Book review: Le Fric, by Alex Duff

Title: Le Fric – Family, Power and Money: The Beautiful Business of the Tour de France
Author: Alex Duff
Publisher: Constable
Pages: 314
Year: 2022
Order: Hachette
What it is: A (financial) history of the Tour de France with an emphasis on the attempts to form a breakaway league a decade ago
Strengths: Breezes along at a breathless pace
Weaknesses: Strip out the by now overly familiar racing anecdotes and it’s pretty thin gruel, revealing little new despite the hyperbolic claims of its author and publisher

As the second world war drew to a close, France was in rebuilding mode, physically and psychologically. The country had to get to grips with an Occupation that had seen many collaborate with the invading German forces. One consequence of this was that media outlets that had continued to operate during the Occupation were closed, their assets seized by the state.

From the ashes, some former media operators rose like phoenixes, such as Jacques Goddet, who created the sports newspaper L’Équipe from the embers of L’Auto. Goddet had been Henri Desgrange’s heir apparent at L’Auto before the war, the younger son of Desgrange’s business partner, Victor Goddet.

Others rose more like the oligarchs who got rich after the collapse of the Soviet Union, such as Émilien Amaury. From the ashes of Le Petit Parisien – the newspaper in which, in 1924, Albert Londres did not call the riders in the Tour de France forçats de la route – Amaury created Le Parisien Libéré, which became the cornerstone of a family empire that is today into its third generation. The Amaury empire no longer includes Le Parisien, the jewel in its crown today being the Tour de France, once owned by L’Auto.