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The Content Marketing Origins of Le Tour de France

Content Marketing / July 23, 2019 by [email protected]

< 1 Min Read

In the early 1900s, French newspaper  L’Auto  had a big mountain to climb.

Facing  stiff competition  from rival publication  Le Vélo  and declining sales, the paper’s founder Henri Desgrane was desperate for a big idea that would save his company. Cycling journalist Geo Lefevre pitched him the idea of sponsoring a massive bicycle race that lasted for weeks and led riders around the entire country of France.

A former cyclist himself, Desgrane loved the idea and saw it as the opportunity his business needed. Dubbed Le Tour de France, the race was scheduled to stretch over 1,509 miles and take an astonishing 19 days to complete. In turn, the paper would produce coverage of the first-of-its kind event in an attempt to sell more papers.  L’Auto  also hoped to sell ad space in the paper at a premium and generate more revenue.

Tour de France’s Marketing Win

The event was a huge win.  L’Auto  increased its circulation four-fold in the first year of the race alone and was able to sprint past competing papers. At the conclusion of the sixth consecutive race in 1908,  L’Auto  had increased their circulation to 250,000 copies,  a massive spike  from roughly 25,000 in 1902.

The rest is history. Le Tour de France has grown into the most popular and widely broadcasted cycling event of the year. Millions of viewers tune in to watch race coverage, and its quintessential yellow leader’s shirt has become a coveted item among the world’s top cyclists.

Buzz that Saved the Business

In launching Le Tour de France,  L’Auto  pulled off a miraculous content marketing feat. By creating content the entire world wanted to see and read about, the newspaper generated enough buzz to save its business. 

Long Story Short

Don’t be afraid to shift gears and think outside the box when it comes to the content you produce. Sometimes taking a leap can be the shot in the arm, or leg, a marketing strategy needs.

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Is Le Tour de France the best piece of content marketing ever?

The Tour de France is surely one of the world’s most gruelling races, during which 198 riders will cover 3,540km, visiting 4 countries over 3 weeks with just the occasional rest day. But is the race the best example of content marketing of all time?

I would suggest that it is.

To make my case, I would cite three key constituents of the race, which of themselves are not enough to satisfy my claim, but when combined together might just be enough.

Firstly, and most obviously, the race reaches a huge global audience each year. This year, the race organisers are expecting 12 million people to spectate from the roadside, who will be joined by armchair cycling enthusiasts watching 105 hours of live coverage in 190 countries, plus a digital audience of more than 36 million people consuming content produced in four languages*.

Impressive. But from a content marketing perspective, the use of Le Tour in tourism marketing is arguably more impressive. France is the most popular destination in the world for tourists, with 82.5 million visiting in 2016** and doesn’t Le Tour do its best to boost those numbers. If you’ve never watched a stage of Le Tour (and if you haven’t I can heartily recommend it) you have missed, as a best guess, about a third of the live coverage being dedicated to the scenery and history of the regions and Departments that the race visits.

Each of the 190 countries airing the race take their feed from the official race broadcaster and as such, all beam incredible footage of chateau, mountain ranges, river gorges, outrageously cute villages and some of the most picturesque countryside in the world to their viewers. In addition, each of the commentary teams is clearly feed information on historical or other points of interest, the names and locations of which are shown on screen. And if that’s not enough, both the Assemble Des Departments De France and the Ministere De L’Interiuer are both official race sponsors.

The whole production is part race and part ‘Wish You Were Here. It’s brilliant.

Finally, and most interestingly, at least from an historical perspective, is that Le Tour was started as a content marketing campaign by a French cycling magazine to boost its circulation.

The first Tour was stage in 1903, started by L’Auto a sports newspaper which was formed to compete with Le Velo, at the time, the largest daily sports newspaper in France. L’Auto was in effect losing the circulation battle and started Le Tour to create a unique content event which they could use to drive their circulation numbers above those of their rival.

L’Auto’s circulation rose from 25,000 in 1902 to 250,000 by 1908, almost exclusively on the back of Le Tour. Le Velo was driven out of business in 1904.

So I rest my case. Le Tour – surely the most successful content marketing campaign of all time?

* www.letour.com

** French Foreign Ministry

Richard Spencer, CMO

Loren is an experienced marketing professional who translates data and insights using Isentia solutions into trends and research, bringing clients closer to the benefits of audience intelligence. Loren thrives on introducing the groundbreaking ways in which data and insights can help a brand or organisation, enabling them to exceed their strategic objectives and goals.

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Isentia and its partners envision a future where strong representation of women in sports media contributes to the professionalisation of women’s elite sport, dismantles limiting stereotypes, and promotes inclusivity at both the elite and community sport levels. This collaboration sets the stage for a more equitable and diverse sports media landscape, where the stories and achievements of women athletes are celebrated, amplified and contribute to a stronger ecosystem for women's sport.

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Isentia co-launches report: representation of women in sports coverage 2022-23.

Isentia, a leading provider of media intelligence and analysis services, is proud to announce the launch of “The Conversation of Sport: Representation of Women in Sports News Coverage,” in partnership with the Office of Women in Sport and Recreation. This research aims to bring awareness to gender inequality in sports, and attention to address the […]

The story around supermarket prices has been evolving for a number of months, finally reaching an inflection point as the Woolworth’s CEO appeared in a challenging interview with Four Corners and then announced his upcoming retirement only two days later.This chain of events underscores the critical importance of understanding the connections made by broadcast media, as they can significantly influence public perceptions and shape the narrative surrounding key industry players.

It was only the latest in a series of media items to seize Australia’s attention, and cast the nation’s supermarkets into something of a PR and Comms crisis.

And yet, viewing events through this framing also only gives a partial picture. As the discussion surrounding the impact of supermarkets on the rising cost of living intensifies, we've observed a notable surge in the usage of terms such as 'shrinkflation' and 'skimpflation'. Reaching back even further, we can see how the topics attained a gradually greater place on Australian news and social channels. Shrinkflation and skimpflation are tactics employed by supermarkets during economic challenges. Shrinkflation involves reducing product sizes while maintaining prices, subtly passing on costs to consumers. Skimpflation maintains product sizes but compromises on quality to preserve profit margins. These strategies often frustrate supermarket shoppers, especially during economic strains like inflation.

Clearly, the topic has become ubiquitous. But if we want to understand how information and perceptions have been communicated to mainstream Australian audiences, then it becomes vitally important to pay particular attention to broadcast media. 

Broadcast media (which includes television, radio and podcasts)  plays a pivotal role in shaping public discourse and influencing perceptions, particularly on pressing issues such as the cost of living crisis. 

Using Isentia to monitor these data sources, we gain valuable insights into their contribution to consumer attitudes. From identifying which organisations are most associated with the issue to pinpointing key public figures and preferred channels within radio and TV, broadcast media monitoring allows us to understand the complex dynamics that shape public opinion.

It’s the oldest of these media types which accounts for the most mentions of the supermarket crisis. Beyond reporting updates on the senate inquiry and government actions, radio excels in facilitating in-depth conversations between hosts and listeners, which surfaces more individual consumer stories than television or podcasts can match.

ABC's predominant coverage of the topic corresponds with the network's content strategy. Major programs such as the Supermarket Four Corners special and podcasts like The Briefing attract substantial listenership and garner attention from other channels. Channel 7, in addition to delivering key news updates, focuses on the shopper experience within supermarkets, shedding light on everyday challenges faced by audiences, such as navigating shrinkflation and skimpflation tactics.

Understanding the majority share of broadcast channels within this topic is important as it reflects who has the loudest voice, and is most persistently advancing a certain narrative or way of framing the situation. 

Coles and Woolworths dominate the conversation, reflecting their prominent presence in the retail landscape. Their widespread accessibility and familiarity to consumers make them prime subjects for discussion in the context of rising costs and economic pressures. 

Conversely, Aldi and IGA, while still significant players in the grocery market, may receive comparatively less focus in these discussions. Aldi's reputation for offering lower-priced alternatives and IGA's decentralised business model, with independently owned stores, may also contribute to their reduced presence in conversations about supermarket practices during times of economic strain. 

Each channel and network approaches discussions about supermarket groups differently. While Coles and Woolworths understandably dominate each station's broadcasts, the precise balance (and the time afforded to Adi and IGA) is revealing.

For instance, 4BC has encouraged audiences to diversify their shopping habits, with one 4BC broadcaster highlighting that "Aldi and IGA are actually doing more than the other two to really help enormously with the cost of living."

In the discourse on supermarket practices during the cost of living crisis, a number key figures emerge across broadcast channels. Anthony Albanese, the Australian Prime Minister, is predictably prominent on just about every channel, particularly broadcaster 2SM. 

All of them, that is, apart from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which spotlights Allan Fels, an economist and former ACCC chair who has analysed price gouging by major corporations. Other notable politicians mentioned include Treasurer Jim Chalmers, Craig Emerson, Steven Miles, and David Littleproud. 

Media's focus on these figures is crucial for shaping public discourse and policy responses amid economic pressures. While supermarkets are often discussed as a key antagonist in the cost of living crisis, they are increasingly being viewed in the context of potential solutions, particularly regarding government policy to regulate supermarket giants.

At the same time, focus does not only fall on the prominent individuals driving business decisions and policymaking. Country Hour (NSW), for instance, focused a story on cherry grower Michael Cuneo, who ceased selling to supermarkets after he made a financial loss on a shipment of fruit. And it was this story that achieved the greatest media reach of any radio content on the topic.  

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How Australian broadcast media has shaped the cost of living crisis narrative

The story around supermarket prices has been evolving for a number of months, finally reaching an inflection point as the Woolworth’s CEO appeared in a challenging interview with Four Corners and then announced his upcoming retirement only two days later.This chain of events underscores the critical importance of understanding the connections made by broadcast media, […]

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What’s driving the cost of living concerns?

A range of factors are driving the cost of living in Australia, with some having more of an impact than others. Using data from our sister company, Pulsar, inflation (as the overarching issue) is gaining the most media coverage as the price of goods and services continues to increase over time.

The chart also shows the rise in energy costs, interest rates, and housing prices (rent and mortgage prices) as other main drivers for cost of living concerns. As energy prices continue to increase, households are feeling the pinch as their expenses soar. And when it comes to housing, whether it's the skyrocketing rent or the burden of increasing mortgage payments, many individuals and families are finding it increasingly challenging to secure affordable accommodation.

Let’s take a closer look at these topics.

Energy fuels the discussion

Energy sources and prices are hot topics in the media, impacting households, affordability, and vulnerable populations. But a troubling discrepancy emerged in the May 2023 Budget: businesses got more attention than households in energy relief measures. Surprisingly, only 13% of media coverage focused on the struggles faced by individuals, while a whopping 29% centered around the politics and policies of Australian businesses. This raises valid concerns about whether the media is truly addressing the needs of Australian communities.

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Media outlets play a crucial role in shaping public opinion and influencing the cost of living. When it comes to specific energy sectors, they have become the subject of intense media scrutiny. Data from our Energy Transition report shows that coal and gas are in the hot seat, with a significant portion of media coverage - 43% for coal and 26% for gas - dedicated to discussing these fossil fuels. This media focus highlights the ongoing conversations surrounding the environmental impact of coal and gas, their contribution to climate change, economic considerations, and the urgent need for policy changes to transition to cleaner energy sources.

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Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows living costs have reached an all-time high. Over the past 12 months, all living cost indices have risen between 7.1 percent and 9.6 percent for all households, compared to a 7 percent annual increase in inflation.

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Influential figures shaping the conversation

Data from the Pulsar Platform gives a visual snapshot of how several Australian and foreign individuals and groups are influencing the conversation, including politicians, economists, consumer advocacy groups, and business owners.

Unsurprisingly, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) holds significant influence when it comes to shaping the cost of living conversation in Australia’s political landscape. As the governing body in Australian Parliament, their policies and initiatives subjectively bear the everyday Australian in mind, aiming to tackle the affordability challenges that many face. The ALP resonates with citizens worried about rising living costs due to its focus on income inequality, social justice, and fair economic policies. But are they doing enough?

Treasurer Jim Chalmers, along with other influential ALP members including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Chris Bowen, and Mick de Brenni, are leading the conversation in an effort to alleviate living expenses and promote income growth. Despite their desire to achieve these outcomes, the public outcry on Twitter shows the frustration Australians are feeling. The Prime Minister and Treasurer are in the firing line, with the public urging more action on the cost of living crisis.

How media intelligence can help you navigate the cost of living

Advocacy efforts can be significantly enhanced through the use of social listening and media monitoring. These tools allow you to effectively navigate the dynamic narratives surrounding the cost of living. By tailoring your advocacy approach, you can foster a more equitable and sustainable solution that brings positive change to communities and influences public opinion.

Additionally, by staying well-informed about the ongoing public discourse and trending discussions related to the cost of living, you can develop compelling communication strategies that effectively inform and engage your stakeholders.

Curious about how media intelligence can enhance your communication strategies to connect with your audience? Request a demo here , and our expert team will reach out to help you develop your communication strategies.

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Media’s Lens: Framing the FIFA Women’s World Cup Narrative The FIFA Women’s World Cup has taken centre stage as well as global communication strategies, drawing global attention as the media employs key themes to shape perceptions and illuminate the tournament’s core values. From Viewing & Enjoying to Women in Sports, Rankings, Cultural Inclusivity and Representation, […]

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How a Small French Newspaper Began the Tour de France

Adin dobkin on l'auto , the war torn year of 1919, and the beginning of the legendary bike ride.

Henri Desgrange watched the celebrations pass by on rue du Faubourg Montmartre. Crowds renewed themselves along the blister of a road through Paris’s ninth arrondissement, on the Seine’s right bank. The editor stood, stiff. His soldier’s posture had not yet left him. When he’d held his unit’s colors, his face set for the army photographer, it had taken effort to stay as rigid as his soldiers, three decades younger than Desgrange. Anyone who knew him would say he thought nothing of the gap in their ages.

Stasis didn’t suit him. Desgrange always appeared in constant motion: his white hair swept back over his still dark, wayward brows, his chin cocked out, his eagle nose just barely upturned, as if to focus on some prey. He had watched his neighborhood dim in the preceding years, though that day it was, for at least a moment, reborn. The powder-blue dressing rooms and gilt mansions of les Grands Boulevards, their extravagant rose gardens concealed behind modest steel fences, all remained a short walk away, but the artists who had once made their homes nearby had moved to the city’s left bank and carried Paris’s cultural mass with them.

The occasional salon and cabaret still opened its doors on fall evenings like this one, however, and new jazz clubs had moved into the shuttered spaces between, buoyed by the unending tide of the city. Desgrange, the editor-in-chief of the sports daily l’Auto, could look out his office window and see the corridor that led to Bouillon Chartier’s entrance where waiters scribbled out customers’ receipts on unfussy paper tablecloths. He’d sometimes take his journalists to the restaurant after editorial meetings, when a walk to boulevard Montmartre felt too far with the evening’s deadlines. If he turned his head to the left, he could just make out the second-story awning of Gaumontcolor. The cinema’s neon lights cast a faint glow on the opposite wall; geometric shapes snapped in and out of existence on the pavement underfoot.

Anyone waiting outside the theater that day was subsumed by the passing bodies who crowded the Faubourg Montmartre street. Few were willing to miss the celebrations that continued into the late afternoon. For the first time in years, the streetlights remained lit as the evening aged but did not wane; they cast a glow on the people’s newly freed movements well into the night.

Parisians, Americans, British, Belgians—most anyone who found themselves in the French capital—amassed on the streets that day to celebrate the armistice signed between the Allied countries and Germany. They arrived knowing the fighting on the western front had ended at 11:00 am, though most who crowded onto the avenues had not yet heard what the document’s terms were. Whatever clauses and subclauses had been agreed on by their leaders and those on the table’s opposite side mattered little to the people’s immediate celebrations: it was enough that the thing was through.

No matter the conditions of the armistice, no matter how much Germany paid for those four years, the document couldn’t make up for the war’s cost. Like the rest of France, Desgrange had been consumed with the war. It had stamped his existence, left no corner un-inked. And his country? The war had threatened to tear it from its foundation, to cart off its remains, to expand Germany’s excision of territories and to break apart the alliance France had formed with Great Britain.

he country’s borders had not collapsed any further in the war—they’d expanded—but the conflict had succeeded in its first aim: to uproot the ground in tracts of land to Paris’s northeast. In doing so it shattered those young men, and plenty of old ones, too. Men who had been sent away in those first days of fighting with spirit in excess. Their stamina hadn’t lasted as long as the war did. Those men couldn’t be blamed; they had volunteered for a tragedy few had expected or prepared for, even those who led the aggressors.

A few saw how war had changed in the 60 years before 1914, in the cast artillery guns and industrial train tracks that ran like roots behind units in the Crimean War and in Vicksburg’s trench networks in the American Civil War. The Great War revealed those logistical and engineering lessons as ruinous, if inevitable, advances to warfare. Little could have protected the men on the front, short of killing every last German who had stepped onto their country’s trampled ground. Underfoot, the land carried each side. It held as they advanced and retreated, back and forth, but after four years it was broken: its roads dredged up and its farmlands and forests fallow. Negotiating with German generals and politicians might have spared lives, but after the war had slowed, burrowed into the clay, no conversation could have brought back those poilus Desgrange had funneled through l’Auto’s offices.

Desgrange paused. His fingers hovered over the keys. The paper’s found­ing message, written by him and published in l’Auto ’s first issue on October 16, 1900—19 years ago—said the newspaper would avoid political issues, in contrast to its many competing sports dailies. He and l’Auto ’s advertisers had seen an opportunity to differentiate themselves from Le Vélo , their widest-circulating opponent, whose writ­ers and editors regularly waded into domestic political conversations. Le Vélo ’s editor-in-chief, Pierre Giffard, had come to the defense of Alfred Dreyfus in its pages, to the chagrin of Le Vélo ’s conservative advertisers. Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, had been convicted of selling military secrets to the Germans.

At the time of Giffard’s defense, those who supported Dreyfus hoped to reopen his case and overturn the conviction, while anti-Dreyfusards thought that doing so would weaken people’s faith in France and its government. An antisemitic undercurrent ran throughout. At the time of the affair, Desgrange was a public relations representative of Clément-Bayard automobiles, itself a Le Vélo advertiser. He had already left his days as a professional cyclist behind. He had not broken from the sport entirely, though.

Only a few years before he had become the director of Parc des Princes, an arena with a cycling track in the city’s western suburb of Boulogne-sur-Seine. Desgrange wrote articles and opinion pieces about physical education and sports for Le Vélo and other publications outside his regular public relations duties. As the Dreyfus Affair continued, he remained publicly mute, a quality that appealed to his employer, Adolphe Clément-Bayard.Soon after Giffard declared his support of Dreyfus in his newspa­per’s green-tinted pages, Clément-Bayard, the founder of the company bearing his name, brought Desgrange into discussions between Le Vélo ’s advertisers. Clément, like the other corporations who advertised in the paper, had publicly disagreed with Giffard’s slant in Le Vélo ’s coverage. Clément and the others had pulled their advertisements in protest. They had little desire to return that money to Le Vélo any­time soon.

Instead, they hoped to create a competing sports daily that would sate the public’s interest in athletics without the political coverage that had fragmented readership. Clément believed Desgrange could be an ideal editor for the new paper: he was a cyclist who had achieved some public acclaim after setting records in the hour, the 50 and 100 kilometers, and the 100-mile lengths on bicycles. He had written columns and books on his own experiences. As a public relations manager, he knew how to deal with journalists, even if he wasn’t one himself. The advertisers didn’t want to consider anyone else for the job; they offered the editor-in-chief position to Desgrange. He accepted.

L’Auto ’s founding message well represented its early stance toward politics, even before the war broke out. “What we wanted to say is said,” Henri wrote to l’Auto ’s readers of the Dreyfus Affair, though the paper had said nothing until that point. He didn’t comment on Dreyfus again. The advertisers of the new sports daily, yellow tinted in contrast with Le Vélo ’s green, were satisfied with their investment.

L’Auto ’s founding and the Dreyfus Affair were far from Desgrange’s mind that November evening. His enemies, those his readers and adver­tisers shared, weren’t fellow Frenchmen but foreigners. He saw little chance a civil war would erupt between his fellow citizens who hated the Germans and those who thought they were being treated too harshly in their defeat. The few who believed that were in the minority and most were smart enough to recognize it and watch their own language. Le Vélo had shuttered in 1904 and the war had created a common enemy, one all of Paris could agree upon—Desgrange was free to write as he pleased.

Given the celebrations on most every Paris street, in count­less small towns on the city’s outskirts, and in trenches that had been rendered worthless, l’Auto ’s major advertisers like Jacques Braunstein at Zig-Zag and the Palmer Tire executives wouldn’t mind their ads abut­ting another of Desgrange’s political columns. They had remained loyal to the editor over the years. They had trusted him to expand the news­paper’s circulation in its first years as it competed directly with Le Vélo , and had stuck by him once Le Vélo had closed, quotas on materials had restricted l’Auto ’s coverage, and its reporters—fighting-age men—had been called to the front. The newspaper’s readers had more pressing concerns than what l’Auto covered, cycling and gymnastics, running and yachting. But the sporting events Desgrange and his correspon­dents wrote about, those that continued in the wartime years, provided those readers with a release from the events that filled the pages of other newspapers: the movements of battleships, the arrest of foreign spies not far from where they lived, the deployment of units filled with sons, husbands, and fathers.

In l’Auto ’s early days, Desgrange worked to live up to his advertis­ers’ initial confidence. His public relations experience, however, hadn’t carried him far in the newsroom. He had few ideas for stories and didn’t have much knowledge on how to manage a team of journalists. He only followed what others in the industry did and hoped the absence of something—political coverage—would be enough to drive readers to l’Auto . His brash writing hid a caution in business manners: whenever possible, he preferred others take risks in developing new projects while he waited to see whether their ventures would pay off. Given that plenty of other sports dailies were still in the market, even after Le Vélo faltered, l’Auto ’s circulation stalled in those first years. The newspaper’s future had been uncertain enough that Desgrange’s job had been threatened. The advertisers expressed their hope he would turn things around, a sign that anyone without his relationships would have already been fired from the job. The threat wasn’t enough to change Desgrange’s nature, but it at least opened him to others’ ideas.

Desgrange held an editorial meeting in response. He asked the journalists who worked under him and those administrators on the business side of the paper for their ideas on how l’Auto could grow its subscription base. Géo Lefèvre, a 26-year-old cycling and rugby correspondent whom Desgrange had hired away from Le Vélo , spoke up. Lefèvre’s previous employer had sponsored sporting compe­titions and provided exclusive coverage of the results: Paris–Roubaix, Bordeaux–Paris, Paris–Brest–Paris. The three were one-day cycling events that Le Vélo helped organize and run. By offering readers exclu­sive interviews with the contestants and by following the cyclists on each section of road, Le Vélo encouraged nonsubscribers to pick up the paper on race days. Some, they hoped, would even subscribe after see­ing the surrounding reporting.

The one-day cycling races worked well for the newspaper’s aims: the races didn’t require much in the way of logistics and took place on regular roads instead of in stadiums—for-profit companies themselves that would have their own ideas about coverage. The events appealed to competitive cyclists but also attracted amateurs. Races any longer than one day would be difficult for cyclists who didn’t train for endurance. On a longer race, registrants would flag, but the sponsoring newspaper could extend the days it offered in-depth coverage. More adventurous than Desgrange, with less to lose, Lefèvre suggested a cycling race longer than anyone before had considered, one spanning France’s entire border. “A Tour de France,” Desgrange clarified.

The Tour had existed as part of French life even if it had never been a cycling race. Kings went on tour to inspect their more distant lands, to let those with tenuous allegiances know that they remembered them; craftsmen left their hometowns for tours to learn how others in regions not their own built cathedrals, baked pastries. Le Tour de la France par deux enfants , a book French children read in primary school, described two children’s journey around their country to find their uncle. A Tour de France race on bikes had never been considered, but it could be imagined. It was enough for Desgrange to not dismiss Lefèvre’s idea immediately.

The editor took the journalist to a café after the meeting and dis­cussed the proposed race further. The pair decided Desgrange would bring the idea to l’Auto ’s business director and cofounder, Victor Goddet, for his input. If Goddet thought it impossible, that was easy enough: the idea wouldn’t go any farther. When Desgrange went to him, however, Goddet thought it was just what l’Auto needed.

The Tour de France’s first years surpassed Desgrange’s guarded expectations. People left their homes to watch the cyclists on the 1903 Tour’s six stages. In time, the Tour route extended, hewed closer to France’s borders. The cyclists beat the bounds of their country. They marked France’s borders and every town they rode through, in each new clime they reached. As the cyclists biked through some of the same small towns in subsequent years, the association between that town and the Tour grew. The towns formed the Tour, and the Tour formed the towns as well as the country.

Many cyclists didn’t find the Tour appealing at first. It was unques­tionably more difficult than one-day events with relatively large purses for the cyclists’ investment of time and training. The Tour was a chal­lenge as much as a race. The average professional didn’t know whether they could finish until they rode back to Paris. Sponsors still promised cyclists’ salaries for the competition, however, and with the smaller prizes along the way, racers could justify the effort. L’Auto and Desgrange’s job were saved. Near the Tour’s end, l’Auto ’s circulation ballooned, mul­tiples of Le Vélo ’s on its best days. The competing paper shuttered in 1904. Desgrange even became comfortable with the race he had once considered a gamble. He had made it part of his image: the father of the Tour de France. It was his foresight, after all, that let it occur those first years, before its concept had been proven. Géo Lefèvre—who had conceived of the race—was transferred to writing about boxing and aviation while Desgrange stayed involved with the Tour’s administra­tion, covering it in regular dispatches as he followed its route.

On the day of the 12th Tour’s start, June 28, 1914, the archduke of Austria, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo. The cyclists were already on the road to Le Havre when Gavrilo Princip fired two shots into the archduke’s car. They rode on even after they heard the news. The race ended on its scheduled day of July 26th. On August 3rd, France entered the war; Tour winner Philippe Thys’s Belgium had already been invaded by that time. With the news, plans for the thir­teenth Tour—the event that had saved l’Auto from failure—halted. The race couldn’t hope to cycle along the country’s borders.

Desgrange and the paper couldn’t afford to stagnate until the war had ended, even if the Tour couldn’t take place. L’Auto continued to cover life and sport during the wartime years, even as one after another major sporting event was canceled or held with smaller crowds and diminished competitors. In his columns, H. Desgrange was replaced by H. Desgrenier , a thin pseudonymous veil. The paper’s founding promise of reporting unaffected by politics fell away with the other vestiges of the prewar landscape.

Desgrange’s columns darkened. “This is our work!” he began in his August 15th column, just before Desgrange had turned into Desgrenier. German politicians “alone are amazed to see France draw up against the German brute, they who haven’t bothered to study, for twenty years before the war began, our moral and physical evolution.” He barely distinguished between German leaders and German men who had been conscripted in the fight against France. He continued writing columns supporting France’s decision to fight as the war went on, when his coun­try’s prospects were dim and plenty of other Frenchmen were support­ing politicians’ few attempts to resolve the war quickly and peacefully. He continued after he volunteered for the military in April of 1917, at the age of fifty-two, sending his columns back by post. He only let a few close friends and his mistress know his decision. He privately hoped to carry out the mission he had been writing about since the war’s start, to do his part in reclaiming the French lands that had been lost after the Franco-Prussian War and to fight the Germans who would have his country reduced even further.

L’Auto ’s front page was at times a small altar to former Tour com­petitors. The name of a cyclist from the 1914 edition of the race would appear. “Lapize falls on the field of honor,” “Death of Lucien Petit-Breton: the end of a great champion—the accident—his main victo­ries.” In the editor’s bold pen, cyclists who had died in the war were memorialized. Those reading the obituaries were safe behind the lines, celebrating in Paris while their country’s heroes had been brought down in the war. They should remember them, Desgrange wrote in his col­umns, celebrate them, do anything but forget them.

He ended the obituary of Octave Lapize, the 1910 Tour champion, who had been shot down eight kilometers behind French lines in a dogfight, with one last proclamation: “Hourlier, Comès, Faber, Bouin, Engel! And now Lapize!” he wrote, listing the cyclists killed in the war. “O heroic dead, victims of this Teutonic barbarism, receive splendidly this beautiful son of superb France. He will be, like you, worthily avenged!” Three winners of the Tour had been killed in the war; others had been maimed. Countless not-yet professionals and aspirants who might have someday competed in the race died in the front’s churn.But the war had ended, and the crowd outside l’Auto ’s office flocked past.

The people of France, or at least those who read him, had come to expect something from Desgrange: a salve for those preceding years, someone who recognized the hardships they had gone through, would continue to go through, who wasn’t afraid to place blame for those hard­ships. He was a voice of confidence who could direct their attention, someone who recognized, knew personally, the costs they had endured and the spirit that had stayed with them despite the war’s toll. He couldn’t disappoint them by letting its end pass without comment.

”Ah! My dear country, what suffering we’ve paid to purchase your resurrection,” Desgrange typed. “And what funeral hours next! What grief! The despair we had when the German brute took advantage of us with his methodical planning!” Desgrange drew his conviction from the same source he had found those years back, at the war’s outset, when he’d told French boys to not take mercy on the German soldiers but to shoot them where they stood. “Let us draw a line. Let us live.” He paused once more. “Goodbye to the Boche, and hello to your home!” Desgrange knew some towns along the front would need to be rebuilt entirely. The land around them might never be useful again. Local poli­ticians and whoever chose to return home might find new uses for the fallow ground—more factories, perhaps, like those that had sprung up far from the trenches, supplying the battle lines with all they needed. Bricks or cement could pave over the cratered landscape. People might be able to turn those onetime towns into bustling cities that could sup­ply new factories with the workers they would need. Or the land might stay as it was that day, a memorial spanning hundreds of kilometers where visiting crowds could look in from its edges, few desiring to intrude any farther.

Some towns—Ailles and Courtecon, Moussy-sur-Aisne and Allemant, Hurlus and Ripont and Nauroy and others—were given to the war as martyrs. The government had already deemed them irreplaceable, at least in physical terms. Next to nothing stood where streets once ran through their center. The towns, politicians decided, could be moved elsewhere; they could be re-created with old plans and local memories—whose house stood next to the butcher, which town hall features should be preserved and which were always complained about, and so on—but they couldn’t exist where they once had been. At the Meuse–Argonne, Desgrange had witnessed that putty knife of the war, flattening the landscape and whatever features had once existed. The people wouldn’t leave the war behind; nothing could cause them to do that, not entirely. But maybe their eyes could be directed elsewhere, at least for a time. Let them see that the scarred country still had its strength, its élan, even if that sinew was not what generals thought it to be in the war’s first days.

Nine days had passed since the armistice’s signing. The November 20th edition of Le Temps arrived on newsstands in the morning fog. Headlines said that on Thursday, the German naval fleet would likely be surrendered to the Allies, barring any delays. On the newspaper’s final page, between advertisements for the bookstore Berger-Leverault and Vin de Vial tonic, the editors noted small events not worthy of includ­ing on the front page. In two days, poet Jean Richepin would hold a lecture on American life at the Sorbonne; the Société de Auteurs held their general assembly the evening before; the Maisons Laffitte horse track on Paris’s outskirts would enter the final week of its annual season. Small bits of lifelike grass on tilled ground broke through. These scraps were marginal, but they at least existed. Pronouncements and congratu­lations from liberated towns decorated its borders. Proclamations from foreign leaders, congratulating the French for all they’d done for the world, filled whatever space remained.

Paperboys unbundled and stacked the daily edition of l’Auto at newsstands. An article discussed how Henry Farman, a French air­plane designer, had revealed plans for an aircraft that could transport twenty people in its hollow fuselage. The Six Days of New York bicycle race—scheduled to take place in Madison Square Garden December 2nd to 7th—would return after being canceled in the preceding years. Organizers hoped this year’s race could reclaim just some of its previous glory. Robert Dieudonné penned a new short story, “Pot of Varnish,” which Desgrange published. The editor-in-chief’s column appeared on the center of the front page. It still carried the byline H. Desgrenier . The article concerned the project Desgrange had worked on during the war, before he had volunteered for the front: national physical fitness. An announcement, written in fine print to accommodate its lengthy contents, took up the two rightmost columns of the front page and extended four more onto the second. It described plans for an upcom­ing race, what documents interested cyclists would need to register, their arrival locations in various cities, and the itinerary of what had already been an ambitious race, in what was bound to be, according to Desgrange, its most ambitious edition.

____________________________________________

Excerpted from Sprinting Through No Man’s Land by Adin Dobkin. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Little A. Copyright © 2021 by Adin Dobkin.

Adin Dobkin

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What the Tour de France Teaches Us About Advertising

"It never gets easier; you just go faster."

I think about this quote a lot. Greg LeMond, famed cyclist and Tour de France winner, said it, so it's a little more relevant this month as we watch the best cyclists in the world climb the Pyrenees and the Alps. But it could've just as easily been said by you, or me, or anyone in advertising. Today, or 10 years ago, or 19 years ago when I got started.

The "it" for LeMond was Le Tour—21 days of arguably the world's hardest sporting competition. For us, the "it" is timelines. Deadlines. Briefs. Pitches. Social posts. Google docs … you get the picture.

Today in advertising, we're not just multitasking. We're hypertasking. How much time do we get to think about a single creative brief these days? But the industry evolution isn't why I bring this up. For me, the power of the "it" in LeMond's quote is craft. Not just how quickly we do our jobs, but how well.  

Whatever your discipline, it applies. 

Brand management never gets easier; you just go faster.  Strategy never gets easier; you just go faster.  Production never gets easier; you just go faster. 

But I'm a creative. So…

Getting to a powerful idea never gets easier; you just go faster. Writing taglines never gets easier… Crafting a presentation never gets easier… Art direction… Design… Social campaigns… 360 global campaigns… You just go faster.

These are the Pyrenees we train for. They're not meant to get easier. You're meant to get stronger, smarter and, yes, faster—at solving them. 

How do you do it? Consider another LeMond quote, this one given directly to me. 

I had the privilege of meeting Greg a few years ago as I was training for the L'Etape California, a 100-mile bike race with 8,000 feet of climbing. Not quite a stage at Le Tour, but no walk in the park. I asked him for any advice as I trained. He said you don't have to go on five- or six-hour rides every day. All you have to do is go as hard as you can for an hour each time. And he won the Tour three times, so I'll take that advice.

What does that mean in advertising?

As a writer, it just means carve out a quiet, uninterrupted hour to do really smart, focused, hard work. Sometimes, sure, you need a long ride, or long concepting session. But mostly, working smarter is the answer.

Go faster. Be brutal. Write hard. Only aim for the good stuff. Self-edit. On the page. Then, eventually, in your head. The further along you are in the business, the "easier" that will be. To not even write down the bad ideas, or headlines. But put in quality reps every time.

If you're newer to the business and not there yet, just know it's a process we've all been through. You don't start out climbing Mont Ventoux. You have to start on the 5 percent climbs before you take on the 10 percent and 22 percent grades. Put in the miles. Turn the pedals over and over again. Crank like crazy. Write your ass off. The quality will come. When you're starting out, it's the volume that matters. You have to write more to eventually write less.

It sounds basic, because it is. The more miles you ride, the faster you get. But then, you'll want more, better miles. And those won't be easy, until they are. And so on.

Which leads me to another favorite quote, this one from Mark Twain, which has nothing to do with cycling, but everything to do with advertising. 

"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

Make the time. Faster.

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Welcome to 2021 edition of  What The Tour de France Can Teach You About Advertising . This is my annual post where I use professional bicycling’s Tour de France to illustrate ways to improve your advertising. You can catch up on previous entries here .

Last year , I compared Team Ineos’s decision to support defending champ Egan Bernal to creating a diversified ad plan. While it was assumed Bernal could easily repeat, a funny thing happened on the way to the Champs-Élysées. Bernal wasn’t on form, his teammates couldn’t protect him in the mountains, and he abandoned after Stage 16. By then, it was too late for any Ineos rider to vie for the title. Only a late stage win and  Plan B  Richard Carapaz’s King of the Mountains podium saved the team’s 2020 Tour from complete disaster. Would the presence of the team’s  two experienced previous Tour winners have made a difference ? While we’ll never know for sure, Team Ineos clearly missed the mark in 2020.

For 2021, it appears Ineos assembled its Tour de France team to be the exact opposite of last year. With Bernal sitting out 2021, Ineos is stacking the team’s deck by rolling out four potential team leaders and Tour winners. Joining Carapaz in 2021 will be 2018 Tour winner Geraint Thomas, ace support rider Ritchie Porte, and last year’s Giro d’Italia winner Tao Geoghegan Hart. With no designated leader, it appears that Ineos will turn those four riders loose to determine who’s strongest and then  support that rider. It may work out for Ineos, but similar Tour strategies have crashed due to ego clashes, personal agendas, and team conflicts. The team’s success in 2021 will only be confirmed if an Ineos rider finishes in yellow in Paris.

What Does The Tour de France Have To Do With Advertising?

In 2020, I compared Ineos’s 2020 Tour de France strategy to a diversified advertising plan. That is, several components all working together to support one goal; the success of your business. However, Ineos went wrong in the same manner as many small businesses. That is, they realized too late that one large component wasn’t working and wound up with little to show for their investment.

As a business owner, it’s easy to put an advertising plan into action and essentially set it and forget it. However, the danger of doing so lies in the potential to miss poor performance of one or several components of your ad plan. Media spending that doesn’t generate a return on your investment (ROI) means you’re not getting the best bang for your ad budget buck.

To avoid  that costly mistake, simply take the time to monitor your media. Regardless of where you spend your ad dollars, don’t assume it’s going to perform as expected. Instead, check it periodically and assess each media’s performance against your investment. If your spending in one or several forms of media isn’t generating a return, reallocate you ad spending before it’s too late. To compare Ineos to an ad plan, the team’s late adjustment in 2020 was the equivalent of a retailer realizing on December 20th that its 4th quarter ad buys aren’t effective.

Applying Ineos’s 2021 strategy to the ad plan analogy is fine if you have an unlimited ad budget. While Team Ineos might be overreacting to their 2020 Tour de France failure by aiming for overkill in 2021, your business may not have the same resources. Instead of throwing all your money blindly against a wall to see what sticks, keep your ad spending diversified. Keep focused on what’s working and what’s not, and always be ready to act, adjust, and reallocate funds as needed.

Focus All The Way To The Finish Line

While at heart, it’s a grand bicycle race, the Tour de France is essentially one big advertising vehicle. Sponsorships (ad spending) drive the Tour. Every team is supported by multiple sponsors. If an advertiser isn’t seeing a return from their sponsorship, they reallocate their spending. Competitively, if a team isn’t getting the desired results from a rider, they reallocate the resources of the team. And, no matter what business you’re in, keep your focus on your advertising plan. If an element of your advertising isn’t delivering, reassess and reallocate before it’s too late.

Team Ineos had a solid Plan A in 2020, but waited too long to switch to Plan B. In 2021, it seems they’re approaching the Tour de France with four Plan As. Pro cycling teams with unlimited budgets can afford four Plan As, but your ad plan likely doesn’t have that luxury. Instead focus on a plan A and a diversified ad plan that works together to promote your business. Monitor the performance of each element of your ad spending and, if one isn’t generating ROI, switch to Plan B. Simply put, keeping focused on your advertising ROI means that, when your ad plan hits the finish line, can help you see a big improvement on your bottom line.

See also: Is Your Advertising Keeping You Ahead Of The Pack?

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The 5-minute essential guide to the Tour de France

Inspiration

Cycling Tourism Sporting Activities

Reading time: 0 min Published on 8 January 2024, updated on 18 April 2024

It is the biggest cycling race in the world: a national event that France cherishes almost as much as its Eiffel Tower and its 360 native cheeses! Every year in July, the Tour de France sets off on the roads of France and crosses some of its most beautiful landscapes. Here’s everything you should know in advance of the 2018 race…

‘La Grande Boucle’

In over a century of existence, the Tour has extended its distance and passed through the whole country. Almost 3,500 kilometers are now covered each year in the first three weeks of July, with 22 teams of 8 cyclists. The 176 competitors criss-cross the most beautiful roads of France in 23 days, over 21 stages. More than a third of France’s departments are passed through, on a route that changes each year.

A little tour to start

The first ever Tour de France took place in 1903. It had just six stages – Paris-Lyon, Lyon-Marseille, Marseille-Toulouse, Toulouse-Bordeaux, Bordeaux-Nantes and Nantes-Paris – and 60 cyclists at the start line. At the time, the brave cycled up to 18 hours at a stretch, by day and night, on roads and dirt tracks. By the end, they’d managed 2,300 kilometers. Must have had some tight calves!

Mountain events are often the most famous and hotly contested. Spectators watch in awe as the riders attack the passes and hit speeds of 100 km/h. In the Pyrenees and the Alps, the Galibier and Tourmalet ascents are legendary sections of the Tour, worthy of a very elegant polka dot jersey for the best climber…

The darling of the Tour

In terms of the number of victories per nation, France comes out on top, with 36 races won by a French cyclist. In second place is Belgium with 18 wins, and in third is Spain with 12. The darling of the Tour remains Eddy Merckx, holding the record of 111 days in the yellow jersey. This Belgian won 5 times the Great Loop as Jacques Anquetil, Bernard Hinault and Michael Indurain.

‘Le maillot jaune’

The yellow jersey is worn by the race winner in the general classification (calculated by adding up the times from each individual stage). This tradition goes back to 1919. It has nothing to do with the July sunshine or the sunflower fields along the roads; it was simply the colour of the pages of newspaper L’Auto, which was creator and organiser of the competition at the time.

The Tour de France is the third major world sporting event after the Olympic Games and the World Cup, covered by 600 media and 2,000 journalists. The race is broadcast in 130 countries by 100 television channels over 6,300 hours, and is followed by 3.5 billion viewers.

The Champs-Élysées finish

Each year the Tour departs from a different city, whether in France or in a neighbouring country. Since 1975, the triumphal arrival of the cyclists has always taken place across a finish line on Paris’ Champs-Élysées. It’s a truly beautiful setting for the final sprint.

And the winner is…

Seen from the sky and filmed by helicopters or drones, the Tour route resembles a long ribbon winding its way through France’s stunning landscapes: the groves of Normandy, the peaks of the Alps, the shores of Brittany and the beaches of the Côte d’Azur. In 2017, it was the Izoard pass in Hautes-Alpes that was elected the most beautiful stage, at an altitude of 2,361 metres. Which one gets your vote?

Find out more on the official Tour de France site: https://www.letour.fr

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Head Tour Tennis Ball Review

The Head Tour ball is one of the most popular tennis balls in the amateur and professional game, alike – and for good reason too!

There’s nothing worse in tennis than your equipment letting you down.

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Another contributing factor to “frustrating tennis” is the ball.

Often the choice of ball is overlooked by club level players and organisations, but failure to recognise the benefits of a certain ball could be hurting you both in terms of performance and your finances.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the Head Tour (taking over from the Head ATP) ball and look into why we believe it should be the primary choice for your game.

10 out of 10

There are certainly a lot of tennis balls out there. But rest assured, over the years, we have literally tried them all!

A tennis ball’s ability to penetrate the court effectively and truly “pop” on serve is something we really appreciate at TheTennisBros.com.

There’s nothing more frustrating than making clean contact with a shot, only to find the ball dribbles off your string bed.

The Head Tour ball contains power in spades.

We feel it’s probably the most powerful ball out there, both before and after being smashed around for a couple of sets.

Tennis balls always lose some of their pop within a number of minutes on the tennis court, but the Head Tour balls remained reasonably steadfast in this aspect all the way up to to the end of the two-hour playtest.

Control is an aspect that we hear a lot of players talking about, whether that be in terms of their tennis racket or string.

The control aspect of a ball is something that isn’t discussed a lot, however.

How much control a tennis ball has will have a direct correlation with how easily it is able to take spin.

Additionally, a balls ability to receive spin potential is linked to the quality of the felt material, but also how well intact it is after a set of tennis or two.

You’re probably thinking I should be putting this information in the durability section, but a lot of these aspects, whether it be power, control or spin, do interconnect.

Due to the premium, professional level felt of the Head Tour Ball (and also, its great durability, which we’ll look at in a moment), its control was very good indeed.

We’ve heard some complaints from some of the more elderly female, lower level club players about these balls being “too bouncy”.

Personally, we didn’t find this to be anything near an issue and with good footwork and technique, no tennis ball out there will be “too bouncy”.

The Head Tour balls take spin extremely readily. When I use them, myself, I can literally hear the topspin fizzing off the ball!

It’s easy to press back your opponents with them, and when the stars align, you can deliver a fatal, heavy ball or flat winners without parallel.

Of course, your opponent can also hit the same type of shot at you, so be ready!

9 out of 10

Durability is one of the most important factors for club level players who do not want to be paying for brand new tennis balls every single session.

No tennis ball out there is perfectly durable. If it were, the manufacturers would be out of business as everyone could play with the same balls forever and not have to buy any again!

The Head Tour are the best it gets in terms of durability, though. They really do withstand a pounding.

Often, you’ll find you’ll get a good number of hits out of them until they become unplayable.

This is of stark contrast to the Dunlop Fort Balls, which fluff up virtually instantly!

Personally, I find a ball fluffing up during a match to be incredibly infuriating.

The moment this happens, they lose their ability to spin effectively, suddenly sending my topspin serves a foot long, instead of a foot inside the line, where they were landing previously.

When this happens, I feel much more vulnerable out there on the court as I’m fighting with a factor which is beyond my control and sometimes have to make small adjustments in my game to help deal with this.

The game of tennis requires so many small adjustments already, so don’t add in more complication by choosing an inferior tennis ball!

Another Reason Why Choosing The Right Ball Is Important

Failure to choose the right, or even a good quality tennis ball will, quite simply, hurt your bank account.

No tennis balls out there are “really cheap”, and if you choose a lower grade ball, you’ll have to replace them in practice far more often, costing you more money in the long run.

For a club level player, the Head Tour ball will last you many hits and help you cut down on some of those painfully high expenses tennis can bring!

Buy In Bulk

Do you buy your tennis balls can by can? Match by match? Training session by training session?

If you do, you’re missing a trick. I (Tom) never do this as I know I’m basically throwing away money.

The more tennis balls you buy at once from good tennis retailers, the cheaper each ball costs, and the more money you will save.

In England, where we are based, the Head Tour balls tend to average about £1.25 a tennis ball/ £5 for a can of 4.

These numbers don’t sound like they will break the bank, but when you’re buying one, two or even three cans a week for this price, the numbers soon add up.

Instead, it’s far better to bulk buy your balls from reputable online retailers, as you can get the cost per ball MUCH cheaper.

In England, providing I buy enough balls, I can get mine for about £0.80 a ball, which is insanely cheap in comparison! I tend to buy a year’s supply of balls at once to get them for the cheapest price I can.

Of course, the downside lies in the fact that you need a suitable place to store them if you do go for a larger bulk buy.

You’ll also need to make sure that you store the balls in a room with medium temperature and where conditions don’t increase and decrease too dramatically.

In our opinion, here, at TheTennisBros.com the Head Tour tennis ball is THE BEST ball on the market today.

It’s durable, powerful, easy to spin and all of these attributes contribute to maintaining a fair tennis match between opponents.

There’s a reason the pros use this ball, so be sure to give it a try!

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Feb 20, 2023 • Balls Penn Balls Wilson Balls

Penn vs Wilson Tennis Balls: What’s Best for Your Game?

Trying to compare Penn and Wilson tennis balls? Choosing the right tennis balls can make a big difference to your game, so we’ve researched all of Penn’s and Wilson’s tennis balls to give you the complete guide of which will suit you best, based on your needs. Here’s our in-depth…

Oct 14, 2021 • Balls Wilson Balls

Wilson US Open Ball Review

The Wilson US Open ball is the one of the most premium level balls on the tennis market today. Although they are such a high class ball, I must admit – I don’t see them as frequently as I expect to at tennis clubs across the country. This isn’t any…

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The TOUR XT is HEAD's brand new PREMIUM ball. It provides unique touch and easy controllability thanks to the Impact (EN)Core technology. This ball will make your precise game even more accurate.

The TOUR XT is HEAD's brand new PREMIUM ball. The HEAD TOUR XT was developed and tested rigorously for more than two years – in the lab and on the court with professional tennis players. The result is a ball that provides unique touch and easy controllability thanks to its Impact (EN)Core technology. Choose the iconic golden HEAD TOUR XT tube, if you are a tournament or club player – or anyone else looking for the perfect ball to hit your best and most accurate shots.

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• Regent Seven Seas Cruises

Best of Moscow by high speed train

By shuguley , February 15, 2014 in Regent Seven Seas Cruises

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Sure would appreciate someone who has taken "Best of Moscow by high speed train" from St. Petersburg could please share their impressions of this shore excursion. From the description this sounds like a very long day.

Wondering how the 4 hour train trip was in terms of accommodations, etc. Also what time did you leave the ship and what time at night did you return? Were both legs of the trip on the high speed rail (I read that slower trains also travel the same tracks)?

My wife and I are considering this excursion. We thought that if we are making all the effort to go to Russia then how could we pass up going to Moscow, walking in Red Square, seeing St. Basil, etc.

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If you are considering this on the 2015 June Baltic cruise on Voyager; my suggestion is don't. There is so much to do in St. Petersburg and although a train is one of my favorite ways to travel the time would be far better spent in St. P.

Thanks for the advice. Yes, this would be on the Voyager during the 2015 season but not yet sure exactly which cruise.

We did the Moscow excursion "on a different luxury line", but from your brief description it sounds very much like the same trip, so I will operate on that assumption. It is a VERY long day! We left the ship at 5:30 AM and returned at 12:30 AM. The highspeed train trip is comfortable, and while they call it "Business Class" it does not compare well to the equivalent class on say Rail Europe. When we did it in 2011, we did have highspeed both ways, and the trip back seemed much longer as the adrenaline and excitement had worn off!:D

Moscow itself is not that terribly different from any other big city in the world, but this Cold War kid never thought he would ever stand in Red Square, never mind walk the grounds of The Kremlin, or tour The Kremlin Palace, or see (but not visit) Lenin's Tomb, or visit The Armoury. But he did, and he loved every minute of it! Yes, it is a long day, and you barely scratch a scratch on the surface, but it is worth it. There is a tremendous amount to see in St. Petersburg, but every Baltic cruise goes to St. Petersburg, so you can go back if you choose to. Not every cruiseline offers you the chance to see Moscow.

I have not personally done this tour, but our last time in St Petersburg, the private guide that we hired for a day was leading the regent tour to Moscow on the high speed train the next day. He said it was way better than the previous alternative, which was flying to Moscow and back. He said that you actually got to Moscow faster because you didn't have to deal with airline checkin etc. it did seem like a very long day to me, and there is so much to see and do in st. Petersburg that I didn't consider doing it.

countflorida

We toured to Moscow from St. Petersburg via the hi-speed SAPSAN train last September, from a Baltic cruise on the Oceania Marina. You need to have a two-night, three day port call in St. Petersburg to take this tour because the tour typically leaves the ship around 5:00 - 5:30 AM and doesn't return until after midnight the next day. We didn't take the ship's tour; we made private arrangements with TravelAllRussia for three days of touring, the first and third days in St. Petersburg and the second day the tour to Moscow by train. Our cost for the private tour for three days was about the same as what the ship charged for the excursion to Moscow alone. There are a number of private tour agencies that operate in St. Petersburg and offer the Moscow train tours; we would strongly recommend them over the ship's tours.

All three days had private guides with car and driver. The second day, the driver picked us up at the ship and took us to the train, but we were alone on the train, and met in Moscow by the guide on the station platform. After our tour and dinner, we were brought back to the train and after the return train trip met by the driver and taken back to the ship. Because you are alone on the train you must have your own Russian visas.

If this is your first visit to St. Petersburg, I would agree there is much more to see there. We found Moscow somewhat a disappointment, particularly Red Square. The Kremlin and the cathedral in Red Square were also worth seeing. But the best thing we saw was the Moscow subway! I worked for the Washington Metro system back in the 1980s as it grew from 40 to 80 miles and although I was in the computer area, I learned a lot about the challenges of running a subway system. We used the Moscow system to get across the city from where we had dinner to the train station, and I was amazed at the cleanliness', speed of operation, the short headways maintained, and the courtesy of everyone involved. A very impressive experience!

We had been to St. Petersburg before, and so had the time to take a day and go to Moscow. Also, I really like trains, and the SAPSAN is a German train set running on Russian rails. Seats are like first class domestic air, spacious but not too plush or comfortable, but with enough room. Not too much recline, and almost 8 hours on the train in two shots is a lot for an old man. They come through and sell drinks, candy, etc. but the sellers don't speak English and no one around us helped, so we had just poor coffee once coming, and brought stuff with us for the trip back. Not too much to see from the train either, particularly on the return when it is night the whole way.

If you decide to go, take a private tour and avoid the overly expensive ship's tour. I'm glad we did it, but wouldn't bother to repeat the tour; we've seen Moscow.

Thanks so much to all of you for the thorough and thought insight. Yhe information you have provided is most helpful.

countflorida: Your detailed post is very helpful. We are not quite ready for a Baltic cruise but should do so within a year. Time enough to do our pre travel research, bookings and visa gathering.:) Thank you!

Emperor Norton

Sure would appreciate someone who has taken "Best of Moscow by high speed train" from St. Petersburg could please share their impressions of this shore excursion. From the description this sounds like a very long day.   Wondering how the 4 hour train trip was in terms of accommodations, etc. Also what time did you leave the ship and what time at night did you return? Were both legs of the trip on the high speed rail (I read that slower trains also travel the same tracks)?   My wife and I are considering this excursion. We thought that if we are making all the effort to go to Russia then how could we pass up going to Moscow, walking in Red Square, seeing St. Basil, etc.

I did this on Seabourn. IMO DONT. Take Aeroflop (er Aeroflot). The train has non folding seats where you are literally knee to knee with your fellow passenger (facing each other). Further they don't believe in air conditioning. It's also the worlds slowed bullet train. I think I would have found more enjoyment wandering around the St. Petersburg and Moscow airports.

Countflorida,

This is a little off topic,, however we had planned a river cruise in Russia but decided we would rather stay on land and have booked about two weeks with Travel-All-Russia using the private guide and driver. I'm curious as to how you found them as a tour company.

The guides they provided were fine. We had a different guide each of the days in St. Petersburg, but both were flexible, pleasant, knowledgeable and spoke English very well, as did the guide in Moscow, incidentally. She was a bit aloof, distant, not too friendly, but otherwise fine. In fact, she was the one who suggested taking the Metro, which unexpectedly became one of the highlights of the Moscow excursion. If I have a complaint with AllTravelRussia, it is with their plan and its execution (more later).

I had requested emphasis on World War II (in Russia, the Great Patriotic War) sites and info. In scheduling us, they weren't careful about dates and a couple of the sites we wanted to see were scheduled on the third day, after we'd been to Moscow. But both sites were closed that day of the week, and that info was readily available, right on web sites describing them. Also, the included meals (lunches in St. Pete, dinner in Moscow) were not what we asked for: light meals with some choices, so we could avoid things we didn't like and choose things we did like. My request was ignored; we were given full Russian meals with a fixed menu, no choice. On the first day, a fish dish was the entre, but I am allergic to fish. Fortunately, I had the e-mail I'd sent with me and showed it to the guide, and she was able to change my entre to chicken, which was very good actually. But we didn't want a 3-4 course lunches or dinner (in Moscow). We had the guide drop the lunch the third day, although we never got any credit or refund. But, particularly in contrast to the ship's tours, the prices were so reasonable we didn't worry too much about it.

The people who were on the ship's tour to Moscow saw us boarding the same train for which they were forced to queue up and wait on the way back, and asked us what we had done. I was candid and open so they were not happy when I explained what we had arranged and particularly what it had cost. Also, when we returned to the ship, we found they had laid on a late supper for those who had gone to Moscow, so up we went and had something. Well, it turns out the late supper was supposed to be just for those on the ship's tour, but we and others on 'independent' tours, there were a dozen or more of us, crashed the party, actually got there first, and they didn't realize it until the larger group arrived and there weren't enough tables/places set. By that time, the 'independents' had all gotten served and were eating; what could they do?

A couple from the larger group sat down with us and asked us about our tour, and they were the ones I told about our arrangement and its cost. They turned to others who’d been with them and announced the details, loudly enough so the whole room heard, which started a lot of bitching and complaining. I gathered they weren't very happy with the ship's tour to begin with, and this was the straw that broke the camel's back. We finished up and beat it out of there, but overheard later that one of the excursion staff came to check on something and ran into a real mess. I caught a cold on the trip, which forced me to bed the second day following in Tallinn, so by the time we reappeared we heard about the contretemps' but apparently no one recalled who started it, thankfully.

Because of what happened to us, I would probably not use AllTravelRussia if I were to go again, or if I did, I would be sure to get confirmation of every detail of the tour. They do have good reviews generally, and we were certainly helped by their visa department and liked the guides and drivers. Their weakness, I say now with full 20:20 hindsight, is that once the sales person who plans the tour, sells it to you and collects your money, he (or she) transfers the plan to their Russia office for implementation; there is no follow-up to make sure it gets done right. And that is where our problems arose; we paid for a custom tour but got a standard package with a few destinations switched, and no one checked them out, even to see when they were open the day we were scheduled to go. If you check every detail that’s important to you, it should be OK, but that’s a hell of a way to have to do business, in my opinion.

Thank you for the 20/20 hindsight observation on your Russian tour operator, and better priced than the ship's excursion cost.

Thanks very much for the feedback.

We had the same experience as you so far as price. We originally booked a Viking Cruise but, hearing some things about the river cruises that made us unhappy, looked into other options. T-A-R cost the same or less than a cruise and had us in hotels for 11 days. We opted for the private tour. They have three tour levels, based on hotels. We originally opted for the four star as it did not cost much more than the three star hotels. Finally we decided to throw it all in and upgraded to five star. In Moscow we will be at the newly opened Kempinsky which is two blocks from Red Square. In St. Petersburg it is the Grand Hotel Europe, one of the most vaunted luxury hotels in Russia. Location is important for us as the tours use up only part of the day so being in the center of everything for our independent touring is important. As with many other cities, the less you pay, the farther out of the center of town you are.

We have been working with our salesman in D.C. and he seems to get back to us with the changes we want. He recently returned from Russia so is up on everything. When I asked they said they paid the full TA commission if I wanted so I got my usual TA on board so he is watching our back and giving us that extra level of comfort. He also set up our air, which I know pays him little or nothing, and got us business class for much less than T-A-R wanted for economy, though it took working for a while with a consolidator. He's happy to get his 10 percent on this trip without having booked it. He also took care of the trip insurance. We've been doing a lot of research on the CC sister site Trip Advisor and will write a report there. We will, I guess, become a source of info for CC members after having spent 5 days in Moscow and 6 in SP.

• 4 months later...

scubacruiserx2

Anybody considering a day trip to Moscow from St. Petersburg on the Sapsan may want to look at our travelogue filled with pictures.

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=1927687

Very informative. Thanks dor sharing. Jeff

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The Story of the Tour de France. 2020: The Tour During Covid-19: Better Late Than Never: How a Newspaper Promotion Became the Greatest Sporting Event in the World Kindle Edition

• Print length 48 pages
• Language English
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• Publication date November 3, 2020
• File size 8626 KB
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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B08MPTZYRF
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ McGann Publishing (November 3, 2020)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 3, 2020
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 8626 KB
• Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 48 pages
• #1,040 in Cycling (Kindle Store)
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About the author

Bill mcgann.

Bill and Carol McGann have had their lives inextricably tied up with bicycles about as long as they can remember. Their first date was a bike ride. Bill, formerly a Category 1 racer, has been a contributor to several cycling magazines and National Public Radio. He is widely acknowledged as an expert on road bikes and cycling history.

Since his father gave him a small 1-speed English lightweight bicycle when he was 5 years old, Bill has been in love with everything about bikes. His wife Carol is a former college biology instructor and is also an accomplished rider, having cycle-toured extensively. Together they started Torelli Imports in 1981, a firm specializing in high-performance cycle equipment. In 2007 they sold the firm.

Today, they live in the Ozarks where they write and manage McGann Publishing.

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The Tactics Used To Win The Tour De France

Whether you’re going for the general classification Yellow Jersey, the King of the Mountain Dots, or you’re taking stages for The Green, you need your team to keep you going. Here are the tactics of Le Tour:

Stay On Your Bike

Already this year, Tony Martin is out with a broken collarbone, and Cancellara ended his chances with no less than two fractured vertebrae. Abandoning a race is always tragic, but more so when you’ve worn the Maillot Jaune.

After week one of his winning Tour De France in 2012, Wiggins said, “Unless you’re in the very front line of the peloton, it’s a lottery whether you crash or not.” You need your team to muscle everyone around you and get you to a safe place. The big teams will look to control the pace and dominate the front line with strength in numbers.

Respect The Domestiques

The domestique riders work twice as hard as the contenders for most of the race, both physically and mentally. They’re effectively disposable since they’ve not been chosen as contenders for any jersey, but that doesn’t stop them being hard men.

Domestiques carry the water from the team cars up to the other riders, look out for potholes, protect the team leaders from the wind, and form a buffer zone between their team leaders and the other teams. Watching a road for 150km tires you mentally, never mind the physical challenges endured.

Stay Close To Conserve Energy

Once teammates are close enough to each other, their main aim is to protect their contender from the wind. You can cycle to your local shop without breaking a sweat at about 20kph (12mph), but Tour De France cyclists average 40kph (25mph) across thousands of km.

And every time you double your speed on a bike, you need eight times the physical effort to push air out of the way. The domestiques create a wall to shelter their contender until he’s ready to drop the hammer.

Cyclists need to be within millimetres of the wheel in front to benefit from slipstreaming. This is an inherently dangerous technique that requires exceptional skill, which is why you’re bound to see crashes in tour cycling. The plus side is that it can reduce your effort by up to 80%.

Taking On A Headwind

When there’s a headwind the teams all clump together in what’s known as a peloton. The domestiques take turns in the front and circulate around their team leader to protect him from the wind.

Expect Fireworks When The Peloton Blows Apart

If the wind blows from the side, you’ll see the peloton split into diagonal lines across the road in an echelon formation. This is when teams are vulnerable to attack, especially if they become split across two echelons, or their team leader is in the wrong echelon.

Contador’s Saxo-Tinkoff exploited this tactic to devastating effect in the 2013 Vuelta when they attacked against Froome’s Team Sky. Known for their calculated approach, Team Sky were uncharacteristically taken completely by surprise.

Climb Every Mountain

The King of the Mountain competition is the only jersey that can reliably be won by individual effort. For one, riders aren’t going fast enough up the winding Alpine roads for wind resistance to be an issue, so any team mates hanging on to big climbers like Quintana are only there to offer moral support and carry water until they can hang on no longer.

If your team is in it for the sprint competition, the team’s climbers are there to encourage the likes of Cipollini to make it home before the sun sets.

Unleash The Sprinters

The aim of a team looking to get their contender in the Green Jersey is to keep your main man on a leash. Keeping someone like Sagan in line until the last 1km of a race is a tough job.

Teams have a lead out rider who will exhaust all his energy until the last few hundred metres, getting the sprinter into place. However, Cavendish in his prime would often abandon his own team in favour of slip streaming the fastest rider, until digging deep for his own sprint for the finish line.

Making A Break For It

No one ever believes a breakaway will succeed. At some point a lone rider or a group together will break from the rest of the peloton and get several minutes ahead of the competition. But breakaways have less protection from the wind, and use up more of their effort early on, so most of the time the peloton easily catches up with them.

When a break away succeeds, though, it’s something special. Merckx famously won a Tour stage in Marseille so far ahead of the peloton that organisers weren’t expecting them and no one saw it except a couple of startled officials.

You may wreck yourself with the effort, but breakaways are how legends are born.

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Results have arrived, tour de france explained: how you win & how it really works.

What do the yellow, green, and polka-dot jerseys mean? How do you win? How do teams work? Who are the favorites? We explain bike racing in this guide to the Tour de France.

Written by: Spencer Powlison & Bruce Lin

Published on: Jun 22, 2023

Posted in: Features

Did you just get bitten by the  road bike  bug? Did you watch Tour de France: Unchained and feel hungry for more? Or have you always been puzzled by the daily deluge of Tour de France news? Then this beginner’s guide is for you.

We’ll cover the fundamentals of how this “game” is played. Also, we’ll delve into cycling’s paradoxical balance between being simultaneously a team sport and an individual sport, and many ways riders and teams play to win. 

If you’re a seasoned cycling fan, please feel free to share this with your curious in-laws who always email you questions about pelotons, yellow jerseys, and more. We’ve all been there before!

[button] Shop road bikes [/button]

How The Tour de France Works

The tour de france: infographic.

What is the Tour de France

• The Tour de France is the world's most prestigious bike race which has been running for over 100 years. 
• The Tour takes riders all across France, through the Alps and the Pyranees, and finishes in Paris. 
• This year it will take place: July 1 - July 23, 2023
• The total race distance this year: 3,404 Km / 2,115 Mi 
• The Grand Départ - The Tour de France often starts somewhere outside of France so other cities and countries can experience the excitement of the Tour. This year, the Tour will start in Bilbao, Spain. 

Key Details 

• 22 pro cycling teams will compete with 8 riders each ( 176 riders total )
• The race is split into 21 stages
• Riders race 1 stage per day
• Each stage has a stage winner. Winning a single stage at the Tour is a big deal. 
• On average, racers will ride over 100 miles per stage .
• Riders will get 2 rest days , one after the first week, and another after the second week.  
• The overall winner of the Tour de France is the rider with the fastest time after all 21 stages . 

How To Win The Tour de France - Yellow Jersey

The winner of the Tour de France is the rider who has the fastest time after all 21 stages. Every stage is timed from start to finish, and every second counts toward the race's General Classification (GC). Every day, the current leader of the race will wear the yellow jersey so they are easy to spot. The rider wearing the yellow jersey when the race reaches the last stage Paris is the winner . 

Riders to watch:  2022 winner Jonas Vingegaard, 2020 & 2021 winner Tadej Pogačar, David Gaudu, Romain Bardet.

[newsletter]

Other Ways to "Win" at the Tour de France

The Yellow Jersey is the biggest prize, but there are multiple secondary prizes on offer too. Some teams and riders don’t even bother racing for the yellow jersey and instead focus on these prizes . 

Just like the yellow jersey, each day, the current leader in each classification wears a special jersey color so they're easy to spot.

Points Classification - Green Jersey

Also known as the sprinter’s jersey , this award goes to the rider who scores the most points throughout the race. Points are earned by finishing in the top-15 in a stage.

This classification favors “pure” sprinters (riders who don't compete on mountain stages), and more points are offered for winning flat stages. Riders can also earn points in mid-stage sprints that are usually stationed in towns to please the fans.

Riders to watch:  Wout van Aert, Fabio Jakobsen, Jasper Philipsen, Mads Pedersen, and Dylan Groenewegen.

King Of The Mountains Classification - Polka-Dot Jersey

The Tour gives the polka-dot “ King of the Mountains ” jersey to the rider who collects the most points over the course of the race by reaching the summit of categorized climbs first.

The climb categorization system is opaque and subjective. What you need to know is that there are five climb categories. From easiest to hardest they are: category 4,  category 3,  category 2,  category 1, and hors category (HC - French for “beyond categorization”). Riders get more points on harder climbs. Riders also get more points on mountaintop stage finishes, especially if they win.

Riders to watch:  This one is tough to call until you reach the high mountains. Often anyone who’s in contention for the yellow jersey is a good bet.

Other Prizes

Best Young Rider Classification - White Jersey

This classification works the same way as the yellow jersey but is awarded to the highest-placed rider under 26 years of age. On rare occasions, a phenomenal young rider will win both the yellow and white jerseys. 

Riders to watch: Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard.

Best Team Classification - Yellow Helmets

Like the yellow or white jerseys, this award is given based on overall time in the race and the team with the lowest overall time wins this prize . Each team tabulates the finish times of its three best riders on every stage. The team leading this classification usually wears yellow helmets, helping them stand out in the bunch.

Most Aggressive Rider - Red Number

Also known as the Combativity Award , this is likely the most mysterious prize in the Tour. In every stage (except time trials), a jury decides which rider in the race was most aggressive — usually, that means attacking a lot or gambling on a breakaway. Late in the broadcast, the announcers usually note which rider was given the combativity prize. If you spot a rider with a red number on their jersey, then he was named most aggressive the stage prior. At the end of the Tour, one rider gets the Super Combativity award.

How Cycling Is Actually a Team Sport... Sort Of

Why are there teams if only one rider can win the Tour de France? Professional road cycling has a curious tension between the team and the individual. The key thing to remember is this: If a cyclist wins a stage or holds one of the leader’s jersey for a single stage, it is viewed as a team success . 

So if only one rider “wins,” what do the other seven riders on the team do to contribute to this elusive concept of teamwork? Here are some ways a group of individual cyclists comes together as a team to support their leader:

• Getting into breakaways (small groups that attack off the front of the main group) — that way his team doesn’t have to work to chase the breakaway down.
• Chasing down breakaways — to give the leader a chance to win or place well.
• Retrieving food and water for the leader or other key riders — bottle service on the road … what could be more luxurious!
• Pacing the leader up key climbs — although drafting isn’t as crucial, it can be a psychological advantage to have a teammate at your side.
• Pacing the leader back to the peloton in the event of a crash, mechanical, or split in the group — without teammates to draft, it might be nearly impossible to rejoin the peloton on some fast-paced stages.
• Giving the leader their bike or a wheel in the event of a mechanical — this can often be quicker than waiting for a team car or neutral support to show up with a spare.

What Types of Riders Make Up a Team? 

GC (general classification) riders - These are the riders vying for the Tour de France overall win. They need to be solid all-rounders who are good climbers and time trialists. They are usually the team leader and the rest of the team works to support them. 

Sprinters - Sprinters don’t contend for the overall win, and are more interested in winning individual stages. They often wait to attack at intermediate sprints and the finish line of each stage. Some teams are built entirely around a sprinter and focus on winning stages or the green jersey. 

Climbers - Climbing specialists excel at going uphill. Climbers compete for stage wins on the tough mountain stages or work to support their GC leader in the mountains. 

Domestiques - Most riders on the team will work as “domestiques” to support their team leader. They allow their leader to draft behind them to conserve energy, pace them up climbs, carry food and water, and provide support in case of crashes or mechanicals. 

Time Trialists - Some riders specialize in time trialing. They can compete for wins on time trial stages or work as powerful domestiques on flat and hilly stages  

What Types of Stages Are in the Tour?

The Tour de France route is different every year. Each stage is unique and offers different challenges to the riders. Here are the types of stages riders will contend with over three weeks:

Flat Stages - Flat stages are the ideal hunting ground for sprinters. Teams with sprinters will often work to keep the peloton together on flat stages, to ensure it ends in a bunch sprint where their sprinter has the best chance of winning. 

Hilly Stages - Hilly stages mix it up with rolling hills that make it more difficult for the peloton to stay together. These types of stages can be won by sprinters, climbers, or breakaway specialists. 

Mountain Stages - This is often where the Tour de France is won and lost. Mountain stages climb up into the high mountains in the Alps and the Pyrenees and it's where GC contenders will fight to gain time on their rivals.  

Time Trials - The Tour de France always features at least a couple of time trial stages. Riders set off individually to set the fastest time on a set course. With no riders to draft, it’s less about race tactics and more about pure speed and power.

Strategies and tactics

So we just covered some team dynamics, rider types, and stage types. How does it all fit together? Teams often settle on strategies prior to the race. They assess their strengths and weaknesses and find ways to succeed — whether that means winning the yellow jersey or simply wearing a King of the Mountains jersey for just one stage. Here are some examples of how teams might set their strategies, and how they might execute them with the right tactics:

Team with a top GC rider: Naturally, they’ll try to win the yellow jersey. This means surviving inconsequential flat and rolling stages to conserve energy for key mountain stages and individual time trials. The leader’s teammates will try to get into breakaways so that their team won’t spend energy chasing all day. They’ll also set up the team leader to attack on key climbs or at least follow his rivals to defend his position.

Team with top sprinter: To win the green jersey, they’ll target the flat stages. This means controlling the peloton and chasing down breakaways to set up a sprint finish. Like the GC team, they might also put a rider in the breakaway to ease the burden on the team, forcing rival sprint teams to chase. On mountain stages, the team might have to call riders back from the peloton to help pace their sprinter to the finish so he doesn’t get time-cut.

Team with top climber: Winning the King of the Mountains (KOM) classification is often less of an obvious team effort. These pretenders to the throne tend to be opportunistic. However, it is advantageous to have a teammate in the breakaway on a key mountain stage when points are up for grabs. Also, when defending the polka-dot jersey, teammates can contest the climbs and finish ahead of KOM rivals to spoil their attempt to take over the classification lead by scoring points.

Smaller team without top leader: These are the teams that always try to put a rider in the day’s breakaway. This could earn them the Combativity Prize, or if they play their cards right, a stint in a leader’s jersey or even a stage win. This strategy requires constant attacking in the early kilometers of the race — something most fans rarely see on the broadcast. It is a hectic, painful part of the stage, but it’s crucial in establishing a break. Meanwhile, a breakaway rider’s teammates might patrol the front of the peloton to disrupt the chase.

Three Tips To Watch Like A Pro

Now that you understand the basics of how the Tour de France is raced, what do you, the new cycling fan do? There are daily stages for three weeks. That’s a lot of cycling!

Even if you don't have a way to watch the TV broadcast, it's easy to find highlights and extended highlights on YouTube. Fortunately, you don’t have to put your life on hold to watch the Tour de France. There are some reliably important stages you can focus on to catch the key action.

Can’t watch daily? Pick the key mountain stages. There are usually about 5-8 key mountain stages when the overall race is won and lost. Most of them are summit finishes, and they’re split between France’s two key mountain ranges: the Alps and Pyrenees. The first few ordinarily come in stages 6-9 before the first rest day, and the second round is often scheduled for the final week of racing. Occasionally, another summit finish, such as Mont Ventoux in Provence, will be on the list of important stages.

Watching daily? Tune in when things really heat up. On most flat stages, you can wait until the final 20 kilometers to tune in and see the sprinters fight it out. Some rolling stages might be entertaining in the final 50-60 kilometers if late breakaways occur. On mountain stages, it’s best to start watching as early as possible because sometimes, crazy things happen on the day’s first climbs.

Watching a LOT of TDF? Look for the nuances. If you’re going to have the race on all day, every day, you’ll need to dig a little deeper to enjoy the subtleties of the race. Try keeping track of riders who are often making the breakaway. Watch the sprint teams work together — or not — to chase an escape. Who looks to have strength in numbers, and who is not present at the front of the race? Are the GC riders staying out of trouble or tail-gunning at the dangerous back of the peloton? Usually, at any given time in the race, any given rider is positioned where they are for a specific reason. Look for clues to sort out what is happening.

More Fun Tour de France Info

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[button] The History of Innovative Tour de France Tech [/button]

[button] Our Best and Worst Moments of the 2022 Tour [/button]

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How tech innovation is changing the Tour de France?

The 2018 Tour de France isn’t just a display of athletic prowess and endurance; it’s also a platform for showcasing some of the latest innovations in Big Data, the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning. ITU recently caught up with Peter Gray, Senior Director – Technology at Dimension Data Sports Practice, an IT services firm, about how advancements in technology are affecting this year’s race.

How is Dimension Data promoting technological innovation at the Tour de France?

In business, success boils down to delighting your customers. And who are the customers during the Tour de France? The fans. That’s why technological innovation at the Tour de France is all about improving the viewer experience.

‘Since 2015, we’ve introduced sophisticated IoT-connected technology, machine-learning algorithms and predictive analytics.’ – Peter Gray, Senior Director – Technology, Dimension Data

Last year, we brought machine learning and predictive analytics to the race, enabling us to tell compelling stories every second of the Tour, such as when the peloton will catch the breakaway group, the average rider speed during a crash and the changes in pace as sprinters dash for the finish line.

These stories are told via data visualisations, available across broadcast, digital and social.

Why is the Tour de France a good platform for spotlighting innovation?

The Tour is the biggest race in the world: attracting 12 million TV viewers per stage from across 190 countries, 6.5 million digital fans and 3 million followers of the Tour’s official Twitter account. The 2017 Tour saw online race videos consumed 71 million times, and it’s estimated 10-12 million people will line the roads of France.

What sets us apart from the rest of the Tour’s sponsors is that our partnership is exactly that, a long-standing relationship with the race’s organisers (the A.S.O.) that’s built on trust, interdependence and mutual commercial benefit. This isn’t merely a badging exercise for us; we’re providing real value for everyone involved.

How has tech changed in this Tour de France compared to previous years?

Dimension Data first teamed up with the A.S.O. as the Tour’s official technology partner in 2015, and prior to this, data collection was a very manual and time-consuming process, usually communicated by radio.

It meant many of the more intricate and compelling stories at the Tour went untold, as the cameras tend to focus on the front of the pack.

‘By combining the digital assets with television coverage, the partnership has reinvented the traditional broadcast model.’

Since 2015, we’ve introduced sophisticated IoT-connected technology, machine-learning algorithms and predictive analytics, which enable us to track every single rider across every second of every race – meaning viewers can monitor their favourite cyclist or team, regardless of their race position.

How do you collect, analyse and distribute data from tracking devices?

Each of the 176 riders have their bicycle fitted with a simple device that captures a GPS positioning point every second of every stage. This means by the end of this year’s Tour de France, over 135 million data points will have been captured.

The location data is relayed alongside live TV images and immediately analysed by experts – who use it to calculate real-time insight such as rider speed, relative distance and group composition.

Merging this with third-party data allows for even more granular analysis to reflect on gradient and elevation gain, weather impact and visually enhanced 3D mapping.

RELATED: 4 emerging technologies on display at the 2018 World Cup

By combining the digital assets with television coverage, the partnership has reinvented the traditional broadcast model. Those watching on television will enjoy dozens of data visualisations detailing rider, team and peloton speed, each cyclist’s position, and the likely rate of catch.

From a digital perspective, fans can track their favourite cyclist or team in real time. Dimension Data’s official Tour de France Twitter account (@LeTourData) presents followers with a wealth of data visualisations, from straightforward information such a rider speed and position, to predictions on whether the pack will catch the break.

What are the benefits of machine-learning algorithms in these efforts?

By combining the live-tracking and historical data from past Tours with our machine-learning algorithms and predictive analytics, we’re able to make accurate predictions about the outcomes of various stages. For example, last year, our #ddpredictor correctly called the top-placed riders 71.4% of the time.

‘We can weave together complicated data sets to tell compelling stories.’

By combining the basic information we have with variables such as rider speed and position, wind speed and strength, weather conditions and gradient, we can weave together complicated data sets to tell compelling stories.

All this information is hosted on a real-time, Big Data analytics platform (powered by Dimension Data’s cloud) that sucks in all those data points, cleanses, enriches and enhances the data, and then ultimately produces a shiny set of insights that is used to tell captivating stories.

How do you protect data from cyberattack?

We’re a global leader in cybersecurity, so not being able to practice what we preach would be unimaginable. At the beginning our Tour de France partnership, we used a closed environment for the deployment, but over the past three years we’ve steadily transformed from managing an on-premise solution to running everything in the cloud.

RELATED: KT showcases 5G innovation at the Olympics in PyeongChang

This year will be the first time we have an entirely cloud-based security environment, with numerous layers of security being integrated with real-time predictive capabilities (another first for 2018). This will enable us to identify and respond to potential threats in a way we’ve never been able to do before – and a lot more quickly.

Our managed security services capabilities give us a platform for managing operations swiftly and effectively, helping us achieve that balance between security and business agility.

What tech innovations would you like to see in future races?

It’s genuinely exciting how many possibilities there are for tech innovation at future Tours – and this is something we’ve started nurturing within our own four walls.

This year saw the launch of our ‘Le Code to France’ competition, an internal initiative aimed at engaging Dimension Data’s 30,000 global employees, driving innovative ideas that can be implemented during future Tours.

RELATED: How AI will disrupt the world as we know it: Anastassia Lauterbach

Standout ideas included a 3D virtual reality rendering of a Tour stage you can watch on your coffee table, a fantasy predictor game based off machine learning algorithms, and a sophisticated chatbot that could answer live questions about what’s happening during the race.

We’re going to be testing these over the next year or so, with the ultimate aim of introducing them at future Tours – watch this space!

Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ITU.

Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images

Peter Gray is Senior Director – Technology at Dimension Data Sports Practice.

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Meet the man aiming to ride the Tour de France route in just 10 days

Jack Thompson will start in Brest on July 5 and aim to beat the professional peloton to Paris

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Like most cycling fans the world over, Jack Thompson had the same dream. “I would love to ride down the Champs-Élysées as the leader of the Tour de France , but my direction never took me that way,” he says. “I want to give hope that you don’t have to follow the conventional path and you can do things differently and succeed, even in the face of adversity.”

Fighting against a tide of hardship and doubt is part of Thompson’s story. Struck by depression and “super-scared to talk with anyone” aged just 12, the Australian later suffered drug abuse and addiction after he finished university and was admitted to rehabilitation. Between and after both significant chapters in his life, there was only one thing that kept him in a positive mindset: his bike.

He tried racing in Belgium, the professional dream a goal, but it never materialised. Instead, the now 32-year-old figured out that it was long-distance cycling that was his calling. “I’ve got a bit of an obsessive personality,” he laughs. “And my mind is very manic: I’m always thinking about something and I can never relax. 

“But cycling is meditation for me. It’s the only time when I can switch off, not think about other things happening in my life that might cause me anxiety or overcomplicate things.”

For a man who once rode from sea level to 3,300m in Taiwan four times in a row non-stop and last year set a Guinness world record of riding the most kilometres in one week, a whopping 3,505km, Thompson is about to embark on the biggest challenge of his life: on Monday, July 5, he will set off from Brest, the start city of this year’s Tour de France, and aim to reach Paris within 10 days, two days before the peloton ride their processional race.

Thompson  will average 350km a day, climbing around 6,000m. “I’ve given the peloton a 10 day head start, but I’ll be in Paris before them,” the likeable Aussie quirks.

Coining his challenge The Amazing Chase (presented by Wahoo), Girona-based Thompson will first encounter rainy and windy conditions in Brittany – “how do the northern Europeans live through this grim, s**tty weather? The weather is such a prick,” he half-jokingly, half-seriously ponders – before reaching Alps, heading south and then traversing across the Pyrenees, and later arriving in the French capital on Friday, July 16.

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Far from being daunted, Thompson is excited. “I am basically doing two stages in one day and backing it up, day-on-day,” he says, adding that he hopes to ride at an average pace of between 27 and 30kmh. 

Thompson will fuel himself mostly on a liquid diet, taking as much as 80 percent of his calories through bottles, and eating real food when cravings set in. It’s not romantic, but it’s efficient. He will be supported by a team who are also documenting the journey for a film, and he will sleep around five hours each night in hotels. 

“I don’t really have any nerves,” he says, possessing the assuredness of a man who relishes his identity as an ultra-endurance athlete.

“I’m really comfortable climbing, I don’t have any issue with that. I suppose one thing that worries me a little are the transfers because it could be quite easy to lose half-an-hour here or there, and that adds up over the 10 days. I have to manage the time really strictly.

“What else? Honestly, I’m just excited by it all. I get a lot of satisfaction in setting a goal, breaking it down into small chunks and then achieving each small goal. I get an endorphin rush from that day-to-day mentality, not having to please anyone else. It’s f**king cool.” Then he breaks his momentum. There is a problem. “The French roads, hey… they’re s**t,” he opines. “I guess I’ve taken it for granted how good the roads are in Spain. To be honest, I’ve never really ridden in France, it’s all new territory. It would be nicer if their roads were more like the Spanish ones, though.”

Thompson will adapt. That’s what he does. The first time cycling became part of his life, in his early teenage years, it pointed him in a new direction. “It started with triathlon,” he recalls, “and having these daily and weekly goals gave me a focus. I wasn’t so depressed with the world.”

It was during university that Thompson gave up two wheels “and I noticed my mood dropped off again.” Wanting “to become a man, I felt like a boy,” he trained to put on muscle and weight and his drug problems began. He was reluctant to try cycling again, but finally gave in to his father’s encouragement. “That first ride, it was like ‘f**k, why did I never continue this?”

His flirtations with becoming a pro never took off, also hampered by being diagnosed with chronic fatigue. “Once the symptoms disappeared, I jumped back on the bike and decided to make a living from riding a bike,” he reveals.

He rode the 2015 Transcontinental Race, and has since added to his portfolio of challenges: completing three Everesting challenges in three consecutive days and three different countries, and also riding from the bottom to the top of Portugal in record time.

Riding the Tour is his biggest test to date. “Lachlan [Morton] and I are friendly,” Thompson says of his compatriot’s challenge that has garnered a lot of interest. “What I think is cool is that we’re thinking outside the box of traditional cycling: we’re showing another way is possible and ultra-cycling is super-cool.”

When the Tour reaches its crescendo in the French capital, if all goes to plan, Thompson would have had his feet up for two days, because catching and surpassing the greatest race on earth is just what Thompson does. 

Away from the post-race team parties, one may well then find two slightly-mad, definitely inspiring Australians in a corner of a bar. “It’ll be nice to share a beer with Lachlan in Paris,” Thompson says. They will have deserved it.

You can follow Jack’s challenge here - https://jackultracyclist.com/theamazingchase

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A freelance sports journalist and podcaster, you'll mostly find Chris's byline attached to news scoops, profile interviews and feature writing across a variety of different publications. He has been writing regularly for Cycling Weekly since 2013.

Previously a ski, hiking and cycling guide in a number of places, but mostly in the Canadian Rockies and Spanish Pyrenees, he almost certainly holds the record for the most number of interviews conducted from snowy mountains.

He lives in Valencia, Spain.

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Tour de France 2023 : TOUR Tech briefing for Stage 1

Robert Kühnen

 ·  01.07.2023

Tour de France 2023 - Stage 1: Bilbao - Bilbao | 182 Kilometres

Should, contrary to expectations, an athlete be able to break away earlier, the aero card would sting in this case as well.

*) The calculations are based on the bikes tested by TOUR in the laboratory and wind tunnel. The bikes at the Tour de France may differ in details. Of course, we have not yet been able to examine last-minute prototypes either.