“Cycles of Change”: Slaying the Badger,the Tour de France and Contemporary Documentary Film

Introduction

One of the consequences of the sudden and rapid demise of Lance Armstrong’s professional cycling career in the aftermath of the 2012 United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) investigation has been a long-overdue reconsideration of the career of fellow American and professional cyclist Greg LeMond. The subsequent ratification of USADA’s decision by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) culminated in a life-long ban from professional sport competition and stripped Armstrong of all achievements post-1998, including seven Tour de France titles. In the process, these decisions have rendered LeMond not simply the first North American to triumph at the world’s most famous road race but now the only recognized winner from the United States. ¹

These circumstances bring into sharp focus LeMond’s success in claiming the prestigious overall maillot jaune—or yellow jersey—three times between 1986 and 1990 and present an opportune moment for re-evaluating North America’s sporting breakthrough in the world of elite professional cycling during the 1980s. Thirty years since LeMond’s first victory, the 1986 Tour de France remains one of the most celebrated in the modern era. Furthermore, LeMond’s triumph would later be adjudged an important contributor factor in the development of North American road cycling—with some arguing that the Nevadan’s popularity became the “ballast” upon which the commercial viability of the sport in the United States depended throughout the 1980s and 1990s (Reed, 2015, pp. 181-182). This article analyzes the representation of the 1986 Tour de France in the documentary Slaying the Badger (Dower, 2014) to situate the cultural significance of LeMond’s victory within a broader sociohistorical setting and to map the profound transformation of the Tour de France from a European cycling race into a worldwide sporting phenomena. These changes to the Tour not only transformed the economic composition of sporting participation, including team budgets and sponsorship opportunities, but also challenged specific cultural meanings embedded with European professional cycling since the end of the Word War II.

Similar to organizational changes experienced by other major transnational sporting events within this period—such as, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup and the Olympic Games—the Tour de France came to be irrevocably shaped by the socioeconomic forces of globalization. Together with the impact of new telecommunication technologies, which engendered dramatic shifts in patterns of consumption of sporting audiences, the sport witnessed the adoption of management structures and marketing practices associated with commercial models of so-called “Americanzation.” ² LeMond’s career blossomed among a generation of riders who were at the forefront of the economic and cultural shifts in professional cycling. In addition to three Tour de France victories, his palmarès include the UCI World Road Racing championship in 1983 and 1989 along with numerous other criterium titles. Such sporting accomplishments subsequently catapulted him, for a short time at least, to international sporting superstardom (Maso, 2005). Despite these remarkable achievements, LeMond has since the late-1990s often occupied a peripheral position in the sporting consciousness of the American public and inevitably been overshadowed by the totemic rise and fall of Armstrong.

Cycling and Contemporary Documentary Film: Slaying the Badger

In the midst of recent films and books examining the aftermath of Armstrong’s career—including Alex Gibney’s (2013) The Armstrong Lie, Alex Holmes (2014) Stop at Nothing: The Lance Armstrong Lie Story, and New York Times journalist Juliet Macur’s (2013) Cycle of Lies—U.S. sports network ESPN released director John Dower’s (2014) documentary Slaying the Badger as part of their 30 for 30 series. Dower (2006, 2008) is a filmmaker with an impressive pedigree when it comes to sports documentaries and his previous directorial credits include Once in A Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos and Thrilla in Manila. Similar to other films in the 30 for 30 series Slaying the Badger exhibits the two standard features of the sports subgenre: a “celebration of sporting motion” coupled to an exposition of the “social meanings of sporting phenomena”—the latter of which is filtered through different themes, tropes, and presentational techniques (Barrington, 2014, pp. 34-41). These are reified through a composite of archival televisual footage and present-day interviews with various social actors and therefore can broadly be categorized within the participatory tradition of documentary filmmaking’s “genealogical modes” (Nichols, 2010, pp. 142-211). In addition, Dower’s film also affirms the prestige status of documentary film in the contemporary sports media landscape. This trend often emphasizes the sports subgenre as a medium with the “capacity to treat sports in a more authentic, detailed, and artful manner than regular sports programming” to potentially “offer greater perspective and intimacy than other media forms” (Vogan, 2012, p. 146).

The markers of cultural distinction associated with the 30 for 30 series are further buttressed by Dower’s adaptation of sport journalist Richard Moore’s extensively researched book of the same name for the basis of the documentary. ³ Like Moore’s account the dramatic force of Slaying the Badger is manifested in an exposition of the intense competitive rivalry between LeMond and Bernard Hinault—the titular badger of the documentary. ⁴ At the time of writing, Hinault remains the last great French cycling champion of the modern era and flourished among a Golden Age of French sportsmen who came to symbolize La France qui gagne or Winning France (Fotheringham, 2015, p. 16). From the mid-1970s onward he dominated the world of professional cycling for a decade—winning the Tour de France five times, the Giro d’Italia three times, the Vuelta Espana twice along with the 1980 UCI Road Race World Championship, and a multitude of monument titles. The confrontation between the young Nevadan and the experienced French champion therefore reflects a typical narrative concern of the sports documentary genre. Yet what is remarkable about the dynamics of LeMond and Hinault’s relationship in Slaying the Badger is the two men were not merely rivals at the 1986 Tour but also teammates in the same La Vie Claire team.

Slaying the Badger examines LeMond and Hinault’s fractured relationship by using a schema similar to those established in Dower’s previous films. This approach involves exploring the historicity of the 20th-century sporting milieu through a resolutely synchronic approach to documentary form. Such techniques are not uncommon to the sport documentary genre and often work by isolating a significant sporting incident and then extrapolating its various strands of meaning to suture together a cohesive narrative whole for the audience. Dower’s sporting centerpiece in the documentary addresses a confluence of events during 18th stage of the 1986 Tour. Traversing several mountainous climbs over a 101 mile route from Briançon to the Alpine village of L’Alpe d’Huez, it is the famous mountain top finish to the stage which proves pivotal to the outcome of the race and vividly embodies the epic struggle between LeMond and Hinault. The complexity of this battle is crystallized for the audience in a powerful visual juxtaposition of two defining moments edited from archival televisual footage of the end of the stage. The first of these sequences is a rare instance of sporting camaraderie in an otherwise fiercely fought and attritional stage race. After attacking aggressively on the descent of the notorious mountain road of Col de Galibier, an evidently fatigued Hinault is subsequently chased and caught by LeMond on the ascent of Col du Croix de la Fer. Curiously, rather than race away from Hinault (which the American had done to win the previous stage at Col d’Izoard to gain the maillot jaune), LeMond, who was already leading his rival in the overall general classification of the Tour by several minutes instead continues to ride at a constant pace behind him. When the two men eventually near the finish line atop the mountain village of L’Alpe d’Huez, LeMond propels himself alongside his adversary, affectionately pats him on the back, and Hinault turns and smiles (Figure 1). Then in unison they clasp one another’s hand and raise their arms aloft in a triumphant salute, with LeMond seemingly allowing Hinault to ride a few centimeters ahead to claim the stage victory.

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Figure 1.

A defining image from Slaying the Badger: Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault celebrating in unison as they near the finish line at L’Alpe d’Huez on Stage 18 of the Tour de France in 1986.

The aesthetics of this moment are almost perfectly realized and clearly abound with symbolic potential. For instance, Moore’s (2011) book proposes a reading that seemingly elevates LeMond and Hinault’s gesture into expressions beyond the everyday locale of sporting discourse:

For many of those watching it was indeed a moment of such beauty and poignancy that it seemed to transcend sport. Indeed, it didn’t seem fanciful to imagine that what we had just witnessed at the top of Alpe d’Huez might come to be recognized along such other transcendental moments: Jessie Owens’ four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics; Ali and Foreman’s Rumble in the Jungle in 1974; Borg and McEnroe’s 1980 final at Wimbledon. (p. 4)

Such possibility for transcendence is further foreground in the documentary with the augmentation of a black and white photographic still of the same image, which seemingly captures the indexical singularity of the event. ⁵

Susan Sontag (1971/1979) cautions us against the tautological seduction of the photographic image and the potential to disinvest from engagement with the historical milieu of its production in favor of the simulacra of the postmodernist spectacle (p. 106). A comparable argument can be made about the relationship between the audience’s reception of filmic images and the practices of documentary production. For instance, according to film scholar Cynthia Fuchs (2013):

the essence of the sports documentary as a form . . . locates and highlights these moments, framing them as objects of explanation and speculation, implying that if we look at them and hear about them, you will find a kind of truth. (p. 4)

Continuing to underscore what we experience in our engagement with the indexical images of documentary film is not so much ontological reality, but a narrativized version, Fuchs (2014) concludes that, “the moment and its explanation . . . most often produce a faux closure” within the digesis (p. 4). Put otherwise, such filmic moments simultaneously aver the margins of the documentary genre and attest to the power of the image.

In Slaying the Badger there are similar moments of faux closure evident within the representation of events at L’Alpe d’Huez. Revised from different and often opposing perspectives in the documentary, it soon becomes apparent that this scene is far from an act of sporting transcendence or a gesture of sporting solidarity. According to the various social actors involved, the events at the finish line served two principle purposes. On one hand, it was an opportunistically constructed media stunt to further La Vie Claire’s commercial interests in the new global marketplace of professional cycling—with the owner orchestrating events from a pursuing team car. On the other hand, it was tacit affirmation of an agreement made by La Vie Claire and Hinault at the end of the 1985 Tour to support LeMond in pursuit of the maillot jaune the following year. Riders are of course obliged to fulfill responsibilities to their sponsors—especially in the televisual age. Equally, informal agreements of this kind are not unusual in the culture of professional cycling and have long constituted the realpolitik of the peloton. That said, temporary allegiances are generally only made between riders from opposing teams rather than teammates. This is due to the fact that leadership roles are conventionally allocated before the beginning of the sporting calendar to assist the deployment of specific team tactics within races.

The following sequence in the documentary demands an immediate revision of these interpretations of the gesture at atop L’Alpe d’Huez and attests to another faux closure within the filmic digesis. LeMond and Hinault appear on national television an hour after the conclusion of the stage and the Frenchman is asked by interviewer Jacques Chancel whether he is “still able to win the race.” Hinault is both uncompromising and unmagnanimous in his assessment. “The Tour is not finished,” he states, “there could very well be a crash. He [LeMond] could very easily fall sick.” An astounded LeMond, clearly referring to the very public agreement struck with La Vie Claire and Hinault at the conclusion of the previous 1985 Tour, protests, “I could have attacked last year!” and feeling both utterly confused and betrayed concludes, “I don’t know what to do.” Hinault is quick to respond, “It’s a sporting war. It’s a sporting war” (cited in Dower, 2014).

The Tour de France: Mapping a Sporting Spectacle in the Global Age

The preceding section foregrounds an explication of these two sequences from Slaying the Badger because the narrativized fissures of faux closure embedded within the documentary’s representation of LeMond and Hinault’s rivalry are emblematic of the sociocultural transformation of the Tour during the last 30 years. Furthermore, documentary filmmaking is a medium especially predisposed to mapping out these kinds of discursive spaces. Historians Murry Phillips, Mark O’Neill, and Gary Osmond (2007), for example, recognize how the particular codes, conventions, and practices of sport documentary film possess “the ability to engage with an audience at a deep emotional and imaginative level that facilitates a unique connection with the past” (p. 278). Such a faculty offers critical insights into various constructions of social identity within sporting communities and the contingent generation of cultural meanings. Furthermore, when these meanings are situated within a wider historical context, the documentary’s depiction of LeMond and Hinault’s rivalry also exposes the impact of global economic forces upon modern professional sport at the end of the 20th century.

The discursive features of LeMond and Hinault’s rivalry must be understood within the broader context of a culture clash that emerged within professional cycling during the 1980s. According to sports journalist William Fotheringham (2015), LeMond and Hinault’s fractious relationship was not merely a product of incompatible personalities but a direct consequence of the changing cultural composition of the Tour’s peloton:

In the 1986 Tour, two different versions of cycling came head-to-head and neither truly understood the other. On the one hand, there was the newcomer, Anglo-Saxon, for whom the Tour was an ideal, tinged with romance. . . . The Europeans didn’t see it that way. Hinault was a man bred into cycling from a locale steeped in the sport, a pragmatist, for whom winning the Tour de France was the climax to game you played rather than mangle metal in a factory. (p. 285)

Critical to this assessment of the Tour in the mid-1980s is the idea of a sporting phenomenon in flux. Hinault’s career, as Fotheringham (2015) further explains, “started out in 1975, when the sport had barely changed in its essentials since the Second World War—better bikes and kit, better roads but not much else” (p. 4). Hence, the formation of Hinault’s sporting identity—signified in the admixture of a distinctly European cycling heritage and his working class roots—is resolutely bound to the Tour’s traditional symbology, one in which French Republicanism and national unity are represented in the geographical contours of La Grand Boucle (or Great Loop) that shape the race anew each year. Hinault therefore occupies an important position in a complex nexus of socially determined meanings—not least because he is simultaneously “bred into cycling” from the cultural landscape of the Tour and the nation.

The potential of sporting events to serve as spatial loci for complex discursive formations of place and identity has been the focus of recent critical ideas about sport. Cultural historians Hugh Dauncey and Geoff Hare (2004), for example, assert that the version of “France that is performed and celebrated by the Tour” must be understood as complex expression of modern physical culture (p. 3). What is experienced at the Tour therefore is the coalescence of “sporting, social, political and cultural memory,” which symbolically positions “the riders at the center of the overlapping value systems” (Dauncey & Hare, 2004, p. 3). Within the context of the immediate post-World War II period, the customary ideals and the cultural meanings generated by the Tour had embodied distinctly Europeanist dimensions. In tune with these geopolitical settlements, the Tour reflected ideological principles contributing to the modernization of a progressively united Europe—with France, alongside West Germany, at the forefront of a political and economic reshaping of the continent’s societal contours. Tendencies such as these were not merely signaled in the diverse European peloton but also in the Tour’s ambition for geographical expansion. From 1954 onward, when the Tour commenced outside of France for the first time with a prologue stage in the Dutch city of Amsterdam, the race organizers’ geographical itinerary often “looked beyond France’s borders and its past to the future, endorsing the general trend in Western Europe toward integration by exporting the Tour to neighboring countries” (Thompson, 2006, p. 93). The grand départ soon became a regular occurrence in the Tour’s route and later included key European regional partners—with stages first hosted in West Germany in 1965 and in Great Britain in 1974. Accordingly, as John Marks (2004) argues, not only did the Tour constitute “a sporting version of strategy that France followed with a great deal of success after the war” but, in addition, many riders of the era “were seen to embody a particular set of popular progressive values broadly associated with the modern ‘European’ France of les Trente glorieuses” (p. 204).

Slaying the Badger foregrounds Hinault’s personification of a modern European Tour de France through the synthesis of two guises: the national sporting hero and the patron of the peloton. The first of these identities is exhibited in scenes from the 1985 Tour where after crashing in the final kilometers of Stage 14, French television broadcasts Hinault bloodied, with brace of black-eyes and a fractured nose. Celebrated by the press and public alike for continuing ride to the finish line at Saint-Etienne and retaining the maillot jaune, Hinault seemingly epitomizes Breton fortitude and Gallic panache—complaining only of breaking his sunglasses. Contrastingly, Hinault’s second role as patron of the predominantly European peloton is represented in terms of bipartisanship rather than the individualism of sporting heroics. Affirmations of this can be witnessed in archive footage of Hinault galvanizing fellow riders in a collective protest over pay and conditions against the Tour’s organizers in 1979 and then again later at the 1984 Paris-Nice stage race, when he leads the line to fight through a crowd of striking French shipyard workers who had blocked the peloton enroute.

(De)Tour de France: LeMond and a Journey Beyond Europeanization

The powerful cultural constituents that had shaped modern Europe after World War II—and simultaneously, the Tour—were in the final decades of the 20th century superseded by new global socioeconomic shifts. LeMond was among a wave of professional cyclists from beyond Europe’s borders benefiting from these new circumstances and whose participation would have a profound effect on the cultural meanings signified by the Tour along with its position in the new cultural economy of international sport. ⁶ As evidenced in the documentary, it was the transition of the Tour from a sporting event with a discreet European character to one of true global significance that determined the nature of the contest between the two rivals. Hence, although Hinault’s sporting performance can be understood as the personification of the Tour’s conventional symbology, LeMond’s victory was representative of a major detour from the standard Europeanist narrative.

The professional road cycling environment from which LeMond emerged in the United States was a world apart from the sporting milieu of Hinault, native France. When LeMond turned professional in 1979 at 20 years of age, road cycling in the United States was still very much a niche sport supported by a patchwork national competitive scene. The development of road cycling in the United States had undergone a dramatic shift by the time LeMond retired in 1994, and in less than two decades both the organization and the infrastructure of the sport experienced exponential growth. For instance, the U.S. Cycling Federation membership reputedly tripled throughout the decade, and by attracting significant corporate sponsorship, a variety of multistage race competitions were established—such as the Coors Classic, Tour de Trump, and Tour DuPont (Drake, 2011; Reed, 2015, pp. 153-154). Furthermore, there was also an unofficial “national” team of sorts had also formed for American fans to support at the prestigious European Grand Tours with the formation of the 7-Eleven cycling team (Drake, 2011)

LeMond’s eventual defeat of Hinault in 1986 to become the first non-European to win the maillot jaune therefore signaled a significant challenge to the Tour’s dominant discourse of Europeanization—both home and abroad. With an American victory, the Tour’s integrationist tendencies were now no longer exclusively European in character and, consequently, “the later phase of globalization proved harder for the French to deal with in cultural terms precisely because the national and international elements could no longer be so easily reconciled” (Marks, 2004, p. 210). To put this into context, the period spanning the Tour’s postwar renewal had up until the mid-1980s witnessed a litany of Tour winning French riders—including, Louison Bobet, Jacques Anquetil, Berbard Thevenet, Laurent Fignon and Hinault. The fact that this succession came to an end in 1986 and that to date there has not been a French winner of the Tour does appear to be a prophetic reflection on the changing relationship between the Tour and the French public in the intervening years.

From this perspective, LeMond’s (1986) victory functions as an insightful synecdoche for the transformation of the Tour from its postwar European internationalization to a sporting event reshaped by the emergent forces of globalization. LeMond’s recruitment by Renault-Elf-Gitane and subsequent relocation to France in 1980 was in this respect of significant import because it established him as the preeminent American professional cyclist on the elite European circuit. ⁷ In the documentary, the audience witnesses LeMond’s palpable admiration for the traditions key to French cycling’s insular world and he makes significant efforts to integrate into the culture of the peloton by learning to speak its language and adopt its often archaic sporting practices. At the same time, there is also a manifestation of “a paradoxical aspect of LeMond’s personality,” and far from a Francophile, he was also someone who made “few concessions . . . and could be stubbornly independent and even rebellious” (Moore, 2011, p. 68). In short, the uneasy synthesis between cultural assimilation and the characteristics of LeMond’s personality could be seen to embody the tension between expansionist and isolationist tendencies that have characterized American sport and sporting identities in the 20th century (Bairner, 2001, pp. 91-113).

Bringing the Americans: Tapie, Lévitan, and Un Tour Mondialisé

LeMond’s arrival in France in 1980 also heralded a more fundamental shift in the traditionally insular world of French cycling due to the fact that it coincided with Félix Lévitan assuming overall commercial control of Société du Tour de France (STF). With Lévitan at the helm and an institutional desire to reach new global markets outside of Europe, the concept of “un Tour mondialisé” (or World Tour) was adopted by STF along with modern corporate strategies comparable to other sport business practices from Western Europe and the United States (Marks, 2004, p. 220). Chief among the transformations to the Tour was further internationalization of its competitive structure coupled to an expansion of the event’s global television audience. Cultural historian Eric Reed (2004) explains that to implement the first of these strategies,

Between 1980 and 1987, the STF expanded the number of teams and riders invited to compete in the race. The Tour invited 13 teams and 130 riders to compete in the 1980 race. By 1987, the number had expanded to 23 teams and 207 cyclists. . . . During the 1980s, the STF invited teams from Colombia, Portugal, Britain, Japan and the United States. . . . Racers from cycling’s peripheral nations competed on an equal footing with professionals from France, Italy and Belgium, cycling’s traditional powers. (pp. 120-121)

In breaking with the traditional composition of teams invited to participate on the Tour, STF announced its ambitions to popularize the event in new economic territories outside of the European heartlands. This was evident with the inclusion in the 1986 Tour of the U.S. based 7-Eleven cycling team, who alongside LeMond’s victory, were of equal significance to the exposure of the event in North America. The 7-Eleven team even won two stages—Canadian Alex Stieda became the first North American to wear the maillot jaune after securing a series of time bonuses on the second stage of the race, and American Davis Phinney won Stage 3 the next day. The exposure of the Tour in the U.S. press—where some newspapers had a legacy of foreign correspondents covering the event—was now complimented by limited coverage from television networks such as NBC. ⁸

The reshaping of the cultural composition of the peloton at the Tour was not necessarily a straightforward evolution, and some European teams were less than appreciative of newcomers. American Andy Hampsten, who rode for 7-Eleven team and was later recruited by La Vie Claire for the 1986 Tour recollects, for instance, that “[t]here were a lot of crashes, and there were attempts to blame the crashes on the Americans” (Moore, 2011, p. 148). Other fault lines in the European New World axis of professional cycling come to the fore in the documentary’s attempt to unpack the internal dynamics of the La Vie Claire team. In interviews with LeMond, Hampsten, and Candian domestique Steve Bauer, it becomes clear that throughout the Tour the team was riven with infighting and divided almost exclusively on continental lines. The origin of the team’s dysfunction is never definitively addressed in the documentary. LeMond, for example, alternately apportions blame to Hinault’s hubris, the tactics of Swiss coach Paul Koechli, or ambitions of the team’s French owner. Whatever its source, the atmosphere of fratricide that had engulfed La Vie Claire also permeated the wider peloton. Fears of French and Spanish riders aligning with Hinault were shared by directeur sportif Maurcie Le Gullioux, and LeMond sought assistance from English-speaking riders on rival teams, such as Australian Phil Anderson and Scotsman Robert Millar—with the latter helping chase a breakaway instigated by LeMond’s own European teammates (McGrath, 2016; Moore, 2011, pp. 236-237).

Frictions within the peloton during this transitional period were arguably symptomatic of the wider ramifications of the Tour’s new global ambitions set against the legacy of les Trente glorieuses. According to Marks (2004), opposition toward the changing nature of the Tour and revision of its traditional European practices also reflected deep-rooted disquiet about the meanings of French nationhood and the country’s position in the world order:

As the internationalism of the Tour gathered pace in the 1980s it became increasingly difficult to place, for example, American riders within this framework. In short, France’s anxiety and uncertainty in the face of globalization are mirrored in the cultural topography of the Tour. (p. 207)

Slaying the Badger expresses the uneven transition of global changes to the traditional European model of the Tour through a focus on the business relationship between LeMond and French entrepreneur Bernard Tapie. Unlike the other main social actors in the documentary, Tapie does not contribute to a participatory interview with the filmmakers and consequently the audience’s understanding of him is filtered through archival television footage and the opinions espoused by various talking heads. These work to reaffirm many of the common perceptions of Tapie—a figure arguably worthy of profiling as any other social actor in the documentary.

Tapie has always been viewed as an unconventionally mercurial character in the public life of French sport, business, and politics. ⁹ He was also an admirer of the American business attitude and in promoting various enterprises accordingly exuded a “showmanship, confidence, audacity and irresistible confidence” that at the time was untypical of the French business model (Moore, 2011, pp. 183-184). Such characteristics were evident when Tapie signed Hinault to lead the newly formed La Vie Claire in 1983—exclaiming in the press conference “it doesn’t matter if he wins or not . . . I’m counting on him to make me as much money as possible. As far as success goes, that’s the only measure” (Fotheringham, 2015, p. 224). Two years later, he repeated the trick by tempting LeMond away from Renault-Elf-Gitane and reuniting the American with his former team leader. LeMond recounts in the documentary how he was summoned by a mysterious woman on a motorbike to clandestine meeting in the French Alps with Tapie and Hinault. Rewarded with what became a highly publicized 3-year deal, the Nevadan became the recipient of the world’s first million dollar contract in professional cycling. Again, Tapie dominated headlines in the sporting press and in the process recruited a valuable media sports star for marketing newly developed clipless pedals and carbon frames into hitherto untapped global territories. Most importantly, for the Look brand, this included consumers in the United States—a market where Tapie reputedly offered LeMond 1 cent for every pair of pedals sold. Fotheringham (2015) states that it is crucial to recognize however that “Tapie’s willingness to buy his way to success was not the driving force behind cycling’s economic revolution of the 1980s,” but more illustrative of the wider changes to business models within European sports industries of the period (pp. 249-250). In recruiting LeMond, Tapie did nevertheless demonstrate an astute understanding of how to exploit the financial opportunities of globalized sporting markets in a new era of broadcast media.

Tapie’s nuanced commercial engagement with a distinctly televisual experience of the Tour was much in synch with a rapidly changing media landscape in France—both in terms of its domestic structure and global reach. Reed (2004) explains that due to STF’s broadcasting media ambitions, the “Tour’s emerg[ed] as a major international television spectacle in the 1980s [and] presented the race’s organizers with enticing business opportunities” (p. 117). The Tour had first been broadcasted on television in the United States in 1979, but significant change to global coverage occurred in 1982 following the Mitterrand administration’s deregulation of French television (Thompson, 2006, p. 48). This shift in the organization of the French broadcast media revolutionized the Tour’s financial structure in two important ways: generating venues streams from the sale of domestic and international broadcasters and attracting sponsorship from transnational companies such as Coca-Cola and Nike (Reed, 2004, p. 117). As a result, this quintessentially French sporting experience was transformed into truly a global phenomenon. By the time of LeMond’s victory in 1986, the Tour had emerged as the world’s largest annually televised sporting event and was watched by an estimated billion people in 72 countries (Thompson, 2006, p. 48).

Filtered through an increasing televisual lens, the spectacle of the Tour acculturated the French public to new patterns of sports media consumption. This refashioned the nation’s relationship with the Tour and signaled a change in the French cultural imaginary, not least because the Tour now competed among a plethora of other globally mediated sporting spectacles—such as the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup. These changes also emerged at a time when the commercial impact of sports broadcasting industries engendered an increasingly deterritorialization of the sporting experience (Ingham & McDonald, 2003). In sports media—especially, television— such developments facilitated the formation of new temporal and spatial relationships between sporting events and their audiences. For the Tour and also other events in professional cycling’s calendar, new patterns of media consumption ineradicably changed their localized social meanings. Previously, these sporting events had functioned as terrains for the symbolic expression of shared social traditions, cultural values, and various features of national identity but that was no longer the case at the end of the 20th century.

The changes to the wider social meanings of the Tour in the 1980s and 1990s—including, the French public’s increasing incongruity toward an idea of sport possessing collective cultural significance as an event experienced in situ—are perhaps reflected in the general laissez-faire reception that greeted LeMond’s three victories. In the immediate aftermath of the 1986 Tour, for instance, Reed (2015) notes that the “reactions to LeMond’s crowning moment” from both France’s national broadcast media and press “captured the ambivalence with which the French faced professional road cycling’s ongoing globalization and the prospect of declining French fortunes in the Tour” (p. 139). These two factors combined, inevitably hastened the diminishing status of the Tour within France. After all, this was period when the Tour’s claims for representing shared French national values were no longer as steadfast as it had been in the past. Now, it was one of many mediated sporting event that contested for commercial space within a progressively more congested domestic marketplace. Subsequently, the STF had become focused on exporting a commodified version of the Tour and selling its commercial rights in new global territories, and henceforth appealing to both Francophiles and cycling enthusiasts alike.

According to the Slaying the Badger, LeMond never truly benefited from the emergent changes to the world of professional cycling despite his status as “a valuable commercial commodity in France and the United States” (Reed, 2015, p. 181). Some of the interviewees cast him as a naïve figure and there is certainly a sense of LeMond as an American who was a product of French cycling culture and ultimately caught in-between both the financial rewards and cultural recognition afforded by the sport—for instance, in the documentary, he claims to have “never seen a cent” from the Look sponsorship deal struck with Tapie. Moreover, it was the arrival of Lance Armstrong, arguably the embodiment of the Tour’s corporatization at the end of the 20th century, who ultimately overshadowed his compatriot and former champion. At the time, the story of Armstrong’s survival of testicular cancer and incredible fight back to return to the pinnacle of professional cycling had carried both universal and highly marketable appeal. A subsequent record-breaking sequence of seven title victories enabled Armstrong to dominate the narrative of the modern Tour. Despite some concerns about the Texan’s perceived brashness—among other potential character flaws—Armstrong was by the time of his final Tour victory in 2005 embraced and celebrated within the French media and wider public sphere (Carr, 2007, p. 31).

And what of Hinault? Well, many of the talking heads in the documentary suggest his reputation in 1986 was never in question—win or lose. Moreover, it seems more than mere coincidence that at the end of an illustrious career Hinault’s last triumph was overall victory at the Coors Classic (Hinault wins in Colorado, 1986). A multi-stage road race finishing in Boulder, Colorado, in the United States, the Coors Classic witnessed him for a final time defeat LeMond into second place. This would prove to be no faux closure, but a cycling career seemingly coming full circle within an increasingly globalized world.