The Hotel Parc Beaumont in Pau is a regular billet for teams on the Tour de France. It’s modern, clean, central and close to the start and finish areas of Tour stages as they head in and out of the Pyrenees. It’s also very close to the building used as the media centre, the nearby Palais Beaumont, one of the Tour’s grander press rooms.
The Palais has efficient air con, plenty of space, a pricey cafe and a good PA system. Over the past 20 years or so, there have been some infamous moments there — Lance Armstrong went head to head with David Walsh, Michael Rasmussen flannelled his way through a disastrous press conference, Christian Prudhomme described doping as “Russian roulette” and, on the same day, David Millar broke down in tears.
In 2012, when Bradley Wiggins was leading Team Sky to its first Tour win, the team was staying at the Parc Beaumont and held a traditional rest day press conference. This time though, rather than walk (six minutes according to Google Maps) or drive (one minute) to the Palais Beaumont’s airy corridors, the team held their press meet in the hotel garden.
In the midday heat, the riders sat under parasols, while the media jostled and shoved and sweltered in the sun. There were no microphones. Only a handful were able to hear Wiggins’ jokes. The Palais, cool, spacious, and comfortable, was a mere golf shot away.
Later, Carsten Jeppesen, the team’s Head of Technical Operations, shrugged when I suggested that the press conference should have been held in the Palais. “But having the press conference here is better for their recovery,” he smiled, a little dismissively.
In recent years, as recovery has become all-important, social media has held sway and PR personnel have become part of the sport, the relationship between rider and journalist has become even more distant. The culture of shared experience, of camaraderie that characterised the race caravan, pre-Festina, pre-Armstrong, has long gone. After all the collateral damage done by numerous scandals, there is a truce between teams and the media now, but it can often feel very fragile.
It is all far removed from some of the seminal encounters between riders and journalists in bars cafes and brasseries — the daddy of them all being the interview the Pelissier brothers gave to Albert Londres in 1924 — and now the 2020 Tour de France may be about to drive an even greater wedge between riders and journalists than ever before.
In this extraordinary and confusing year, the Tour de France organisation is in a bind, caught between a rock and a hard place. As Covid-19 looms large again across Europe, the race is on a knife edge. Promoters ASO must satisfy the health and sanitary expectations of the French government while greasing the wheels of cycling’s ever-fragile business model.
How many times this year have we heard that cycling will be dead if there is no Tour?
But the risk of a cluster of Covid-19, mid race, has to be eliminated as much as possible and part of that risk assessment ensures that media access to riders will be greatly restricted. Anyone who’s been working through Zoom calls or Skype over the past few months will tell you that it’s no substitute for human interaction and, in the cauldron of the Tour, eye contact and body language counts for a great deal. It appears that, for those following the race and describing it through the written word, that interaction will be minimal.
No access to team buses at the start or finish, no waiting on the finish line as riders freewheel to a halt, swearing, arguing, shaking their heads — even in tears sometimes. Press conferences on zoom, mixed zones allowing two questions only, and access controlled by team press officers. It doesn’t bode well for those who have followed the Tour’s soap opera for so many years.
Of course, there are exceptional circumstances.
But the worry is that teams may like this way of working. It may slip into being the ‘new normal.’ It’s more controllable, more sponsor friendly, more predictable. It allows press officers greater control, the ability to ensure that ‘negative’ messaging, rifts between personnel, bursts of frustration, disappointment, even anger, are all kept hidden. That means that so much of the human drama of the Tour will remain hidden, which is a huge shame.
For over a century the race has been fuelled by intrigue and drama, whether it’s been sporting, tactical, or ethical. Long before TV coverage became so crucial, the interactions, good and bad, between riders and journalists — from the Pelissier brothers to Raphael Geminiani, from Bernard Hinault to Lance Armstrong, from Richard Virenque to Cadel Evans — were crucial to gaining a deeper understanding of what it means to compete and to survive in the Tour de France.
Journalists too have been crucial in debunking the myth-making of some of the sport’s paper tigers. You can’t really do that without establishing eye contact. Now a great race, founded by and documented by journalists that has inspired some of the very best sports-writing, may be forced to leave that century old tradition behind. Let’s hope it’s for one Tour only.