ABSTRACT
Writing on the Tour de France in 2000, Julian Barnes speculates upon the fact that, despite the 'vast moral taint' of drug-taking and the lack of recent French success, the Tour remains extremely popular in France. 1 As Barnes points out, the last French rider to win the Tour was Bernard Hinault in 1985, and in 1999 not a single stage of the race was won by a Frenchman; in 2000 French riders won two out of 21 stages. Barnes offers two explanations for the continuing French attachment to the Tour. Firstly, he recounts an anecdote relating to France's failure to qualify for the 1994 football World Cup finals. France lost to both Israel and Bulgaria in their final qualifying matches, and Barnes overhears a waiter saying of Bulgaria's last-ditch winner, 'It was a pretty goal'. 2 The French sports fan tends to be, Barnes claims, a 'purist', a devotee of the sport itself rather than a fanatical supporter of a team or nation. This claim, built as Barnes admits on the slenderest of evidence, 3 is, of course, consonant with a more general truism regarding French savoir-faire and style, as opposed to Anglo-Saxon fanaticism and boorishness. Secondly, Barnes claims that although the French may be purists in sporting matters, they are not moralists. On drugs issues, for example, fans of cycling and the Tour seem willing to side with their heroes against the forces of law and order and bureaucracy. Barnes may be building his argument on the national stereotypes of French 'style' and antiauthoritarianism, but it is his claim that the Tour retains a genuinely popular aspect that is perhaps the most contentious:
In other sports, fans go to a stadium, where there are entrance fees, tacky souvenirs, overpriced food, a general marshalling and corralling, and a professional exploitation of the fans' emotions. With the Tour de France, the heroes come to you, to your village, your town, or arrange a rendezvous on the slopes of some spectacular mountain. The Tour is free, you choose where you watch it from, bring your own picnic, and the marketing hard-sell consists of little more than a van offering official Tour T-shirts at 60 francs a throw just before the race arrives. 4
