ALBERTVILLE, France — Hours before the start of Stage 19 of the Tour de France, the day’s real competition is already well underway. Civilians and workers alike stalk the caravan, seeking goodies. A gendarme engages in barter with a representative from La Vache Qui Rit (the Laughing Cow). Each side wants what the other has: merch.
Ultimately, the cop trades two official Tour de France police patches and two bananas for a dozen cycling caps adorned with the beautiful laughing cow logo and as many t-shirts. I have been trying to secure a shirt for a week, but when we beg for some, the representative offers a chagrined smile and tells us he is out, as he hands us hat after hat. On the hats is the eponymous laughing cow, wearing earrings of the brand’s trademark cheese wheels, each featuring a laughing cow of their own, who is wearing the earrings as well—an infinitely recursive abyss of bovine mirth.
This is the Tour de France caravan, a rolling parade that precedes the race each day, driving the course and flinging seemingly endless trinkets at the fans amassed by the roadside. The caravan is composed of parade float–style cars, shaped like cherries, a large bed, a washing machine spilling suds everywhere. Atop each is a leader of sorts, strapped in with a serious harness allowing them to pump up the crowds and toss out merch. The vast majority of caravan folk are young and in shape, and they kick their days off with a big group dance party.
Rather than distract from the sport on offer, as it may in most American contexts, advertising is a core component of the Tour de France and cycling generally. The term “product” is often used to refer to a sport’s on-field or -court offerings as a way to flatten the competitive substance of a sport into something being sold to advertisers. In cycling, there is simply one less layer of abstraction.
Every team is named after its sponsor, the jerseys adorned with dozens of logos. To a very real degree the product is the Decathlon brand fighting against the Alpecin brand. It’s like Formula 1, but with products and services far less prestigious. The most lucrative part of a rider’s kit to advertise on? The butt.
Without ticket sales, stadium deals, or TV rights contracts—the latter of which go to the Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO)—teams have to make their money the old fashioned way. The race by necessity is both a race and a series of rolling billboards; it began at the start of the 20th century as a spectacle engineered by a newspaper, and it has followed the rough logic of newspaper advertising ever since.
The non-racing parts of the Tour operate the same way, with every available inch of space around the whole unwieldy circus bearing one brand’s logo or another. Where and when racing cannot serve as an eyeball magnet, the draw is free stuff. The caravan throws goodies; the sponsor of the climbing jersey hands out thousands of polka dot t-shirts; booths around the start and finish offer 10 or so different bucket hats. (The connoisseur’s take is that the FDJ hat is superior.)
The caravan is an effective advertisement, then, not just for its constituent brands but also for the broader in-person experience of the Tour de France. If you want to parse the subtleties and depths of strategic bike racing, turn on your TV. If you want to encounter the names of hundreds of brands and debase yourself for trinkets, go to the Tour.
This is the village, which has an unofficial mayor. A man dressed up as King Louis IV wanders around in full regalia, and conducts interviews in character. He is here to advertise a region in southern France. When I ask him what is special about his region, he thinks for 30 solid seconds, and says, “The sheep, and the cheese.”
Beyond the village is a second village, for VIPs and media people. VIPs form another critical revenue stream for the ASO, and for some amount of money they get access to this second, secret brand experience, as well as the freedom to walk around the start paddock and take pictures of their favorite riders while journalists try to do our jobs. Every morning, the UAE bus is mobbed with fans, to the point that journalists don’t even bother trying to wade through the crowd, instead either getting there early or just going through a contact. That’s not the case elsewhere, as I can go and have a casual chat with any of the small teams without any hassle, though those teams typically speak less English. The only place my credential has not gotten me into is extra-special VIP-only zones near the finish, which feature champagne, fancy food spreads, and the best views of the race.
But the caravan is the primary draw for the fans. I spend several hours wandering around before the start of Stage 19 talking to the caravan people and trying to accumulate as much stupid merch as possible. A paramedic swaps an official Tour patch for a bagful of pasta; a parent holds their child up next to the gaping maw of the melon car; a youngster from Orangina engages in a playful water fight with a caravaner from Gaulois under the watchful gaze of the massive chicken-bodied float. “My favorite part is the smiles of the people, it’s very amazing,” says Melanie, a person responsible for throwing hundreds of plastic shopping bags frisbee-style. “The worst part is the end of the day when my arm hurts.”
I have seen the caravan go by several times, and I always try to grab a cold beverage. A non-alcoholic beer company offers them, as does Orangina. The Orangina float is, unsurprisingly, quite popular. “People go crazy because it’s the best drink of the world,” says the driver of one of Orangina’s three cars. How many cans does he drink every stage? “Only one, to keep the pleasure for the end of the day.”
The thirst for cheap crap transcends age brackets. In Toulouse, I look down at my phone and am hit in the chest with a novelty paper fan. When I offer it to an older woman, I receive the most heartfelt Merci beaucoup of my life. Kids go especially crazy for Haribo. “It’s dangerous, driving for them,” a Haribo driver says. “There is much enthusiasm on the road.” I ask him what the hardest part of his day and he says that the caravan doesn’t stop, so you have to have an iron bladder.
By far the most beloved float in the caravan is the leek. Seven leeks with stringy rope beards form a double-wide float, and when they go by, the crowds’ cheering goes up an octave or two. The leek’s colleagues include a melon, a strawberry, and two cherries, but the leek is the star. Someone hand-painted the faces on the front, and they bear different smiles than last year. The leek does not throw merch—would the merch be leeks?—it doesn’t need to. Simply seeing the leek is enough to brighten anyone’s day.
You could make the argument that the caravan cheapens the bike race, that its goofiness and the worship of disposable consumerism it embodies both distract from a sport that is all about pain, sacrifice, and bravery, a sport that is first and foremost serious. There are some who think of cycling in such monkish terms and probably consider the caravan to be at best tonally incoherent. I think such a position misreads the spectacle and performance of the Tour de France, failing to consider that being ridiculous is not the same thing as being hollow. Bike racing is an extremely intense, competitive sport—but it is also quite often silly, and to fail to highlight that attribute would be to omit a critical component of what makes the sport interesting.
If you win the Tro-Bro Léon race, held annually in Finistére, you win a pig. Riders do wheelies up mountains all the time. This is supposed to be fun, is my point. Why not cheer for the leek and for the riders?