The Tour de France: A Success Story in Spite of Competitive Imbalance

Résumé En

The Tour de France is one of the world’s largest annual sport events. Although cycling races are usually not lucrative, the Tour de France organizer’s balance sheet reveals that the Tour has been profitable since the 1980s. How can this economic success story be explained? Most sport economists are used to turn to tournament theory and a contest’s competitive balance and outcome uncertainty as major reasons for success. However, fans of the Tour de France are seldom surprised by the name of the final winner of the race, usually not even by the riders sharing the podium. Thus, explaining the Tour’s success by competitive balance must be checked carefully. Following the introduction, this chapter shows how the Tour de France has been a successful managerial and economic model: it is a well-designed and well-managed sport event, with a modern financing model which is founded on TV broadcasting rights, like other mega-sport events. Fundamentally, the quality of the show of the Tour seems well explained by tournament theory. However, if one focuses on competitive balance, it appears that the success of the Tour is likely not due to a high competitive balance, but instead holds in spite of static and dynamic competitive imbalance. The conclusion stresses that the increasing economic success of the Tour since the 1980s is likely not caused by more competitive racing, but instead by a better broadcasting of the event.