The Tour de France is still owned by the Amaury family, posing a raft of significant problems

In 1902, a junior reporter at the sports newspaper L’Auto suggested to his boss that flagging sales might be improved by organising a bicycle race around the country. They could grip the nation with tales of derring-do and suffering from “the most courageous champions since antiquity”. The plan was extraordinarily successful.

The Tour de France has become one of the most established races on the planet – the centrepiece of an entire sport – and you might imagine that, with such popularity, its ownership would have spread from a newspaper office into the control of the big cycling organisations, the big teams, perhaps even the French state.

To millions of spectators who watch from an armchair, or head roadside to see this three-week festival of torture, it can feel as if we all own a part of this famous institution.

Instead, as recounted in Alex Duff’s book Le Fric – The Cash – it is an octogenarian widow and her two children who sign off the Tour’s annual accounts, collect their multimillion-euro spoils and maintain tight control in the face of bids and hostile takeovers.

The Amaury family own the Tour – as well as L’Equipe, the successor to L’Auto – which is, first and foremost, a remarkable peculiarity. Imagine the FA Cup rights and profits belonging to an English family who decide where and how the final should be staged each year.

As Duff writes, the race is “a feudal business model” in an age when we are used to the power in sport shifting to superstar athletes and super-clubs. Not at the Tour, which is estimated to generate about €100 million annual revenue, only a fraction of which goes in prize money; €50,000 to the most successful team and €500,000 to the victorious rider. That is much less than for winning, say, Wimbledon or a big golf championship. The main outgoing is the €20 million dividends for the Amaury family.

This has profound implications for a sport and for cycling teams that have considered various rebellions and breakaways to wrest some control and financial stake. None has amounted to anything. They need the race more than the Amaury family need them.

The Tour’s profile represents about 80 per cent of exposure to teams that, as businesses, function purely as vehicles for sponsors who may pull out at any moment, leaving nothing more than worthless contracts and a truck full of second-hand bikes. It is an ecosystem that is very fragile, except for one family, who own the crown jewels.

Silicon Valley wealth, private equity and billionaire egos intermittently circle around the Tour wondering how to muscle in and yet the Amaury family, owners since the Second World War, resolutely hold on.

Does it matter? In a saturated market of cycling books, this different take by an experienced business journalist inevitably lacks the thrill of Mark Cavendish describing a 75km/h sprint or the grim fascination of a doping confessional. But it is well told, with dashes of wartime resistance, cycling action and characters such as Lance Armstrong to keep the plot moving, and raises some important questions.

We see the obvious conflict of interest in the story of the matriarchal Marie-Odile Amaury complaining about too many doping stories appearing in L’Equipe, undermining the sparkle of the Tour. It is not the first time that her newspaper has been accused of pulling punches to protect the family’s most profitable asset.

Le Fric also raises questions far beyond cycling about who owns professional sport – and for what purpose. You could say that is a preoccupation of sports writers these days almost as much as who has won the race or scored the winning goal. Is sport a vehicle for sportswashing Middle Eastern states? For American speculators buying English football clubs in search of profit? As the journalist Gideon Haigh once asked of cricket, does it exist to make money or make money to exist?

Sport’s governing bodies have become marketing agencies forever devising glitzier competitions. The blazers have been replaced by salesmen in sharp suits; sometimes for the better but frequently for worse if profit becomes the goal, the cause.

It feels like a very 21st-century debate, but Le Fric shows that, even at the outset, the Tour was founded as a marketing idea to flog newspapers. The best way to do that was, inevitably, to exaggerate some of the stories of these intrepid cyclists pedalling around dirt roads in France with spare tyres slung around their shoulders.

There was glory – and prize money – for the winner but it was the organisers who profited most handsomely from the heroism, drama and even the scandal. “Plus ca change”, as they no doubt say at Amaury headquarters in Paris.

– The Sunday Times

Originally published as The Tour de France is still owned by the Amaury family, posing a raft of significant problems