for appearance fees in 1924, caved to the demand for a non-appearance fee. Once again commerce triumphed principles.

At which point appearance fees re-enter this story. Up to now Binda hadn’t taken a tilt at the Tour de France, preferring the Giro. It is said that the reason for this was that Legnano had no business interests in France, but this isn’t entirely true: they were there in force in 1924, and Ottavio Bottecchia’s two victories for Automoto demonstrate clearly that the Italian media gave the French Tour ample coverage, so long as one of their own was winning. The main reason Binda hadn’t bothered with the Tour is more likely to have something to do with that post-Giro critérium circuit; having won the corsa rosa and then filled his boots with the round-the-houses races and track appearances, it’s highly unlikely he was ever in much of a state to tackle the Tour. The fact is, few Giro winners had the legs to tackle the Tour, as we’ll see when we come to look at the 1924 Tour itself, which was graced by the presence of the reigning Giro champion Giuseppe Enrici.

The post-Giro critériums sapping Binda’s strength would not, of course, be the case in 1930. So with Binda now sitting out the Giro, and the Tour having just switched to national team format, Henri Desgrange – it’s claimed – saw an opportunity to get the best Italian rider of the day riding in his race. He offered Binda a generous appearance fee to ride the Tour.

It’s said by some that the reason Binda eventually pulled out of the Tour, ten stages in, eleven stages to go, is that he’d bled Desgrange dry and there was simply no more money to pay him to continue. If you look, though, at the 1930 Tour, you see a possible alternative reason: alongside Binda on the Italian team was Maino’s Learco Guerra, a rising star. When the Italian squadra snatched the maillot jaune on the second stage of the race, it was Guerra who wore it, not Binda, who was twelve seconds off yellow and in third place. The hills were yet to come and he was more than capable of clawing back time once the road went upwards. So Binda had nothing to worry about. Until he lost more than an hour after suffering a major mechanical on the road from Bordeaux to Hendaye, just before the race reached the mountains. That was his race for yellow done for. Time for him to turn to consolation prizes.

The next day, Hendaye into Pau, the campionissimo took the stage win. The same again the day after, Pau to Luchon. And on the third day – Luchon to Perpignan – he retired from the race, with his compatriot Guerra having finally surrendered the maillot jaune and eleven minutes to André Leducq. When the race made it back to Paris, Guerra was just fourteen minutes off Leducq’s pace, and stood standing on the second step of the podium.

It took a lot of spinning to explain Binda’s abandonment of the race, especially with his teammate in yellow and in need of support. Hence, perhaps, the legendary stories of Binda having bled Desgrange dry. The Italian cycling federation tried to claim that their campionissimo was saving himself for the Worlds (which, in fairness, he did go on to win). But many, many years later Binda finally offered his own reason: Colombo had welshed on the Giro deal and the agreed 22,500 lire non-appearance fee had failed to materialise. Even so, Binda was still proud of his ‘victory’ in that 1930 Giro, as he explained to Pierre Chany:

It was my best Giro. I didn’t just get the prizes without riding, but I took up about ten contracts on the track in France, Germany and Belgium. The records say I won the Giro five times, but I consider that I won it five and a half times.”

The appearance fees issue was put to rest – sort of – after the war, with the establishment of the Challenge Desgrange-Colombo, a precursor of the old Super Prestige Pernod trophy and today’s World Tour. To encourage the big teams to send their best riders to all the races making up the season-long competition, the organising journals – L’Équipe in France, La Gazzetta dello Sport in Italy and Les Sports and Sportwereld-Het Nieusblad in Belgium – dangled the carrot of generous travelling expenses under the noses of the teams. Today, Pro Teams in the World Tour races are guaranteed a minimum appearance fee of €7,500 each, with the ASO raising that to €51,443 at the Tour de France. The teams don’t think it’s enough and – as in 1924 – are still agitating for more.

The deal hammered out for the Challenge Desgrange-Colombo races clearly wasn’t the end of the issue. The Tour de France may have been able to attract the cream of the peloton, but the two other Grand Tours – the Vuelta a España and the Giro d’Italia – suffered a little in the shadow of other races, especially the Tour. Too often the Giro was used just as a training ride for the Tour, no more important – for some riders – than the Tour de Romandie which itself served as a leg-loosener for the Giro. So sometimes the Giro organisers had to take out the cheque-book and entice the best riders to put in an appearance.

Appearance fees weren’t the only thing that had the Giro organisers reaching for their cheque-book. Sometimes certain riders – certain Italian riders – needed a little bit of help when it came to ensuring that the maglia rosa stayed in Italy. The stories here are legion, although the facts supporting them are few. But it does seem that the Giro organisers paid for the right result on several occasions. (And sometimes they didn’t even pay, they just helped in other ways, such as cancelling stages and turning a blind eye to infringements of the rules.)

Other times, extra money was spent to liven a race up: consider, for instance, the 100,000 wager La Gazzetta‘s Rino Negri had with Roger de Vlaeminck over how many stages he could win at the 1975 Giro. And, of course, the issue of disappearance fees was also on the agenda that year. When Eddy Merckx‘s Molteni squad was pulled from the 1975 corsa rosa just before the start, the official reason given was that Merckx had taken ill at the Tour of Romandie. Some suspected that Vincenzo Torriani, the Giro’s direttore di corsa, had paid the Belgian off. Italy, at this stage, was so bored with the Cannibal’s reign of terror in the Giro – five victories, plus that near victory in 1969 – that RAI had stopped covering the race live. With Merckx gone and Torriani delivering a corker of a race in 1975, RAI returned to the corsa rosa the following year. Whatever money Torriani had spent on that 1975 Giro, it was a wise investment.

Chucking out money to the odd team or rider here or there was relatively easy to do. Paying off everyone in the race is of a different order of magnitude. Especially given the precarious financial position of the Giro and of its organising journal, La Gazzetta dello Sport. Which, in 1977, was taken over by the RCS group. One of the grand ironies of this take-over was that La Gazzetta was now part of a stable of newspapers that included the Corriere della Sera, that newspaper whose guns La Gazzetta had spiked back in 1908 with their pre-emotive announcement of the Giro d’Italia. And the paper to which La Gazzetta had needed to go cap in hand in order to ensure they had sufficient finances to actually run the inaugural Giro in 1909.

The RCS group had started life in the 1920s when Angelo Rizzoli created a small publishing company, Rizzoli & Co, later to become Rizzoli Editore. In 1974 Rizzoli took over Corriere della Sera and the newly-merged company became Rizzoli-Corriere della Sera. By the end of the seventies, with La Gazzetta now part of the company’s publishing empire, the future should have been bright for RCS.

Things went tits up for RCS in the eighties when they found themselves caught up in the Banco Ambrosiano and the P2 scandals and – in 1982 – went in and out of bankruptcy. The 1982 Giro itself was very nearly cancelled. Vincenzo Torriani, the Giro’s direttore di corsa,  had to stand personal guarantor of its debts. Torriani was by now into his sixties and had been running the Giro for three decades. He certainly didn’t need the headache, but he wasn’t going to sit back and watch his race – and it would be fair, at this stage, to call it his race – to be ruined by the financial incompetence of others. Knowing his own shortcomings, Torriani called in a man to do the jobs he himself couldn’t do. That man was Carmine Castellano and, together with Torriani, he set about saving the corsa rosa.

The Giro was saved, in the end, by the arrival of the Seventh Cavalry. Well, the American Coca-Cola corporation, which stepped up to the plate. It wasn’t their black gold that the men from Atlanta showered on the Giro, it was one of their other brands, Sprite (about to be launched in Italy), which became the drink that saved the Giro. (If you think that Coke entered cycling when their bidons began appearing at the Tour de France after 1985, think again. You can even date Coke’s interest in cycling to earlier than 1982: back in 1968 it was their money which had been used in one of the failed attempts to get a young Eddy Merckx to ride the Tour.)

Scroll forward to 2000. In the post-Festina years the Giro suffered heavily from an association with doping, not just through stars like Marco Pantani being laid low by controversy, but also through the Italian judicial authorities making their presence felt at the Giro, raiding hotel rooms and tickling collars with alarming regularity. You would imagine that the teams had enough on their plates at the time but – surprisingly – revenue sharing was again high on their agenda. A group of teams – through the Assogruppi, the Association of Italian Sporting Groups, headed by Moreno Argentin – demanded a share of the Giro’s TV and merchandising revenues. And they figured they knew just what it would take to grab the race organiser’s attention: strike!

Rather than boycotting the race itself – clearly someone had learned a lesson from the 1924 Giro – this time the Italian teams decided they would refuse to participate in their media duties: post-race interviews and podium ceremonies were to be boycotted. Nor would they wear any of the race leader’s jerseys, including the maglia rosa. This they announced on the eighth stage. Moreno Argentin made his position clear:

They are prepared to talk […] but they never talk of the congestion of television rights and advertising. They want to see how strong we are. This is the only sport in the world in which ninety-five percent of the costs are covered by sponsors and five percent by television rights. Riders are paid by us and without riders, there would be no cycling.”

On the tenth stage of the race the Assogruppi took action. Stage winner Ivan Quaranta (Mobilvetta) and maglia rosa wearer Francesco Casagrande (Vini Caldirola) were no-shows on the podium and refused to talk to journalists from La Gazzetta or RAI. Polti’s direttore sportivo Gianluigi Stanga, speaking on behalf of the Italian teams, had this to say:

Bicycle racing changes. Twenty years ago, TV rights were not a topic, but today I think that it’s normal that the teams – and their sponsors who invest in them – get a say in where the money goes.”

 

The reason the dispute was limited to the Italian teams was that they believed foreign teams were being paid more than they were to ride the Giro. This sort of complaint was typical of the Spanish teams and riders in the Vuelta, especially in the sixties and seventies. Riders regularly complained about the vast sums being lavished on foreign teams in the form of appearance fees, especially when they fielded half-strength squads or just used the Spanish Tour as a warm-up for the Giro. Or even used the Vuelta as a way to make money, selling their services to the highest bidder. Pedro Delgado complained about this aspect of the Vuelta in his autobiography:

Apart from getting paid a good starting fee by the organisation, [the foreign teams] would accept ‘offers’ from the team of an escaped rider in return for not chasing him down. The system of these strong teams, especially the Dutch, was to only allow solitary breakaways, letting them build up a considerable leeway. These teams, filled with powerful road-men, were so dominant they could close down the escape in the final kilometres unless they found some other ‘interest’ in the stage.”

But the fact was the Vuelta needed to pay appearance fees in order to attract the stars of continental European cycling: in the years before and after Franco’s death, Spain was not high on people’s must-visit lists. How much the Giro needed foreign stars – and whether or how much they paid for them – is debatable.

RCS Sport responded to the Assogruppi’s actions with more words. They pointed out the long history of the race. They pointed out how the profits made on the Giro subsidised other RCS Sport events. Then they tried to kick the issue upstairs to the UCI:

The situation demands a careful analysis, in which the organisers and rider representatives must debate responsibly. After that we can perhaps change things. RCS Sport does not believe that such a serious problem can be resolved through a unilateral imposition of a solution, without assessing all of the information and comparing accordingly. The organisers have tried every effort to invite the Assogruppi to the discussions, but emotion seems to have prevailed over logic.

Before answering negatively to the ultimatum given to us by the Assogruppi, we want to verify our own position in the dispute and are seeking UCI president Hein Verbruggen’s opinion. We hope, however, that the Giro can continue as normal, and we would like to start the debate at its conclusion, rather than coming to a hasty compromise.”

The promise of talks, though, was sufficient for the Assogruppi to back down and life in the 2000 Giro returned to normal, or what passed for normality in the Giro in those days. What came of the subsequent talks between Assogruppi and RCS Sport isn’t clear, but nothing really changed, except for the UCI amending its rules with regard to travel expenses and participation allowances.

Appearance fees at the Giro became an issue again when the un-retiring Lance Armstrong made his return to the peloton, with the corsa rosa joining races like the Tour Down Under and the Tour of Ireland in the rush to hand over big bags of swag to the American in order to get him to put in an appearance at their races.

Then we come to last year, and the return to the centre of the stage of the appearance-fees issue, once again linked to TV revenues. At the Tour we had that little strop some of the AIGCP teams pulled, refusing to cooperate with ASO on certain media duties, specifically the issue of in-car race coverage (ironically, one of the points on the AIGCP’s ten-point plan to improve cycling). That doesn’t seem to have endeared them greatly to Marie-Odile Amaury and the attempts to get ASO to hand over a share of their profits – or even engage in talks over handing over a share of their profits – made little progress.

This week’s announcement from Jonathan Vaughters, that the AIGCP and RCS Sport were in advanced negotiations with regard to the issue of revenue sharing at the Giro, suggests that the AIGCP have adopted a different tactic in their negotiations: it’s easier to talk to someone who’s willing to listen and has something to gain from what is being proposed. On the surface, the notion of the Giro sharing a slice of their TV income with the teams makes sense. Michele Acquarone, interviewed by Daniel Friebe, has acknowledged that, over the last few years, the Giro has stood still while the Tour de France has marched forward. This, he knows, has to change:

Now we have to make up ground, and we can do it by trying to convince the biggest stars to come to our race, but it’ll still be their decision. Our biggest weapon in that battle for hearts and minds is the audience; the more people are watching, the more stars will want to come.”

 

The converse of that is equally true: the more stars who take on the Giro, the more people will watch the race. The Giro, after years of going toe-to-toe with the Vuelta over who can find the toughest climbs, is now living up to its marketing slogan: the hardest race in the most beautiful place. But, in audience share, it is still a league below the Tour. A revenue-sharing deal that’s structured around teams bringing their ‘A’ game to the Giro would help the race as much as it would help the teams. The Tour’s status in the minds of ordinary sports fans as the great bike race could even, finally, be challenged.

Acquarone, Bisconti, and Vegni in Milan at the Giro unveiling (Source: Pedalare Tricolore)

But Acquarone has also indicated that he is willing to play a long game with the Giro, and will not necessarily rush to bribe the biggest stars of the day to race the Giro:

What we can do, the only thing, is to build up the biggest possible international audience and grow our race so that our team is ready when a huge star comes along and captures the imagination again. We haven’t had that pied piper effect for the last few years, that excitement, and yet the race has grown, so that at least shows we’re moving in the right direction.”

On the issue of the proposed revenue-sharing deal with RCS Sport, though, it would appear that Vaughters may have jumped the gun to some extent. He himself did indicate that no deal was actually on the table, that the two sides were merely in discussion:

I’m very pleased with the negotiations with RCS and hope to have a deal that’s mutually beneficial at some time in the near future. I’ve been really happy with how RCS and Michele Acquarone has treated the teams. We’re really excited about the possibility of this partnership.”

Now, though, it is being reported that no deal is likely to be reached in the short term. Acquarone has indicated to VeloNews that talks are more likely to take place in the off season, November and December. Acquarone has also indicated that he was surprised to hear an announcement from Vaughters so soon and that any deal would be tied to future TV deals, not current ones. And here one needs to take a step back and look at the RCS Media group as a whole. The group may have turnover north of €2,000 million, but in 2011 they reported losses of more than €300 million, compared to a profit of €7 million in 2010.

A deal with RCS Sport would, of course, open the door to deals with other race organisers and, eventually, ASO. However, what those race organisers have to gain from such a deal needs to be considered. For the smaller events, some form of revenue-sharing deal that guarantees teams will bring their A squads would help generate more revenue from TV rights, a portion of which could be shared with the teams. But what’s in this for ASO?

TV rights for ASO events are currently sold in a package that includes the Tour as well as Paris-Nice, the Critérium International, Paris-Roubaix, the Flèche-Wallonne, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the Critérium du Dauphiné and Paris-Tours, and other ASO events. A race like Paris-Nice could, perhaps, benefit from the teams taking it more seriously, but is there much to be gained at Paris-Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège or even the Flèche-Wallonne? Or take the Critérium du Dauphiné – ASO are still trying to bed that race down having only taken it over in recent years, and the level of prize money being paid there suggests it is not yet profitable. But serving as it already does as one of the major pre-Tour warm-up events, can the teams offer ASO more at the Dauphiné?

Consideration also needs to be given to the fact that ASO’s current deal extends through to 2015. If RCS Sport tie a revenue-sharing deal to future TV deals, you can expect the same from ASO. Which suggests no deal with ASO is likely to be forthcoming within the next year or two.

A lot has changed in cycling since Italian teams tried to hold a gun to the heads of the Giro organisers in 1924 in an effort to gain a greater slice of the cake. Down through the years progress has been made on the issue of appearance fees and the teams have managed to extract a larger slice of the cake from race organisers. Whether we’re really on the cusp of a new deal, or whether we are seeing a repeat of 2000 – talks that ultimately go nowhere – well, only time will tell.

Alfonsina Strada, the woman who had helped save the 1924 Giro d’Italia, was buried in 1959. Ottavia Bottecchia, Henri Pélissier and Albert Londres – the other three names most remembered from the 1924 cycling season – were already in their graves. There are some races you’re happy to finish behind others in. Strada was sixty-eight when she died. Not a bad innings for someone born in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

Cycling was Strada’s escape from a peasant’s existence. While many of her male contemporaries appreciated and applauded her, cycling was then very much a male-dominated sport. It still is, I suppose, but more and more people are beginning to wake up to the existence of the distaff peloton and who knows, maybe within our own lifetime the publicity scales may even balance out and it will receive the media attention it deserves. But the way it is today is far, far better than it was in Strada’s time. The women who rode bikes in those days were too often seen as little more than vaudeville acts, not treated as athletes. Cycling itself, though, was – to some extent – itself a vaudeville act. Men like Henri Pélissier wanted to turn it into a sport about athleticism, men like Henri Desgrange wanted it to be about who could endure the most suffering and still ride into his vélodrome.

From the age of ten, when she first rode her father’s newly-acquired bike, to her dying day, Strada was a cyclist. The fame her cycling exploits earned her enabled Strada to travel, to Russia, to Spain, to France, to Luxembourg, and earned her a better income than her parents had known, and more too than she would have earned had she followed their advice and become a seamstress. As late as 1937 and 1938 Strada was still racing, and still winning.

Cycling may have enabled her to escape poverty, but nothing could save her from a hard life. Her husband, Luigi Strada, the man who gave her a racing bicycle as a wedding present, suffered a mental collapse and was institutionalised. The 50,000 lire Strada won at the 1924 Giro went to the Milanese mental institution to which he had been confined. He died in 1946.

Four years later Strada remarried. Her second husband was Carlo Messori, the cyclist from her native Emilia who had encouraged a teenaged Strada – then still Alfonsina Molini – to continue with this cycling lark. He himself had by then retired from cycling and was running a bike shop in Milan. During their marriage Messori tried to put together a biography of his wife’s life and cycling career, but no publishers showed an interest in her story.

Messori died in 1957 and Strada was widowed for a second time. She continued to run the bike shop herself and continued to support the sport she loved, even though she herself was increasingly being forgotten by a sport which each year churns out new heroes for us to get excited about. In September 1959 Strada returned from a day at the bike races, the Tre Valli Varesine, where Dino Bruni had won. She told the porter at her apartment house that she’d had a wonderful day. She then suffered a fatal heart-attack. Another page of cycling history had been turned.

Strada’s story though was too good to be forgotten for long. In 2004 Paolo Facchinetti was able to publish his Gli Anni Ruggenti di Alfonsina Strada (The Roaring Years of Alfonsina Strada) and when the Giro started from Amsterdam in 2010, a publisher in the Netherlands published a Dutch version of it, Het Roerige Leven van Alfonsina Strada. An English-language publisher has yet to show an interest in the book. Strada’s story has been put on the stage, in Italy – a version of which is playing in London this year – and featured in an album of cycling tracks by the band Tete de Bois. And, if you visit the chapel of the Madonna on the Ghisallo, you can see one of Strada’s bikes among the other relics of cycling’s glorious past.

But does Strada’s story matter today? I think it does. First, and foremost, it’s a good story, a story that deserves to be told and retold. But cycling is full of good stories that deserve to be told and retold. And Strada’s is, at least, told: there are many names in the forgotten history of our sport who have yet to have their stories told.

And of course, yes, the cycling of those days is now anachronistic; we can’t even imagine bikes that weighed twenty kilograms and didn’t have gears, let alone get our heads around the condition of the roads over which the riders of the day raced. But that’s just detail: look at the big picture and see that what was happening in 1924 is still happening in 2012. The big teams are still pleading with the Giro and other race organisers for a bigger slice of the pie.

And why should we bother with the retelling of a story from the past when – for female cyclists especially – the story of the present is only barely being told in the mainstream media and even in the main cycling journals? Would we not be better just forgetting all about Alfonsina Strada and telling the stories of the women racing today? If it was simply a choice between one and the other, than yes, forget the past, talk only about the present.

But can’t we do both at the same time? Cycling’s past is, after all, what makes its present seem so alive. The riders of today are not just racing against one and other, they are racing against the legends of the past. This is one of the areas where women’s cycling still needs help: its past is being forgotten and, without its past, its present doesn’t shine as brightly as it should. Connect the stars of today with the stars of yesterday and both will shine brighter. Maria Canins, Beryl Burton, Connie Carpenter, Keetie van Oosten-Hage, Yvonne Reynders, Petra de Bruin, Ingrid Haringa, Elsy Jacobs, Hélène Dutrieux, Oenone Wood, Louise Armaindo, Anna Millward, Leontien van Moorsel, Yvonne McGregor, Jeannie Longo – all of those names should be as recognisable as any of the giants of the road from Coppi to Anquetil, Merckx to Hinault, Kelly to Cavendish. How many of them are?

Help people undertand who they are, what they did, and you do actually help the current peloton, by providing a yardstick against which it can be measured.  And that’s why Alfonsina Strada’s story still matters. It’s not just about the past. It’s also about today.

* * * * *

Sources: If your Italian is up to snuff and you’d like to learn more about Strada, seek out Paolo Facchinetti’s Gli Anni Ruggenti di Alfonsina Strada (The Roaring Years of Alfonsina Strada), which has also been translated in the Netherlands as Het Roerige Leven van Alfonsina Strada.

Strada’s story is also touched upon in the three Giro-related books to land last year: Bill and Carol McGann&’s The Story of the Giro d’Italia – A Year by Year History of the Tour of Italy, Volume I, 1909-1970 (McGann Publishing), which is a valuable source of year-by-year race data; John Foot’s Pedalare! Pedalare! – A History of Italian Cycling, which succeeds in its attempt to try and see Italian cycling of the campionissimi era in a wider cultural context; and Herbie Sykes’ Maglia Rosa – Triumph and Tragedy at the Giro d’Italia, which is filled with wonderfully told stories of the men whose legends were made by the Giro and who have in turn forged the legend of a race that is often far more fascinating than its over-exposed French cousin.

Those three books are the main sources for the above, with additional information on Strada drawn from the Italian Cycling Journal and Radio Marconi blogs.

The Giro d'Italia, circa 1924

In the 1920s, cycling had but two Grand Tours. The Spanish were only slowing getting into gear, in 1924 launching a tour of the Basque Country. A Tour of Spain itself was still a long, long way off. For the two Grand Tours that did exist, the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia, a comfortable formula had established itself: racing days alternating with rest days.

The racing days themselves were mammoth affairs, the shortest about the length of the longest stage in modern Grand Tours, the longest more than 400 kilometres. Riders would start in the dead of night, racing over roads that were little more than rock-strewn dirt tracks, to finish in the mid-afternoon, often in crowd-filled vélodromes, hopefully in time for the journalists covering the event to get their stories off so fans could spend the next morning reading about what had happened the day before. And fans did have to wait until the next morning to find out what happened, it was the 1930s before the Giro and the Tour went multimedia, with the arrival of radio.

The percorso of the 1924 Giro went like this:

Alfonsina Strada, legend has it, was officially entered in the Giro under the name Alfonsin Strada, with the big reveal – He’s a she! – coming after the race had set off. The Italians love their polemica and really know how to stir it. Certainly the column inches Strada generated for La Gazzetta easily helped make up for the lack of big-name riders. And helped to sell lots of newspapers. Here was a point that the teams and their stars had overlooked with their attempt to extort more money from the race organisers: La Gazzetta was faced with a new rival, the Corriere dello Sport, and circulation was down. And, consequently, so too was profit. Not only could La Gazzetta not afford the extra costs the teams wanted to impose upon them but they also desperately needed a circulation boost. The scandals – a lack of stars and the Devil in a Skirt – gave them just that.

In both her Giri di Lombardia, Strada had finished at the back of the field. Little more of her was expected in the corsa rosa. Even La Gazzetta acknowledged, from the start, that this would be the case, saying:

Alfonsina doesn’t challenge anybody for victory, she just wants to show that even the weak sex can do the same as strong men. Might she be a vanguard for feminism that demonstrates its stronger capacity in order to demand the rights to vote in local or national elections?”

La Gazzetta could present her as an icon of feminism, but the truth was they were using Strada to create a spectacle, to give the tifosi something to get excited about in the absence of the likes of Costante Girardengo (Maino), Giovanni Brunero (Legnano), and Ottavio Bottecchia (Automoto). And a spectacle is exactly what Strada gave the Giro. La Gazzetta, describing Strada and the crowd that cheered her passing, had this to say of the woman “with a short baby haircut and even shorter shorts from which the hems of her jumper in particular protruded:”

She pedalled with self-confidence and cheer, like a schoolboy playing truant. The public that lined the streets in the passing villages immediately noted her with exclamations of wonder, the women in particular perhaps scandalised to see her like this […] hardly representing their sex.”

But, for Strada, the Giro was not just about spectacle. Every day – well, every other day – she still had to get from A to B. At the end of the first stage, 300 kilometres from Milan down to Genoa on the Ligurian coast, Strada was an hour off Bartolomeo Aymo’s stage-winning pace (eleven hours two minutes and three seconds, nearly ten minutes faster than second placed Federico Gay, of Alcyon). In the last three Giri, Aymo had finished third, second, and third (the first two with Legnano, the last with Atala) and already looked set to secure another podium finish as a minimum. Rolling home in fourth on the day, 18’39” down on Aymo, was the winner of the 1920 Giro, Gaetano Belloni, accompanied by his Legnano team-mate Giuesppe Enrici. That was the best Belloni could do in the 1924 Giro. As for Enrici, who’d stood on the bottom step of the podium in 1922, his first proper season in the pro peloton, well he was down, well down, on the day. But far from out.

Giuseppe Enrici in the 1924 Giro (Source: BikeRaceInfo.com)

For Enrici, the second stage was about pulling back some of that time lost on that first day. At the end of the second stage – 307 kilometres from Genoa to Florence – Gay had taken the stage, just ahead of Enrici, with Aymo ceding seven minutes and finishing down in fifth. The peloton itself was already whittled down to just sixty-five riders, thirty-five riders already no longer part of the race. Strada, a real stayer, wasn’t among the thirty-five, she was still riding on when others had fallen by the wayside. Slowly riding on, yes, but still riding and not always the last one home: arriving into Florence she was fifty-sixth and just over two hours behind Gay. The time differential hardly seemed of consequence to the tifosi. Of that day’s racing La Gazzetta noted:

In only two stages, this little lady’s popularity has become greater than all the missing champions put together.”

 

On the 284 kilometre run from Florence to Rome Strada was two and a half hours off the pace set by Gay, who again won the stage. Aymo was forced to abandon the Giro early, leaving Gay to take the lead, with a fourteen minute advantage over Enrici. The Giro would now be a straight fight between an Alcyon rider (Gay) and a Legnano rider (Enrici).

On the 249 kilometre sprint from Rome to Naples Strada was again more than two hours behind the stage winner, Zanaga. Gay put another couple of minutes into Enrici, extending his overall lead out to sixteen minutes. La Gazzetta, in its reporting of that day, noted how much attention Strada had received during the Giro’s stay in Rome:

“There was the usual hullabaloo around Alfonsina who arrived at the checkpoint in a new bright outfit. This woman is becoming famous. Yesterday some receptions were held in her honour. The good Romans gave her flowers, a new jersey and even a pair of ear rings. She is radiant.”

Back in those days Grand Tour stages typically started where the previous stage ended. In the 1924 Giro this was true, with the exception of the fourth and fifth stages: on the rest day between the two the riders had to travel south from Naples to Potenza, about 150 kilometres as the crow flies, by-passing along the way Mt Veseuvius.

Nothing much changed on the last of the southward bound stages, the run down to Taranto from Potenza. Ditto could be said – or not said – of the ride north up to Foggia. But the next two stages – into the heart of the Apennines, Foggia to L’Aquilla and L’Aquilla to Perugia – were where the 1924 Giro was won and lost.

On the first day in the Apennines Enrici put more than seventeen minutes into Gay, overturning his deficit and taking the overall lead with a margin of just one minute. The next day Enrici again won the stage and this time Gay ceded more than thirty-nine minutes to his rival.

As for Alfonsina Strada, well her Giro officially ended on that second day in the Apennines, 296 kilometres of racing that would have made a Flandrian weep: shitty roads and shittier weather. Strada crashed and thrashed her handlebars. A broom handle was used to effect emergency repairs (broom handles were often used in those days to effect emergency fork repairs – early cyclists were a resourceful crowd). But by the time Strada reached Perugia – four hours behind Enrici – the control was closed. Strada had been caught by the cut off. Colombo really wanted Strada to get to the finish in Milan – hell, she was selling newspapers – but he was overruled by the men in blazers, the commissaires declaring that rules is rules. Strada was off the 1924 Giro d’Italia.

The Apennines behind them, the remaining riders then faced a gentle sub-300 kilometre haul up to Bologna, followed by the mammoth 415 kilometre leg taking them eastward to Fiume on the Dalmatian coast, now in present-day Croatia but then still a part of the Kingdom of Italy. Into Bologna Enrici finished second, behind his Legnano team-mate Arturo Ferraro, with Gay ceding another eight minutes on the day. The fight back was not on. Into Fium it was Romolo Lazzeretti (Jenis) who took the stage, beating Legnano’s Ferraro and Alfredo Sivicci in a straight sprint. Gay tossed away another nine minutes.

From Fiume it was westward-ho and home to Milan via Verona, staying clear of the Dolomites, for a finish in the Vélodrome Semplone. Into Verona, Ferraro again took the stage win with Gay second on the day in a bunch sprint. And then it was Milan again, the end of the road, the Vélodrome Semplone. In a hotly-contested sprint, Giovanni Bassi – one of the proper isolati in the race, a man used to riding without team support – edged out Gay, only for both riders to be demoted for an irregular sprint, the victory then going to Legnano’s Sivocci, the seventh stage won by a Legnano rider. Enrici – born in Pittsburg but Piedmontese to the bone – took the title. A third place in his first season, a win in his third, boy but did that guy have a bright future ahead of him.

Half an hour after Bassi and Gay had battled for the final stage win, the Vélodrome Semplone again erupted in applause: Alfonsina Strada had just raced in, battling on despite her exclusion from the race. Following Strada’s disqualification in Perugia, Colombo had had a quiet word with her. There was business to discuss. She was helping him sell newspapers. Yes, here she was, battered and bruised, beaten by the race. But it didn’t have to end there. She could ride on, shadow riding the Giro, apart from the race but still a part of it. And for this service she would be paid, handsomely. While Colombo had refused to meet the teams’ demands for appearance fees, he was more than willing to pay Strada to just stay on her bike and keep the punters happy. There’s principles and then there’s commerce: commerce usually trumps principles.

So Strada rode out the remaining four stages, alongside two other riders who’d also been turfed off the race (in early Tours Desgrange had also allowed riders officially out of the competition to continue racing, on a daily basis). It’s claimed that Strada was the highest-earning rider in that year’s Giro, pocketing 50,000 lire for her efforts (remember, the overall prize fund was 100,000 lire).

That Strada was a draw for the fans is evident in the fact that, even when she was finishing way down on the leaders, the tifosi still awaited her arrival at the end of each stage, cheering her home. At Fiume, the race’s tenth stage, that mammoth 415-kilometre haul down the Dalmatian coast, by which time Strada was officially off the Giro but still shadow riding it alongside the peloton, the crowd waited for her to arrive before they left. Strada’s luck hadn’t improved: as in the Apennines she’d again crashed and arrived at the finish in a bad state and well down on the front runners. The tifosi didn’t care and showed their appreciation of her effort by lifting her off her bike: proving, if proof were needed, that sport isn’t just about winning. The next day, Fiume to Verona, a 366-kilometre haul that the peloton tackled at a sedate twenty kilometres an hour, Strada was just seven minutes down on the main bunch.

Strada’s popularity during the race was such that she spent a lot of time handing out photographs and signing autographs. The King, Victor Emmanuel III, sent her an official communication, congratulating her. Even Il Duce, Mussolini, wanted to muscle in on the act, declaring that he wanted to meet the Queen of the Cranks.

The following year the Darling of the Giro attempted to enter the corsa rosa again but – as with the post-War Giri di Lombardia – Colombo and Cougnet didn’t need her and the big teams and their star riders didn’t want her: to be upstaged by second-string riders was one thing, but to be upstaged by a woman was something entirely different. The Giro was still in dispute with the teams – Bianchi and Maino were still shunning the race – but the Queen of the Cranks had been usurped by Colombo and Cougnet’s new saviour: Emilio Bozzi.

As well as his Legnano squad, Bozzi – and his direttore sportivo, Eberardo Pavesi – now had the Wolsit outfit (after the second world war he would add Frejus to his portfolio of bike brands). The Wolsit and Legnano teams of 1925 were really just one team, with one team car to support them both. And what a team they were: Bozzi and Pavesi lost Enrici to Armor and Aymo to Alcyon but gained Costante Giradengo – the first campionissimo – from Maino. And they also gained a rider from La Française, a kid called Alfredo Binda. You’ll be hearing of him again before this is out.

Alfonsina Strada was the story of the 1924 Giro, a publicity coup for the race organisers in their fight against the revenue-sharing demands of the teams and the competition they faced from rival publishers. Enrici was a worthy winner of the race, a solid rider, but Strada’s fame has lasted far longer than his. Elsewhere in the 1924 cycling season – at the Tour de France, to be precise – it was to be the reporting of a French journalist, Albert Londres, that would last longest in public memory. But before turning to them let’s take a look at Strada herself, and what happened to the revenue sharing demanded faced by the Giro organisers.

Next: How Strada spent her 50,000 lire.

* * * * *

Sources: If your Italian is up to snuff and you’d like to learn more about Strada, seek out Paolo Facchinetti’s Gli Anni Ruggenti di Alfonsina Strada (The Roaring Years of Alfonsina Strada), which has also been translated in the Netherlands as Het Roerige Leven van Alfonsina Strada.

Strada’s story is also touched upon in the three Giro-related books to land last year: Bill and Carol McGann’s The Story of the Giro d’Italia – A Year by Year History of the Tour of Italy, Volume I, 1909-1970 (McGann Publishing), which is a valuable source of year-by-year race data; John Foot’s Pedalare! Pedalare! – A History of Italian Cycling, which succeeds in its attempt to try and see Italian cycling of the campionissimi era in a wider cultural context; and Herbie Sykes’ Maglia Rosa – Triumph and Tragedy at the Giro d’Italia, which is filled with wonderfully told stories of the men whose legends were made by the Giro and who have in turn forged the legend of a race that is often far more fascinating than its over-exposed French cousin.

* * * * *

The reason Emilio Colombo and Armando Cougnet invited Alfonsina Strada to ride the 1924 Giro d’Italia was simple: the big teams were pressing the Giro organisers to pay appearance fees simply for starting the race. The Giro was refusing their request. So the big teams were threatening to boycott the Giro.

Appearance fees were – still are – a part of cycling. If you can’t count on the stars to willingly ride your race, sometimes you just have to cross their palms with silver in order to ensure their presence. When Lance Armstrong returned to the peloton in 2009, his palm was greased generously by the organisers of many races, including the Giro d’Italia. But there’s a world of difference between paying off a star or two to grace your race with their presence and having to pay off whole teams who should be entering your race as a matter of course. There is also a world of difference between buying in a star now and then and having to fork out for both stars and bit-part actors every single year.

One can presume that, once the teams had won their battle with the Giro d’Italia, they would soon turn their attention to La Gazzetta‘s other races, particularly Milan-Sanremo and the Giro di Lombardia. Colombo and Cougnet were in no mood to meet these early revenue-sharing demands. The Giro was already paying generous prize money. When it was launched, the race was trumpeted (hyperbolically) as the richest in the world, with a prize fund of 25,000 lire. By the mid-twenties, that was up around 100,000 lire annually between 1923 and 1926. In the same period, the Tour’s prize fund had grown from 25,000 French francs in 1909 to 100,000 in 1924. (Exchange rates in 1924: approx 87 French francs to the pound, 19 to the dollar; 102 lire to the pound, 23 to the dollar.) As far as Colombo and Cougnet were concerned, they were already being more than generous when it came to paying people to ride the Giro. In the pages on La Gazzetta dello Sport, race director Cougnet accused the teams of “behaving like spoilt theatre actors.”

This, of course, wasn’t the first time the teams at the Giro could be accused of behaving like spoilt theatre actors, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. Bianchi, in particular, had a reputation for throwing strops at the Giro. In the second race, 1910, the whole Bianchi squad had withdrawn on the second stage, for reasons unknown. And 1922 saw one of the best strops in Giro history.

It’s a long and somewhat convoluted story, but at its heart is the simple rule that technical assistance was, back then, outside the rules. So Legnano’s Giovanni Brunero was clearly breaking the rules when, having flatted, he took a wheel change from teammate Alfredo Sivocci (who then took a wheel change from teammate Pietro Linari, who took a wheel from the next Legnano rider to turn up, Franco Giorgetti, who had to wait for Ruggero Ferraro in order to get a crossbar to the next control station).

Maino, who were expecting Costante Giraradengo to do the business for them, and Bianchi, who were resting their hopes on Gaetano Belloni, both leaped at the chance to get a serious threat like Brunero turfed off the race. They both complained about his illegal wheel change. The commissaires listened to them. Brunero was out. Legnano appealed. Not for nothing was their DS, Eberardo Pavesi, known as l’avvocat. Pending his appeal, Brunero was back in the race. It was like an Italian hokey-kokey.

It took the Italian cycling fed another two stages to decide Brunero’s fate: a 25-minute time penalty. With the hills still looming and Brunero a scalatore of some skill, that time penalty was little more than a slap on the wrist. Realising they were about to get their arses kicked again – Brunero had won the previous year – both Maino and Bianchi used the affair as an excuse to pull out of the race, muttering loudly about the unfairness of it all as they left.

With the teams having incidents such as these in their past, and now threatening to not even take the start unless they got what they wanted, you can see why Cougnet was minded to call them spoilt theatre actors.

The teams, of course, couldn’t imagine Colombo and Cougnet not bending to their will. They themselves had been there at the birth of the Giro: Atala got word that Bianchi, along with the Corriere della Sera, intended to launch a Tour of Italy, and took the news to La Gazzetta dello Sport, who then gazumped their rivals by pre-emptively announcing the birth of the Giro d’Italia.

From the outset the Giro had declared itself a race for teams, unlike the Tour de France, where Henri Desgrange was fighting a long and losing battle with the mighty marques. The Giro had even once been run purely for teams, in 1912, when (technically) there was no individual winner. But while that race was won by Atala, it was Carlo Galetti who was the real star and still gets the credit for the victory. La Gazzetta quickly realised that the tifosi cheered for riders, not teams and reverted to individual winners thereafter. Even so, the teams, figured they had the weight of history on their side and stuck to their guns: appearance fees, or else.

Colombo and Cougnet were having none of this and dug their heels in: no appearance fees, no matter how big the stars. The race made the stars, not the other way round, a point many race organisers had proved down through the years, especially Pierre Giffard (at the 1891 Paris-Brest-Paris) and Henri Desgrange and Géo Lefèvre (at the Tour). If the stars of the day didn’t want to ride their race, then Colombo and Cougnet would just have to create new stars to replace them.

The teams continued to withhold their stars, figuring Colombo and Cougnet would cave, that they simply had to be faking their moral indignation. They weren’t. Thumbing their noses at the teams, Colombo and Cougnet called on Strada. The Queen of the Cranks was in and the stars were out.

That the teams were willing to pass up the biggest publicity opportunity of the season demonstrates that they did at least believe in what they were arguing for, that this wasn’t just about petty posturing and silly name-calling. The fact is, cycling was turning into a very expensive sport, and the people who funded it were being bled dry by the demands it was putting on them.

Back at that first Giro in 1909, Atala hadn’t just spiked the guns of Bianchi in the birth of the race by taking the news to La Gazzetta. They had also snatched Luigi Ganna from under Bianchi’s nose, topping the 200 lire a month Bianchi were paying him with an offer of 250 lire. Ganna signed on the dotted line and then went on to win the inaugural Giro for Atala. (Ganna actually finished the race 37 minutes behind Bianchi’s Giovanni Rossignoli – who was still racing in 1924 – but the early Giri were based on points, not time, and the Bianchi rider placed fourth on GC.) The next year it was an Atala lock-out on the Podium (Bianchi had thrown a hissy-ft and left the race), with Ganna finishing third, behind Eberardo Pavesi and Carlo Galetti. Bianchi had to wait until 1911 before they got their first Grand Tour victory, they having lured Galetti away from Legnano (who had lured him away from Atala) by offering him yet more money. A year later Atala upped the ante and had Galetti back on board. In Italy in those days, the best riders were very mobile and regularly changed teams.

Throughout the sport, salaries had spiralled before the war as teams, awash with cash from a booming bicycle trade, outbid one and other for the stars of the moment. The world was rich and the riders reaped the reward. The war brought all that crashing down. Coming out of the war, the main French marques – Alcyon, Automoto, La Française, Labor and Peugeot – banded together under the title La Sportive, which was ruled over by the man they called the Marshal, Aphonse Baugé. No longer capable individually of financing strong teams, collectively they were able to exert a stranglehold on French cycling and keep the lesser lights of the French bicycle industry in their proper place. Most riders signed to La Sportive rode for expenses, only a select few receiving a salary. Even for those who were paid monthly, what they received was tiny compared with what was being paid before the war. Henri Pélissier, for instance, was earning 3,000 francs a month before the war at Peugeot. After the war La Sportive were paying him just 300 francs a month.

La Sportive lasted for three years, before being broken up in 1922. Or partly broken up: the member marques created a cartel, setting salary and budget caps. For a cartel to work, though, two things need to happen: the members need to abide by the rules; and the cartel has to be strong enough to strangle non-members before they can become a threat. In France, La Sportive’s members failed first at the latter, the Pélissiers helping JB Louvet rise to power, and then at the former, when Automoto broke ranks – and the salary cap – and outbid Louvet for the services of the Pélissiers. By 1924, the French cartel had more or less crumbled.

In Italy at this time Bianchi and Atala were relatively weak on the road, their best riders having been lured away from them. But they still carried political clout. The real teams of the moment were Maino and Legnano. The argument with the Giro organisers over appearance fees was being led by Bianchi and Atala and was supported by Maino. Legnano … well Legnano managed to hedge their bets by both supporting and not supporting the boycott.

The man behind the Legnano marque was Emilio Bozzi. He had bought the Legnano marque from Vittorio Rossi shortly after the end of the war. In 1924 he was one of the rising men of Italian cycling. And with Pavesi as his DS he was writing the name of Legnano into Italian cycling’s history books. In 1924, Bozzi and Pavesi were fielding a team of champions: in their pay at this time were the winners of the 1920-22 Giri – Gaetano Belloni (1920) and Giovanni Brunero (1921 and 1922) – as well as Pietro Linari, who was Italy’s sprinter par excellence. They also had Giuseppe Enrici, an American-born Italian who, in his first season just two years earlier, had finished on the bottom step of the Giro’s podium.

Bozzi and Pavesi withheld Brunero, a two-time winner, from the Giro. Were they supporting the boycott? Obviously that position could be argued. But the reality is that Brunero was being saved for a serious tilt at the Tour de France, which so far no Italian rider had been able to win (the best Italian riders typically having ridden the Giro before the Tour). A large number of Bozzi’s riders did turn up for the Corsa Rosa, including Belloni, Enrici, Bartolomeo Aymo, Arturo Ferrario, Alfredo Sivocci, Ermano Vallazza, and Adriano Zanaga. Belloni wouldn’t figure in the race after the opening stage but Aymo, Enrici, Ferrario, Sivocci, and Zanaga would all feature prominently.

Also absent was one of the stars of the 1923 Giro, Ottavio Bottecchia, who was riding for the French Automoto squad. Automoto had signed the Italian the previous year partly because they were making a move on the Italian market, and having a native rider in their ranks would help them get column inches in the Italian press. But they were still a French team at heart: the Tour was their race, not the Giro.

In the absence of the major stars – Girardengo, Brunero, Bottecchia – La Gazzetta sought to encourage individuals to enter the race. Technically, all the riders in the 1924 Giro were isolati, riding without the support of a team network, but many riders – including the lads from Legnano – were still sponsored and the sponsor would still get a boost from whatever success they could achieve in the race. But, without the major riders from the mighty marques, the Giro organisers still needed to find a way to entice the lesser lights of the sport to enter their race. Other race organisers before them had already faced similar problems in cycling’s short history.

Back in the nineteenth century, Véloce Sport organised the first Bordeaux-Paris race, a 575 kilometre jaunt for the two-wheeled stars of the day. The real stars of the day happened to be British, and they managed to knobble the opposition early by insisting they wouldn’t race against professionals. The British sense of fair play, the fabled Corinthian Spirit and all that what, what, what? Hardly. The British just knew the power they held over Véloce Sport: if they demanded that the race exclude pros, Véloce Sport would bow to their will. They also knew that their real opposition – the French riders – all rode as pros. Defeating them before the race even got underway was far, far easier than defeating them on the road. And once the French riders were barred from riding their own race, the British were able to sign them up and set them to work on pacing duty (most early races featured some form of pacing: Paris-Roubaix was still being paced as late as 1909, and – of course – pacing was a feature of Bordeaux-Paris right through to its demise in the 1980s).

When Pierre Giffard at Le Petit Journal saw the success of Bordeaux-Paris, he decided to launch his own race: Paris-Brest-Paris, a mere 1,200 kilometres of pedalling. But Giffard had seen the way the British riders had bent Véloce Sport to their will and he decided he wasn’t going to let the teams and the riders hold him over a barrel. Giffard figured he actually held the upper hand: he was a media man who didn’t just believe in the power of the pen, he knew full well the power of the printing press. He appealed to one of his readers’ most base instincts: patriotism. Paris-Brest-Paris would be a French race for French riders. Giffard then proceeded to talk up the fact that rank amateurs would probably outride the stars of the day. Not only did this ensure that the stars of the day would have a point to prove, but it also encouraged a lot of amateurs to suffer delusions of grandeur. Paris-Brest-Paris’ entrants topped 600, with 200 of them actually turning up for the start. And at the end of it Charles Terront – one of the French pros the Brits had sought to knobble in Bordeaux-Paris – won the race. As he steamed over the Porte Maillot, 10,000 people cheered his progress. Giffard had played a blinder: the public loved his race and a real star had won it.

Skip the story forward a couple of decades. When Géo Lefèvre hit upon the bright idea of the Tour de France, L’Auto Vélo had to face up to the fact that their race might be too tough for the stars of the day, most of whom rode short distances on the track. Not a problem, they decided, they would make the men who did ride it into stars. But they still had to entice enough men to get on their bikes for such a crazy endeavour as a race around France. In the end, the only way they could do this was by lowering the entrance fee, shortening the race, and raising the per diem that was being paid to all participants.

History, then, was affording Colombo and Cougnet at least two examples for dealing with their problem: patriotism and filthy lucre. Neither was really a runner in 1920s Italy, so they found a third way: they figured that the quickest way to a man’s heart was through his stomach. As part of their lure they published details of how much food they were providing for participants: chickens (600), other meat (750 kilograms), eggs (7,200), bananas (4,800), bottles of mineral water (2,000), and butter (50 kilograms) along with assorted bread, jams, biscuits, chocolate, apples, and oranges.

On a daily basis, each rider was getting 250 grams of meat, a quarter of a roasted chicken, two sandwiches of prosciutto and butter, two jam sandwiches, a hundred grams of biscuits, 50 grams of chocolate, three eggs, two bananas, and a litre of mineral water. Today, you might question whether you’d be willing to ride to the shops for such fare, but in 1924 Italy, that was a veritable feast for the cycling classes. The Giro got its desired number of entrants. Ninety riders, all officially riding as isolati, would leave Milan on May 10th, with Alfonsina Strada among them.

Next: The 1924 Giro gets underway.

* * * * *

Sources: If your Italian is up to snuff and you’d like to learn more about Strada, seek out Paolo Facchinetti’s Gli Anni Ruggenti di Alfonsina Strada (The Roaring Years of Alfonsina Strada). , which has also been translated in the Netherlands as Het Roerige Leven van Alfonsina Strada.

Strada’s story is also touched upon in the three Giro-related books to land last year: Bill and Carol McGann’s The Story of the Giro d’Italia – A Year by Year History of the Tour of Italy, Volume I, 1909-1970 (McGann Publishing), which is a valuable source of year-by-year race data; John Foot’s Pedalare! Pedalare! – A History of Italian Cycling, which succeeds in its attempt to try and see Italian cycling of the campionissimi era in a wider cultural context; and Herbie Sykes’ Maglia Rosa – Triumph and Tragedy at the Giro d’Italia, which is filled with wonderfully told stories of the men whose legends were made by the Giro and who have in turn forged the legend of a race that is often far more fascinating than its over-exposed French cousin.

Those three books, along with Benjo Maso’s Sweat of the Gods: Myths and Legends of Bicycle Racing (Mousehold Press), are the main sources for the above.

Cyclismas: Your cycling roots go back to the 1980s. I guess you must have known then of guys like Wayne Stetina and John Vande Velde. Two, three decades on and you’re telling the story of the team that Peter Stetina and Christian Vande Velde ride with. Is that cool, or does it just make you feel old?

Mark Johnson: It’s cool, and when I’m around the younger guys like Dan Martin and Peter Stetina their enthusiasm makes me feel younger than my 47 years!

Cyclismas: Jonathan Vaughters opened his introduction to Argyle Armada with a quote from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. It’s a much abused and rather clichéd quote at this stage – ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ – but, for once, used aptly. Let’s take both sides of the picture, the worst first. Garmin started the 2011 season with the dismissal of Matt White, ended it with the folding of the women’s team. There were all sorts of other issues during the year, from the way the team dropped riders so they couldn’t take points to rival teams, through the tension with Thor Hushovd and the team’s role in the race radios brouhaha. Fair to say it was the year the team grew up, lost a lot of its innocence?

Mark Johnson: I also cringed when I saw that quote, but it’s what JV chose and in the end it fits the year and his intro.

I believe that what the team lost, and Vaughters told me this more than once, was the ability to position themselves and ride as just the ‘100% clean team.’ For the sake of their fans and their sponsors, they had to move beyond a marketing slogan (one they backed up with substance, nonetheless) and start delivering wins.

So yes, in the sense that they had to move beyond the peach-fuzzy gloss of youthful enthusiasm and promises and start delivering substantial wins, they did lose some innocence. Beyond that, they still maintain a degree of the fifteen-year-old’s goofiness that other teams don’t have.

Cyclismas: The good times. If you’re only going to win one Classic in a year, you might as well let it be the Queen of the Classics, Paris-Roubaix. You were in the little vélodrome in Roubaix when Johan Vansummeren broke away at the Carrefour de l’Arbe, fifteen kilometres out. You watched on the big screen as Leopard’s Fabian Cancellara began his chase, Thor Hushovd unable to hold his wheel. You knew what Vansummeren was capable of, you knew what Cancellara was capable of. For you, personally, as someone who has been a freelance writer and photographer with the team since 2007, what was watching those final few miles like?

Mark Johnson: Even though it seems like I saw more of this team in 2011 than my own wife and family I tried to maintain journalistic objectivity and distance with the team. The moment Vansummeren rode into that vélodrome was one of the moments those efforts collapsed.

Johan Vansummeren enters the vélodrome in Roubaix as he solos to victory in the Queen of the Classics. (Photo courtesy of Mark Johnson)

That moment reminded me of two other sporting moments that will forever resonate with me: the day the US Olympic team beat the USSR in ice hockey in 1980 and the afternoon Greg LeMond won the Tour in that dramatic TT win over Laurent Fignon in 1989. All three were simply electrifying, and that’s saying something for a person who is not really that big on sitting around on a Saturday afternoon watching sports on TV.

The Roubaix win was emotional especially because Vansummeren is as humble as he is tall. He is such a deserving winner, and the fact that the Belgian water carrier from Lommel did it at a race that, while technically in France, feels as much a Belgian classic as Flanders the Sunday previous, made it all that more poignant to see him win.

The fact that Thor Hushovd sacrificed his own Roubaix victory desires to make it happen made it even more touching, and that really came through as I observed Thor’s face display a chiaroscuro mix of melancholy and joy in the team bus after the race.

Also, the day was such a joyous contrast to the clinical, all-for-Lance disciplinary methodology Armstrong employed to win races. That Roubaix day put an alternative spin on the way American teams have traditionally won at the highest level of cycling.

Cyclismas: The team had two pretty successful Grand Tours, in France and Spain, but the mood between the two – certainly as you paint it in Argyle Armada – was markedly different. The Tour was like one long, extended party, the Vuelta like a rite of passage. Did that surprise you, or are you used to that in the Vuelta?

Mark Johnson: It didn’t surprise me, but it was certainly a striking contrast and I’m glad it came through in the narrative. Those boys were really suffering at the Vuelta.

While the flush of victory carried them through the pain – and disguised it to a degree – at the Tour, the sheer, gruelling brutality of a three week stage race was so much closer to the surface at the Vuelta. At the breakfast table, dutifully spooning oatmeal past their teeth, they truly had the faces of slaves of the road.

Cyclismas: Park the big moments a moment, Paris-Roubaix, leader’s jerseys in all three Grand Tours, stage wins and the like. Let’s look at the little moments instead, those moments of magic that really enhance our love of cycling. Biggest little moment of the year for you?

Mark Johnson: One of the biggest was also one of the quietest: watching Christophe Le Mével push that boy over a hill in the Belgian Ardennes during their LBL recon ride was profoundly touching to me. I mean, Christophe didn’t need to do that, but he took the time and there is no telling how that moment might affect the trajectory of that kid’s life. As Paul Kimmage told me, they just seemed like decent people.

Also, seeing how much not winning Colorado and the Canadian races affected Ryder Hesjedal and Christian Vande Velde endeared me a bit more to the sport. The root of their disappointment was of course personal – anyone at that level of racing must be fuelled by a selfish desire to win. But I was really struck by their expressions of how their disappointment stems from their failure to deliver a legacy to the young kids watching them. In other words, the source of their disappointment at not winning was also extrinsic – focused on others – as much as it was rooted in ego. I guess I didn’t expect to find what were basically selfless impulses fuelling their sense of failure.

Another moment that comes to mind was sitting down with Thor in Pinerolo, Italy, after stage seventeen of the Tour. Hushovd is generally a pretty reserved guy; he’s nice, but he just doesn’t say much and keeps to himself. On this day, he really opened up about his frustration with the riders’ lack of consequence and leverage in the organization of their sport. They may be the stars on the road and in the eyes of the public; but when it comes to affecting the design of their profession, they aren’t even water carriers, and that dichotomy seemed to really bother Thor.

It was all the more moving because at that moment, Hushovd was poised at the acme of his profession – three more Tour stage wins, seven more yellow jerseys, the rainbow stripes – yet, when the subject turned to the business of cycling, his mood was one of dejection and frustration, not celebration.

It’s funny because, earlier that day, someone introduced me to Thor (not realizing that I had been haunting him since January) and Hushovd responded, ‘Oh, I know Mark, he’s like family.’ I guess I had developed familiarity with some of the riders to a degree I didn’t realize. I certainly did not try to fraternize with them throughout the year; I just watched and observed and gave them their space when I sensed it was time for me to do so. I can only hope my book treated them fairly and honestly.

Thor Hushovd at the Garmin-Cervélo team presentation, Girona, January 2011. (Photo courtesy Mark Johnson)

Cyclismas: Peloton politics pepper the story you tell in Argyle Armada, the big issues such as race radios, the UCI’s role in our sport, financial concerns, the lack of a riders’ union etc. Having spoken to Garmin’s riders, and others within the peloton, how would you describe the cohesiveness of the riders themselves when it comes to having a voice on these key issues?

Mark Johnson: The riders generally express the same concerns you summarize in your question, and they also all cited the same general reasons why they are not organized (language, judicial jurisdictions, socio-economic variations).

But until someone like a Marvin Miller arrives with the focus, energy, experience, and talent to organize them and skilfully negotiate with the existing power holders, I don’t see anything changing. A rider can’t do it. It’s too much to be both a professional labour organizer and a professional athlete at the same time.

Cyclismas: Everybody admits that cycling is tied to tradition. But it’s never been a sport stuck with just one way of doing things, it’s constantly evolving. Ten years ago the Tours of Oman and Qatar were hardly even dreamt of. Twenty years ago French was still the lingua franca of the peloton. Thirty years ago women were only slowly becoming a part of team personnel. Forty years ago the UCI had virtually no power. Fifty years ago anti-doping rules were in their infancy. Cycling never stands still. The changing attitude to doping aside, what’s the most important change you’ve witnessed since first coming to the sport?

Mark Johnson: The emergence of English as the lingua franca of the peloton. Notwithstanding the fact that the photographers’ briefing meetings at the ASO events are still in French (and why not, it’s a French organizer, and most of the photogs speak French anyhow), the fact that English is now the language of the business and sport of cycling portends a larger shift in power that I suspect may happen once higher-functioning business people realize how much money is being left on the table by pro cycling’s current status as, in Christian Vande Velde’s words, the world’s biggest amateur sport.

Also, the booming popularity of the sport among participants in the US and in Europe. It’s stunning to see how many everyday people have become enthralled with riding the bike, and I think that on-the-ground passion will help the professional side of the sport, once it gains more professional management.

Am I concerned pro cycling will turn into a soulless, two wheeled F1? Not really; universally, among all the insiders I spoke to throughout the year about the future of the sport, maintaining a balance between the sport’s primitive appeal while also giving it more management maturity was constantly mentioned as essential to the sport’s longevity. I hope that came through in the book!

Finally, while it’s fashionable to bash the UCI (and they often deserve the beatings), it seems to me they have done more than many other pro sport governing bodies to try and crack down on doping. Yes, their application of rulings and enforcement consistency is lacking, if not corrupt, at times; their infantilization of the riders is undignified; and basic human dignity seems secondary to the UCI’s impulse to hang suspects out to dry in the court of public opinion. But compared to the big American sports, where doping infractions bring a slap on the wrist, the UCI has forced pro cycling to confront its doping problems. Does the clean end justify what can seem to be some scandalous UCI means? I don’t know. Regardless, along with what seems to be a changing acceptance of doping among many of the younger riders, I think the diminished acceptance of doping is an important change – if it lasts.

Cyclismas: Cycling, a lot of people tell us, is too complicated. It needs to be simplified so that fans can understand it. Because, apparently, we don’t actually understand it at the moment. You followed Garmin for most of a season, from the Classics through Cali, on to the Tour, through the Quiznos Challenge and the Vuelta, and then on to the two Canadian races. Each race was different, each race was contested by different groups of riders, sometimes races were on in one place while another was ongoing somewhere else. Given that you’ve had to sit down and explain those races to fans, to unify a season, what would you change?

Mark Johnson: I’d more clearly delineate the top level races. The UCI is kind of stumbling in that direction with the ProTour, but then you’ve got something called the WorldTour – and what the heck is the difference? And the fact that a brand new race with no fans on the roadside, a blanket of filth in the air, and a bunch of listless, bemused riders like Beijing can get WorldTour status while still in the newborn ward discredits the prestige of the entire series.

Give the new fan something they can get a grip on if they want to know what to tune into for the most important races in the most spectacular settings with the best riders racing. And then, at the end of the year, let those key races crown a season champion.

I tend to agree with Serge Arsenault [organiser of the two WorldTour races in Canada] in the book; the template is already there.

Mark Johnson with the tools of the trade (photo courtesy Joel Westwood/Velopress)

Cyclismas: Photography. Like riding a bike, it’s something anyone can do, so a lot of people think it’s not all that hard. Point, press, hey presto, a classic image. The reality is a little bit different: there’s a wee bit more to it than just pointing your iPhone at the peloton as they whiz past and cleaning up in the image in PhotoShop or filtering it through Instagram. Care to share some insight as to the type of kit you cart round with you, the pros and cons of digital over film, and what life’s really like behind the lens?

Mark Johnson: I have a blog post on exactly what kind of camera stuff I lugged around with me while shooting this book, rather than rehash that here, I will leave you to look at that.

The conversion to digital from film is a blessing and a curse. For new photographers, it’s a blessing because you can ramp up your skills without the cost of film and developing. Getting instant feedback on the back of your camera on what works and what doesn’t makes this a fabulous time to start taking photos.

For professionals, the curse is that you shoot a lot more images than with film, which means you have to spend more time editing those photos down to a few selects. The product delivery time-frames are a lot shorter now, too. There is no more post-event down time while you or a lab develop film.

Of course, the pressure to be in the right place at the right time is always there, too. With experience, you gain confidence in your equipment and your control over it and light, so you don’t worry so much about getting the key finishing shot. Even when your equipment fails (and it does, especially with the beatings it takes shooting cycling photography), you also learn to stay calm and get the shot with crippled machinery. With this book, there was way more pressure in deciding what to leave out than stress over what I had missed.

Cyclismas: Jonathan Vaughters is one of the leading voices in the battle to make the race organisers let the teams have a (greater) share of their profits, specifically linking this argument to the sharing of TV revenues. Let’s take that point to its logical conclusion: photographers, like you, should share a slice of your income with the teams, riders, and races you photograph. Ditto a percentage of your income from writing about them. How much would you be willing to fork over to feed the machine, to keep the wheels going round, to save everyone from having to stick with a system that – we’re told – is broken?

Mark Johnson: When a steel and auto economist and labour organizer named Marvin Miller organized professional baseball players in the mid-1960s, one of the first things he did was renegotiate the raw deal the players had negotiated with a major manufacturer of baseball cards. The players were essentially giving their images away for life and getting very little in return.

While pro cyclists may not be able to negotiate with the ASO yet over TV revenue sharing, it seems to me they would do well to federate themselves and gain control over the use of their images to market products and sell dreams. For example, a cohesive riders league could then go to a manufacturer who wants a rider to endorse their product and say, OK, you can do that, but these are the economic terms, and part of your advertising and production spend is going to go back to the riders’ league and be shared by all the riders. (This sort of careful image management is standard in most sports and entertainment businesses, but not in cycling.)

While it would make life more complicated for photographers like me, I think in the end such a change might benefit everyone by increasing rates all the way around. When negotiating licensing terms with a manufacturer, all the parties would know that part of the photographer’s licensing fee would have to go to the league, and rates would adjust accordingly. Today, anyone can grab a good photo of a rider and flip it over to a manufacturer for peanuts or for free, and that harms working photographers who shoulder significant capital and overhead expenses.

As far as how much I’d be willing to fork over; it would make sense to look at the models other sports use and start there. That’s one of the nice things about cycling being in such a primitive state as a business – as it matures it can learn from the mistakes and successes of other pro sports like F1, soccer, baseball, tennis and golf and hopefully follow the good and avoid the bad.

Argyle Armada, a double-page layout example. (courtesy VeloPress/Mark Johnson)

Cyclismas: Let’s go back to the book. Argyle Armada is a mix of words and images. It’s not quite the conventional coffee table cycling photo album some might take it to be: the words and the pictures work together synergistically. I tried to compare it with other cycling books in the review, but did you have a particular model in mind?

Mark Johnson: What I had in mind was a series of New Yorker–like day-in-the-life chapters that were illustrated by photographs. Because there is so much political, social, and economic import to what Jonathan Vaughters is trying to do with this team, I had no interest in doing a photo-only book with captions.

I adore the crafts of both writing and photography – they both involve the thoughtful and selective application of light and shadow, with degrees of gradiated penumbra between the two. My model was a book that would use both mediums (writing and photography) to illustrate a year with the team with a degree of richness that would be difficult to do with either just narrative or photos alone.

In the end, I am pleased with how well the photos match the narrative. My editor at VeloPress, Ted Constantino, was a big help in deciding which photos go where. As a photographer you become emotionally attached to certain photos for aesthetic or personal reasons. Having an editor like Ted who could say, ‘yes, it’s a pretty photo, and it’s technically spot on, but it doesn’t propel your story, so we should leave it out,’ was exceptionally helpful for me.

Cyclismas: Let’s get back to the team, and to the riders. Two hats for you, and I want you to give me two riders: wearing your professional’s hat, who’s best in front of the camera, or gives the best copy; and, wearing your fan’s hat, who are you rooting for the most?

Mark Johnson: One of the luxuries I had in spending a year with the team is that I did not have to rely on the post-race sound bites. Immediately after an event, the riders are exhausted and can go into media management mode – just say enough to celebrate your team and plug the sponsors for the bristling array of microphones in your face, then get back to a shower and a plate of warm food. It’s completely understandable.

However, since I had a year to file my story, I could go back to the riders and interview them a week or a month after an event and collect their more measured thoughts after they had time to process and ponder the race-day drama. And that means, with almost all the riders, they simply told me more than I could have ever expected. For example, Johan Vansummeren a week after Roubaix telling me about his crushing stress riding in with a flat tire.

Christian Vande Velde at the races would have his game face on and not say much to me at all. But when I followed up with him a few weeks after the Tour of Colorado, while he was riding around on a tractor in his back yard, he was genial and loquacious and seemed willing to chat all day about his career, the race in Colorado, and the state of the pro cycling profession.

I think the most eloquent observers on the state of pro cycling were Jonathan Vaughters and Tyler Farrar. The best man for sound bites is Dan Martin – that one has spunk, and seems to have been trained in the Chris Horner school of speak your mind honestly. A base man will forever avoid you. Of course, a half hour with David Millar will set your tape recorder on fire. He’s a forceful, eloquent, thought-provoking man.

As for who I was rooting for with the fan hat on, Sep Vanmarcke, Ramunas Navardauskas and Murilo Fischer come to mind. All three are just delightful, warm-hearted human beings, and young Sep and Ramunas represent pro cycling’s bright future. I had many heart-warming conversations with Murilo in Spanish, since my Portuguese is so miserable. I also think back fondly to a day that he and Dan Martin took me on a bike ride down some of the most scenic, out of the way roads that I would have never, ever found on my own in Girona. The kindness and warmth of these riders also stands in such contrast to their fearsome capacity on the bike.

Dave Zabriskie remains a cipher to this day. Even after speaking to him at length on multiple occasions and watching him for a year, he remains an enigma to me. A charming question mark with a sly and lively sense of humour, but a tough one to crack nonetheless!

Cyclismas: The big thing this year is going to be the team time trial at the World’s, the riders being asked to forget their national colours and don their trade team jerseys again for a day. That’s a race Garmin-Barracuda are targeting. I’ve grown up listening to cycling journalists slagging off TTTs at every opportunity, but this one is shaping up to be a helluva lot of fun.

Mark Johnson: Yes – that is going to be a great race. And the TTT is the only kind of TT that doesn’t look like paint drying when watching it on TV.

Cyclismas: Are there plans for an Argyle Armada II: On Stranger Tides?

Mark Johnson: Not yet on this team – I’ll give them a couple more years before I’d consider circling around again for another book. But, oh man, along with doing a lot of book promotion talks and slide shows, I have magazine articles and race coverage assignments stacked in my queue like planes on the LAX runway. But I’m grateful for the work and happy to have cheques landing in the mailbox!

I had a publisher approach me about doing an Argyle Armada type book on a pro triathlete, and that might be interesting, if there are politics and culture involved. A photographer named Liz Kreutz did a photo book on a year with Lance Armstrong. Something similar on a compelling triathlete but with a substantial written narrative might interest me. And since GreenEdge is linked to something larger, a nation of restless immigrants, that’s a team that might stand up to a book-length treatment like Argyle Armada.

I like to write about people. My dream assignment would be to write a piece on Jonathan Vaughters for The New Yorker. So if any of your readers have contacts at that citadel of high culture and fine writing, please feel free to get in touch with me!

* * * * *

Mark Johnson is the author of Argyle Armada – Behind the Scenes of Pro Cycling Life, published by VeloPress (2012, 207 pages). (Read the review here.)

You can find him online at ArgyleArmadaBook.com and on Twitter, @ArgyleArmada.

Our thanks to Mark Johnson for taking part in this interview.

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.

The AIGCP are but one of many supplicants asking the Amaurys to share more of their wealth with them. Before coming back to the AIGCP’s case, let’s consider some of their revenue-sharing rivals.

Away back in the eighties, when the Tour was heading toward gigantisme and was finally contributing something to the Amaurys’ wealth, Félix Lévitan claimed that the race received not even a single centime in public subsidy. In this Lévitan was not wrong. So sure of himself was he that he even offered to throw open the Tour’s books to prove his point. But, at the same time, Lévitan was not right. For the Tour has always been subsidised by the French state.

After the end of the second world war, the French state began to pay subsidies to newspaper operators. At a time when the Tour was a financial drain on the coffers of L’Équipe and Le Parisien Libéré – remember, it was 1974 before it turned its first profit – Émilien Amaury’s newspapers were receiving subsidies from the state. Indirectly, those subsidies subsidised the Tour.

Another form of state subsidy is the cost of policing sporting events. Increasingly, this is a matter of concern to policing authorities throughout the developed economies. Organisers of sporting events pay a fraction of the true cost of policing their events. Were they to have to pay the true cost, many smaller sporting events would simply cease to exist. The Amaurys today are trying to find a balance between paying a fairer cost for the policing of their events and resisting calls to meet the full cost.

Elsewhere, there is the cost of road closures. A 2009 Le Monde Diplomatique story noted that the Tour pays the Assemblée des Départements de France just €270,000 for road closures, which works out at about €75 a kilometre. The ADDDF are not yet demanding that ASO pay more, but the more others point out how little they currently pay, the harder it is for ASO to get away with paying such a small amount for the use of France’s roads.

There was even a challenge against the Paris-Dakar Rally to the amounts paid by towns, cities and départements to host sporting events (fees which contribute to the Tour’s bottom line). Rules on local government finance, it was argued, forbid such payments. It is perfectly acceptable, it was argued, to subsidise businesses creating local employment. It is not legal, the argument went, to use such money for sporting events. The initial challenge against the Dakar was successful, but in the years since then ASO appear to have found the necessary loophole that enables them to continue to receive payments from host towns. Loopholes can always be closed.

Those are just some of the ways the French state subsidises the Tour, and some of the challenges being faced by ASO. The other side of the coin is the amount ASO pays to subsidise cycling at grassroots levels in France. The French cycling federation (FFC) claim that ASO pay something in the region of just €1.2 million to support cycling at grassroots levels. ASO make a counter argument that their races, at all levels, need to be taken into account, not just the amount they pay to the FFC. But mischievous sorts also like to point out that JC Decaux, who underwrite the cost of Paris’ Vélib’ bike-sharing scheme and similar schemes in other cities, pay more to encourage cycling in France than the Amaurys do.

The AIGCP, then, are but one in a long queue of supplicants standing at the door of ASO’s headquarters. And standing right being the AIGCP is the CPA, the riders’ representative body, who are always ready to call for more money if they see someone else getting a larger slice of the cake.

The Amaurys, though, are used to this sort of thing. Look at the media side of their empire and consider the manner in which they have dealt with the print and journalist unions. Unions, by their very nature, always want more for their members. Bosses, by their very nature, always want to resist such calls. The Amaurys have been in the newspaper business since 1944. That’s close to seventy years of experience dealing with people calling for a greater share of the cake. Remember the story of that two-and-a-half-year strike that hit Le Parisien Libéré in the mid-seventies? It was included in this series for a reason. It demonstrates that the Amaurys are no pushovers when it comes to calls upon them to share more and more of their wealth.

The AIGCP, then, will need to make a very good case if they expect ASO to pay the teams more than the €1.6 million currently shared with them at the Tour. Consider, for instance, the basic €51,243 that the teams have been receiving as a participation allowance. This was originally negotiated before the current AIGCP president, Jonathan Vaughters, took office. It has been renegotiated every year since. And every year it has remained unchanged. The whole €1.6 million has, more or less, hardly changed over the last four years. That should indicate to you the scale of the problem facing the AIGCP today. ASO do not give in easily.

How much do the AIGCP actually want? That’s not known. Jonathan Vaughters did recently put a figure of €10 million on it but, when questioned as to whether this was from the just the Tour, from all of ASO’s races or from all race organisers in total, he withdrew the number. My own feeling – and this is nothing more than a gut-feeling based on nothing more than instinct, and should therefore be taken with a very large pinch of salt – is that the AIGCP are probably looking for something in the region of €5 million to €10 million from ASO, and the same again from the other race organisers.

Let’s take the bottom value of that ballpark, a total of €10 million from all race organisers. What would the AIGCP do with such a sum of money? Back in the Summer, when the AIGCP were boycotting France Télévisions in their attempts to press their case, it seemed that the money would simply pass back to the teams and be spent by them as they wished. Some of the money, we were told, would go toward anti-doping. But the rest the teams would be free to spend as they saw fit.

The biggest cost faced by cycling teams today is riders’ wages. At times, it is hard not to think of some of the teams as being like children rushing to spend all their pocket-money on the latest, shiniest toy in the shop window. Look at teams like Leopard, BMC, and Sky and the amounts they are spending on riders. Were the teams to get an extra €10 million between them, what’s to stop them just blowing it all on increased salaries for top riders as they outbid themselves for the fastest sprinter, the lightest climber and the best time trialist money can buy? What’s to stop all that money simply leaving the sport through the riders’ bank accounts?

Here the AIGCP offered the security of a salary cap. There’s various different forms of salary caps, but the most efficient – or the least inefficient – is the one which puts an upper maximum on a team’s total salary outlay. Given that teams are of a fixed size – 25 to 30 riders – this is relatively easy to implement, should all the teams agree to it. Sadly, it is almost impossible to police. In virtually every sport in which salary caps are in place, the same things happen: the teams either blatantly ignore them or abuse every loophole in the book to get around them.

Let’s consider the simplest way of getting around a salary cap: get someone else to pay your rider’s salary. A simple example for you – consider Mark Cavendish and his deal with Specialized. That is a personal deal, between the rider and the bike manufacturer. That his HTC team also have a deal with Specialized is neither here nor there. The money paid to Cavendish by Specialized is paid direct, without going through HTC’s budget. Thus it would not have been covered by a salary cap.

Any team then, wishing to get around a salary cap, would simply have to keep some sponsorship income off their books by getting the sponsor to do a deal directly with a rider. And that is just one loophole. I won’t bother going into the dozens of others that are used in sports that have salary caps in place. The point is, I think, made: salary caps are just window dressing.

This week, though, the issue of the salary cap was taken off the table when the AIGCP president suggested that the extra money being demanded by teams would effectively go to a central fund. Anti-doping would receive 20% of the fund. Another 60% of it would be set aside, similar to the ProTour reserve, and be able to be called upon by teams in financial difficulties. The balance would be disbursed among the teams, for them to spend as they see fit.

In theory, this is good. The practicalities of the matter, though, are far from simple. Now, just because something is difficult doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be done. But the practicalities do need to be considered. Consider, for instance, the manner in which race organisers might make an extra €10 million available to teams. Some of it would, in all likelihood, be paid in the form of increased participation allowances (remember, the current UCI figure is just €7,500 and covers just the ProTour teams and the WorldTour races, excluding the Grand Tours). Some of the increased payout to teams would, in all likelihood, be linked to performance, paid in the form of prizes or bonuses.

Consider, for instance, the Tour. Let’s assume that ASO can be convinced to grant an extra €5 million from the Tour’s bottom line to the teams. If you were in ASO, at most you would grant only half of that in increased participation allowances. Which would bring the allowance up from the current €51,243 to €165,000 (I am here just tossing numbers about – bearing in mind that the current  €51,243 is unchanged over at least four years, the likelihood of it jumping up to €165,000 in the short-term seems outlandish).

The other half – €2.5 million – were you ASO, you might want to link to performance. You would make it available to the teams through enhanced team prizes, linked to their performance in the Tour. Which means that some teams would pocket more than others. Recall, for instance, that breakdown of the 2011 Tour prize fund we looked at earlier in this series. Of the performance-related element of the €1.6 million currently shared with the teams (€433,000) Garmin-Cervélo pocketed €81,200 while Vacansoleil and Katusha pocketed just €200. That’s not a typo. That’s really two hundred euros. Radioshack pocketed just €700. The average was €19,682. The median was just €14,625.

The difficulty then is in making a performance-related element of any increased payout to the teams available to the sort of reserve fund suggested by the AIGCP. Difficult, yes. But not impossible. And so not a reason not to do it. But, as I say, such difficulties do need to be considered. If the AIGCP cannot convince you or me of the practicalities of their plan, what hope do they have against someone as well-versed in negotiating as ASO? You and me, we’re pussycats when compared to ASO.

* * * * *

Why am I making these observations? Because I do believe that fans have a role to play in this. Consider doping. Why didn’t cycling clean up its act post-Festina? Because, as Benjo Maso has noted, the fans didn’t want to know about it, the riders didn’t want to talk about and the media didn’t want to report it. Why did the sport finally begin to change itself after Operación Puerto? Because the balance of power had shifted.

What changed? Among other things, the power of the fans changed. Ten years ago, fifteen years ago, we didn’t matter. We had no voice. Then the internet came along and gave us a voice. An imperfect voice, I’ll accept. And a voice which doesn’t always reflect positively on us. But a voice nonetheless. And journalists who once didn’t want to report the reality of this sport began to see there is an audience for reality. And the editors who once didn’t want their journalists reporting reality began to see there is an audience for reality. It became harder to ignore us, the fans, the people who buy the products sold by the sponsors who fund the teams who employ the riders who keep the wheels of this sport going around. The dumb schmucks in the cheap seats. The least important stakeholder in cycling.

I’m not here trying to blow the trumpet for the Internet or for sites like this. There’s an awful lot about the Internet that I hate, and even on a site like this there are things I don’t agree with. I’m merely trying to acknowledge fairly what changed. The Internet changed the way this sport is reported. And that has helped to change what is happening in this sport. If you don’t believe that, then ask yourself this: why did Paul Köchli fail in his attempts to operate a Team Clean in the nineties, when men like Jonathan Vaughters were able to succeed in the noughties?

Fans have a role to play in how cycling moves forward over the next few years. We can influence those team managers who, like Jonathan Vaughters, take the time out to listen to us. We can influence those journalists who report this sport properly and their editors who limit what they can and cannot report on. Ultimately, through those indirect channels, we can influence the race organisers. And through them we can influence the UCI.

We have a voice in the revenue-sharing debate. The AIGCP have, so far, been the ones framing the debate. Using the media to make the issue public. We don’t have to be passive, to simply sit back and listen to what they choose to tell us. We have today, through the Internet, a chance to join in the debate. To influence its outcome. I have tried in this series to offer my take on what I see as being some of the key aspects of the revenue-sharing debate. The issues I think need to be considered when looking at revenue sharing. To move the debate forward, the rest is up to you. You have a voice. Use it.

Next: Paris – the end of the road (for now).

Previously: Calculating the Tour’s TV Revenues.

“Newspapers created the Tour de France, radio made it popular, television made it rich.”
~ Christian Prudhomme, 2010

 

In a July 19 story on Bloomberg, the following comment appeared:

“ASO may get as much as $200 million from TV rights, while the 22 Tour de France teams typically have an annual budget of $10 million each from sponsorships, [AIGCP president Jonathan] Vaughters said.”

The story was about attempts by Garmin-Cervélo, HTC-Highroad and Radioshack to limit France Télévisions’ access to their team vehicles during the Tour, contrary to a requirement to grant access to the TV rights-holder. The funny part of this story is that, in the AIGCP’s Ten Point Plan For Cycling, the team managers called for the use of in-car cameras and yet there they were during the Tour, blocking the use of such technology. Then again, the AIGCP’s Ten Point Plan also called for the internationalisation of the cycling calendar only for the AIGCP teams to threaten to boycott the UCI’s latest attempt to bring cycling to non-traditional nations with the the Tour of Beijing.

The fact that the AIGCP says one thing and then goes and does the exact opposite is not what’s interesting about this Bloomberg story (though it’s a fact worth filing for future reference). No, what’s interesting is the comment quoted above. It’s worth repeating. See if you can spot the problem with it.

“ASO may get as much as $200 million from TV rights, while the 22 Tour de France teams typically have an annual budget of $10 million each from sponsorships, [AIGCP president Jonathan] Vaughters said.”

Did you spot it? Yes, that’s right, it’s the failure to compare like with like. As we all know by now [see parts passim] ASO’s TV income – the value of which we’ll return to in a moment – doesn’t all come from the Tour de France. It doesn’t even all come from cycling. But you show that Bloomberg article to someone you know and, after they’ve read it, ask them how much the Tour’s TV rights are worth. I’m willing to bet the majority of people will say $200 million.

Now here’s an easy question, one designed to see if you’ve been paying attention as we’ve dawdled aimlessly through different aspects of the revenue-sharing debate: in 2009, what was the total revenue of ASO? Correct, it was €145 million. Which is how much in dollars? Give or take a rounding error, I’d say that’s about $200 million, wouldn’t you? So either: a) ASO have had a phenomenal increase in revenues in the last year and a bit; or b) the $200 million figure for ASO’s TV rights is total bunkum. Hmmnn, now there’s a real two-espresso puzzler.

So how much are the Tour’s TV rights worth?

Let’s begin by looking at just one TV deal, the headline-grabbing one with the host broadcaster, France Télévisions. A broadcaster so powerful they can tell the UCI that race radios are killing cycling and the next thing you know Pat McQuaid is issuing an edict banning their use.

France Télévisions recently renewed their deal with ASO, covering the rights for 2014 and 2015. The deal is made up of a package of events, including not just the Tour de France but also Paris-Nice, the Critérium International, Paris-Roubaix, the Flèche-Wallonne, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the Critérium du Dauphiné and Paris-Tours. The deal also includes other ASO events such as the Paris Marathon and the Dakar Rally.

France Télévisions’ previous deal, signed in 2008, expires in 2013. The total value of that deal has been put at €120 million, being made up of €23 million for the 2009 rights, increasing by 2% per annum after that (i.e., rising through €23.9 million in 2011 to about €24.9 million by the end of the contract in 2013).

Now here’s a question for you: of the €23.9 million France Télévisions paid ASO for TV rights in 2011, how much would you apportion to the Tour de France?

You could do some simple math: add up the number of days covered by all the relevant ASO events, work out what proportion of those days the Tour’s twenty-three days represents and then apply that to the €23.9 million. You’d probably get a figure somewhere in the region of €5m if you did.

More correctly, you’d want to split the revenue based on audience share of the actual TV coverage of the individual events. The amount of work involved in doing that, however, is above my pay grade, so don’t look to me to tell you what the answer would be.

What you most certainly do not want to do is be exceedingly generous and say that all of the €23.9 million is due to the Tour and all the other events in the package are freebies, part of a super-dooper BOGOFF deal ASO offers France Télévisions. Not that anyone would be dumb enough to do that. No, some people would be way dumber: they’d take the full value of the five year deal – €120 million – and say that was the annual value of the Tour’s TV rights. There’s some very, very dumb people out there.

There’s also some very, very clever people out there. The sort of people who would take the total multi-year value of all of ASO’s TV deals – call it $200 million – drop it into conversation, and then talk about the Tour de France and the annual budget of participating teams. Never once would they say that all of the $200 million related to one year, never once would they say it all related to the Tour de France. But neither would they ever say it didn’t. Some people are too damned clever by far.

The point to note is that, whatever way you slice it, you will still end up with a figure well south of €23.9 million as being due to the 2011 Tour from the France Télévisions deal.

Now, having done all the math that’s already been asked of you, you’re probably feeling like going for a quick lie down. But you’re only just past Go on cycling’s Monopoly board. You now have to do the same math with all the TV deals ASO have in place before you get to sprint past the posh properties and collect your €200. And the Tour is – allegedly – seen on TV in 186 countries (the UN says the world is made up of 194 countries; one day ASO will list all 186 countries receiving the Tour and we’ll be able to work out who the eight countries are that need to be love-bombed by cycling fans).

If calculating the French audience share of the various ASO events is above my pay grade, you can guess how much effort I’m willing to put into collating all the relevant TV deals, identifying the events each covers, finding insiders willing to put values on each contract (TV companies hate to reveal how much they pay for sports rights) and then trying to work out how much of that relates to one edition of the Tour.

It does all sounds like rather a lot of hard work, doesn’t it? Is it any wonder people just pluck numbers out of thin air? But is using made-up numbers that bear little or no relation to reality a proper basis for discussing something supposedly as important as revenue sharing? No it isn’t.

Is there a way of short-cutting the process? Possibly. Earlier in this series I gave you figures for ASO’s performance in 2003. In that year out of a total 117 days of sport organised by ASO, 74 of them were cycling. In total, cycling contributed 70% of the company’s revenue. 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%).

Let’s, for the sake of argument, call the revenue €115 million. Let’s start by being generous. Super generous, in fact, and say that all of ASO’s 2003 TV revenue came from just one event, the Tour de France: that would have been €50 million (€115 million x 44%). Markedly south of $200 million, even allowing for inflation over eight years.

But, as we’ve already seen, being super generous would be super stupid. Let’s try to be intelligent. Cycling’s share of ASO’s 2003 revenue was 70%, or €80.5 million. Let’s make an assumption here, which is that ASO’s TV revenue splits evenly across all their sports. Crazy assumption, I know, but let’s run with it. That would give us cycling’s TV revenue (in 2003) as having been €35.4 million (€80.5 x 44%). How much of that do we apportion to the Tour? It contributed about a third of the cycling days. Call the Tour’s TV revenue €11 million? Or be generous, and say the Tour was worth at least half the TV revenue, €18 million? Hell, let’s be kind and call it a nice round €20 million.

That was eight years ago. The sport has seen boom and bust since then. Can we find a more up-to-date roundabout way of doing the calculation? Well ASO’s marketing director, Laurent Lachaux, has in recent years estimated that the Tour is getting as much as 60% of its revenue from TV rights (with 30% coming from sponsors and most of the rest coming from fees paid by the towns that host stages of the race). Previous estimates from Lachaux had put the TV revenue at 50%, with sponsors chipping in 40%. This suggests that sponsorship income, following years of doping scandals and a global ecomonic crisis, has fallen back somewhat. Whatever the figure, 50% or 60%, it’s useless without knowing the race’s revenue line.

Here we turn to an estimate I don’t like. Pierre Ballester – David Walsh’s partner in crime for L.A. Confidentiel and Le sale tour – has in recent years put a guesstimate of €100 million on the Tour’s budget. For me, that number’s far too round, looks too much like it was plucked out of thin air. It also looks far too high, based on previous estimates. But let’s assume that Ballester knows something here. His figure would tell us that the Tour’s TV revenue was in the region of €50 million to €60 million. A substanial figure, but again, substantially different from the figure the AIGCP have tried to suggest.

* * * * *

What have we got at this stage? We’ve got a ballpark figure for the Tour’s TV revenues as somewhere between €20 million and €60 million. I say that the upper figure is over-inflated while accepting that the lower figure needs beefing up. Can we find an acceptable middle ground, that the Tour’s TV revenue is probably in the region of €40 million to €50 million?

Whatever the figure, it’s important to remember that the teams currently get €1.6 million of whatever it is. Which, as AIGCP president Jonathan Vaughter’s recently noted, barely pays for two bus drivers per team when shared out among the individual teams. So just how much of the Tour’s TV revenues do the AIGCP expect ASO to share with them? Clearly more than €1.6 million. And, from comments made by Vaughters’ AIGCP colleague Johan Bruyneel, clearly more than the €3.4 million total prize pool, too. Which leaves me wishing I knew the answer to this question: just how much do the AIGCP think ASO can afford to share with the teams?

Let’s wrap this up with a question: why TV revenues? Why single them out? Why not simply demand a share of all the Tour’s revenue? Why not simply point out that the participation fees negotiated between the teams and ASO – presumably between the AIGCP and ASO – are no longer deemed sufficient and the teams have rethought their previously-negotiated position and, on mature reflection, now think they deserve a greater reward for their role in this sport?

The AIGCP won’t do this, for obvious reasons. So they focus on the emotive issue of TV revenues. But do the AIGCP really believe that the TV revenues are surplus to ASO’s requirements, that all the other costs of putting the Tour on – which include, don’t forget, travel and accommodation expenses for all twenty-two teams for all three weeks of the race, which alone must run to an amount not unadjacent to the €1.6 million cash the teams already take out of the race – are covered by the Tour’s other income, from sponsors and host towns? That TV revenue is pure profit to ASO? Bear in mind here that, in 2006, 2008 and 2009, ASO reported total profit of just €32 million a year. That’s from all their events, not just the cycling ones and most certainly not just the Tour de France. It seems clear, to me at least, that TV revenues are not surplus to ASO’s requirements.

Right now, I am not arguing that the AIGCP don’t deserve a greater share of the cake, don’t deserve more crumbs from the table. Right now all I am doing is questioning the manner in which the AIGCP are asking for their due. Because right now, the AIGCP’s attempts to focus this debate on a massively-inflated TV revenue figure just make the managers look pretty damned silly.

Next: Can a salary cap stop the teams from blowing all their pocket money in the one sweetshop?

Previous: Licenced to thrill.

Last time out we looked at the way cycling’s various stakeholders share the cost of solving cycling’s doping problem. In 2010, the teams – ProTour and Pro Conti – picked up 59% of the tab, while race organisers chipped in for 21% of the bill. The UCI itself picked up 14% of the bill, or 1,104,180 Swiss francs (call that €880,000 and you wouldn’t be far wrong).

Question: where does the UCI find the money to cover its share of cycling’s anti-doping costs? Answer: part of it comes from the teams and the race organisers, who must pay for the privilege of organising and participating in the races on the UCI’s calendar.

Prudhomme starts an eventful day. (Photo: Casey B. Gibson)

How much teams pay is pretty straightforward. ProTour teams are obliged to pay a registration fee of €50,000, plus a licence fee of €100,000 for a four-year licence (i.e., €25,000 per annum). An interesting point to note about the licence fee is that even if a team folds before the expiration of its licence, the full €100,000 is payable. So consider, perhaps, Team RadioShack. Two years into their licence, they’re folding this year. The remaining two years of their licence fee must still be paid to the UCI.

For ProConti teams, the registration fee is €13,750 (this is reduced for teams registered in certain developing countries, the reduction varying between 40% and 60%). For Continental teams, the registration fee is €2,250. For Women’s teams, €1,000. (Again, discounts of 40-60% are offered to teams in developing countries.)

Teams are also obliged to pay a CADF fee. For Continental and Women’s teams, this is €1,000 (with the discounts referred to above available). For ProConti teams, it’s €60,000. For ProTour teams, the CADF contribution is €120,000.

What do the teams get for those fees? For their licence fees, the teams get to ride in their registered league. For the teams with a ProTour licence, that means they get to ride the Tour de France. Once upon a time the Tour used to levy an entry fee on riders, and then on teams. Starting at ten francs per rider back in 1903, by the 1980’s it was about £25,000 per team (circa 125,000 French francs). That fee is now gone and all you need to enter the Tour is a ProTour licence, or the luck of being one of the four wildcard picks. As the ProTour licence guarantees entry, you can see how some teams would be willing to pay almost any price to get one. And how it has, effectively, replaced a fee that used to be levied by the race organisers.

For the CADF contributions, well the teams obviously get the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing they are doing their fair bit to help police cycling’s doping problem. They get the feeling of security that comes with knowing the bio passport will catch any of their riders silly enough to put their hands in the cookie jar. And they get the feeling of satisfaction knowing that dopers no longer sleep easy at night, not with the knowledge that the UCI’s Bulldog Drummonds are hot on their trail.

So much for the teams. What do race organisers get for their CADF contribution? Well, as we saw last time out, beyond the WorldTour, they get an absolute bargain, with their contribution not even covering the cost of a single doping control.

The CADF contribution is not the only fee levied upon race organisers by the UCI. They must also pay in order to appear on the UCI’s calendar of events. And the amount they pay varies depending on how their event is rated. Organisers of WorldTour races must pay UCI fees of €24,000 for a one-day race or €3,450 per racing day for stage races. The Grand Tour organisers pay more: €4,700 per racing day at the Vuelta a España and the Giro d’Italia and €5,000 per racing day at the Tour de France.

For races elsewhere on the calendar, the fee varies from €121 for a one-day men’s or women’s race to €2,100 for an HC classed one-dayer. For stage races, the fees range from €168 per racing day to €1,050. (Again, discounts are offered for races in developing territories, ranging from 40% to 60%.)

What do race organisers get for their licence fees? Beyond having their races evaluated by the UCI’s bean counters, the fee includes (and here we’ll quote from the UCI) “allowances (expenses and travel) for Officials (International Commissaires, Doping Control Officers, Classifiers and Technical Delegates) appointed by the UCI and enrolment fee for each race on the international calendar. The accommodation expenses (room + breakfast) remain payable by each organiser.”

Okay. All of that is rather abstract at this stage, isn’t it? How about we consider the fees paid by the WorldTour races? We’re already familiar with their CADF contribution, time to see what else the UCI demands of them.

I’ve included minimum prize money for no reason other than to give you an idea of the scale of the problem faced by organisers of a WorldTour event, that on top of the fees you would expect (team travel and accommodation costs, paying the police, paying for road closures, insurance, race marshals, publicity etc) stepping up to the big league requires a deepening of your pockets.

Take, as an example, our good friend the GP Ouest France-Plouay. At this stage, the organisers of that race are probably regretting the day they ever accepted the UCI’s gift of €30,000 from the ProTour reserve, the amount of times we’ve referred to it, but it helps explain a problem faced by race organisers.

What was the GP Ouest France-Plouay before becoming a WorldTour event? I could check, but I’ll presume it was HC, that being the next step down the ladder. As a HC event, it would have had minimum prize money of €18,000 (compared with €40,000 as a WT event). It would have had a CADF contribution of €100 (compared with €6,000 as a WT event). It would have had a calendar fee of €2,100 (compared with €16,000 as a WT event). And there wouldn’t have been a registration fee (compared with the €8,000 due as a WT event). A little bit of mental arithmetic tells me that stepping up from a HC event to a WT event has cost the Plouay organisers the thick end of €50,000. What has really changed at Plouay?

Let’s look a bit beyond the WorldTour. Having previously looked at ASO’s stable of events, let’s see what the UCI takes out of them in fees and levies.

All very interesting, says you, but what has any of this got to do with the issue of revenue sharing? Well, this is revenue sharing, this is race organisers sharing their revenue with the UCI.

Here’s a question: are the amounts being levied upon teams and race organisers by the UCI fair? To answer that question, you have to address the question I posed when considering the UCI’s balance sheet: what is the UCI there to do and how much money does it really need to do it? If you believe, for instance, that the UCI has a training role, then race organisers and teams should obviously be levied a fee to help the UCI meet its training commitments (if you do believe that the UCI has a training role, then you might want to ask why the UCI hold only a 0.32% stake in CMC, the world cycling centre, which seems to have had the UCI’s training role delegated to it). Answer the question as to what the UCI is there to do, and then you can decide whether the amounts shown above are fair.

The other side of these fees is this: every euro the organisers pay over to the UCI is a euro the race organisers can’t share with the teams. These race organisation expenses are, I think, the sort the AIGCP would like us to consider when pondering the revenue-sharing question (unlike, say, the teams’ travel and accommodation costs picked up by race organisers, which the AIGCP would prefer we just ignored). Unlike other expenses faced by, say, the Tour, it isn’t easy to bring on an official partner to pick up the tab for these expenses and turn them from a cost centre into a revenue source. These expenses must be paid for out of general revenue. Out of, say, TV revenue. TV revenue which the AIGCP would like to claim as being due to the teams.

Next: The Holy Grail – TV revenues.

Previous: Sharing the cost of policing cycling’s doping problem.

WorldTour race organisers must contribute an amount equal to 15% of minimum prize money to the CADF as their contribution toward the cost of cycling’s anti-doping efforts. Every euro contributed by the race organisers towards the cost of anti-doping is a euro for which others sharing the cost of anti-doping don’t have to pick up the tab. Which leaves them free to spend that euro as they please. Every euro that the race organisers spend on anti-doping is also a euro which they cannot pay out to the teams. The race organisers’ CADF contributions should therefore be seen as an indirect form of revenue sharing.

With that thought in mind, let’s consider how much of the cost of anti-doping the race organisers currently share. As we saw last time out, minimum prize money for WorldTour events varies. For the five monuments – Milano-San Remo, Paris-Roubaix, the Ronde van Vlaanderen, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the Giro di Lombardia – it’s €50,000 per race.

The other one-day races on the WorldTour calendar – Gent-Wevelgem, the Amstel Gold Race, the Flèche Wallonne, the Clásica San Sebastian, Vattenfall Cyclassics, GP Ouest France-Plouay, GP UCI  Cyclist Québec, and the GP UCI Cycliste Montreal – have minimum prize money of €40,000 each.

For the shorter stage races making up the WorldTour calendar – the Tour Down Under, Paris-Nice, Tirreno-Adriatico, the Vuelta al Pais Vasco, the Tour de Romandie, the Volta Ciclista a Catalunya, the Critérium du Dauphiné, the Tour de Suisse, the Tour de Pologne, the Eneco Tour, and the Tour of Beijing – minimum prize money is set at €10,000 per stage plus half that again for GC, or €15,000 per racing day (e.g., a six-day WorldTour stage race has minimum prize money of €90,000).

For the Grand Tours, the minimum prize money is €850,000 each for the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España, and for the Tour de France it’s €1,000,000.

To turn those numbers into the organisers’ contribution to the CADF, multiply them by 15%. Doing that, we learn that the organisers of the Monuments each pay €7,500 to the CADF, the organisers of the other WorldTour one-day races €6,000 per race, and the organisers of WorldTour stage races pay €2,250 per racing day (e.g., €13,500 for a six-day stage race). The Giro and the Vuelta toss €127,500 each to into the pot, the Tour €150,000.

To complicate the matter somewhat, from last year, the GT organisers must also cover the cost of pre-race out-of-competition tests. The UCI’s 2010 accounts give a figure of 709,830 Swiss francs for that. Call that €190,000 per GT, bringing the Tour’s total CADF contribution up to €340,000

The sum of €340,000 from the Tour de France, it doesn’t look too bad, does it? Try this number then: €120,000. That’s the amount every ProTeam is required to contribute to the CADF. The Tour de France sits at the centre of the cycling world. For too many people, it is cycling. Yet the Tour de France coughs up less than the combined contribution of three ProTour teams to cover the cost of solving cycling’s doping problem? Think about that – Garmin-Cervélo, HTC-Highroad and BMC between them contribute more toward the cost of anti-doping than the Tour de France does.

ASO’s total CADF contribution

That, of course, is an unfair comparison. The teams are competing all year around and the Tour lasts just three weeks. Why then don’t we look at ASO’s total contribution to the CADF?

If we’re going to consider ASO’s total contribution to the cost of anti-doping, don’t you think it would be fair to consider the total contribution to the cost of anti-doping borne by teams? Consider Garmin-Cervélo. On top of the €120,000 levied upon them by the UCI, they fund their own independent anti-doping programme. The best estimate for the cost of that is about €375,000. Which brings their total anti-doping spend to just shy of half a million euros.

Thor Hushovd enters anti-doping control at the 2011 Tour de France (AFP PHOTO / PASCAL PAVANI )

Yup, that’s right folks: in total, ASO spend less on anti-doping than Garmin-Cervélo do. At some of their races, ASO are not even chipping in enough to pay for a single dope test. Seriously. The average cost of an anti-doping test is about €300. That’s not a very scientific figure, not all tests are the same and so not all tests cost the same but, as a simple average, it’ll do for our purposes here. €300. For just one test. Compare that with the €100 contributed toward to cost of anti-doping by the Critérium International. Or the €30 at the Ladies Tour of Qatar. Beyond the WorldTour races organised by ASO, the Amaurys really are getting a bargain when it comes to policing doping.

The World Tour’s CADF contribution

How does the half million or so euros spent by Garmin-Cervélo on anti-doping compare with the contribution of all the WorldTour races to cycling’s anti-doping costs?

Hands up, please, those impressed with those figures?

The big picture

Let’s move this up to the big picture. In 2010, the CADF raised 7.9 million Swiss francs from the teams, riders, organisers and the UCI. This compared with 8.2 million the year before. Let’s look at who contributed what:

The teams in total bear 59% of the cost of anti-doping, compared with the 21% borne by the race organisers. That seems unfair, but look at what the position was in 2009: the teams were shouldering 66% of the burden and the race organisers just 13%. Look closely at those figures though: the contribution made by the ProTour teams has actually risen, from 37% to 40%. The saving produced by making the Grand Tour organisers cover the cost of pre-race doping controls have been passed not to the ProTeams, who make up the majority of the Grand Tour peloton, but to the ProConti teams.

The shift in the burden of anti-doping costs between 2009 and 2010 might leave you thinking that we’ve reached a fair balance in the way the burden is borne, at least between the teams and the organisers in general (sharing the burden between the individual teams is a different debate). The race organisers have shouldered more of the burden, the teams have been freed of some of the burden. The teams are still required to spend nearly €3 for every €1 spent by the race organisers but compared with the €5 they had to spend in 2009, that’s an improvement. But are the race organisers now really bearing their fair share?

Go back to the table of ASO races. The Tour of Oman chips in just €210 toward anti-doping. The Critérium International just €100. Paris-Tours just €100. Once you step out of the twenty-seven WorldTour events, race organisers are contributing next to nothing to solving cycling’s doping problem. Think about this: twenty-seven races pick up the tab for more than 90% of the race organisers’ contribution to anti-doping. Three races – the Grand Tours – contribute more than two-thirds of the race organisers’ total share of anti-doping costs. ASO alone contribute nearly one third of the total contribution made by all race organisers.

Solve the manner in which cycling’s anti-doping costs are shared – between the teams and the organisers, among the teams themselves and also among the race organisers – and you will have gone some of the way toward solving the problem of revenue sharing.

Next: Sharing the revenue with the UCI.

Previous: Sharing the wealth at the WorldTour.