Club Sportico: Are Tour de France Riders Avoiding a Major Sponsor?

This week’s Club Sportico essay looks at the way in which commercial sponsorships and detail-oriented cyclists sometimes clash at the world’s biggest bike race.

Tour de France riders are obsessive about their equipment, including bikes, helmets, shoes and jerseys. That’s why one of the race’s most prominent sponsorships—the official jersey provider—has been controversial among riders for decades.

Most Tour riders wear jerseys supplied by their own teams, but on every stage four cyclists have to wear jerseys provided by Santini, the Italian cycling company that is the race’s official sponsor. Those four riders are the leaders of the Tour’s four main classifications—the overall leader (yellow jersey), the best young rider (white jersey), the best sprinter (green jersey) and the best climber (polka dot jersey).

While there’s little performance difference in a standard stage, pro riders spend weeks leading up to the tour honing the perfect skinsuit for the time trials. On those stages, some feel like it’s a disadvantage to swap out their personal skinsuit for the one made by Santini.

In the past few decades, riders have deliberately dropped time to avoid wearing the sponsor’s skinsuits. They’ve also tried to have their preferred skinsuits printed with other companies’ logos to get around the rules. Does it make the sponsorship any less valuable if the best riders in the world don’t want it?

Here is an excerpt of the Club Sportico essay ✍️:

“On Tuesday, race favorite Tadej Pogačar looked like he might have to wear the polka dot skinsuit for the first time trial. Then, in the middle of a benign stretch of road, his teammate raced ahead of the whole peloton in a bizarre spectacle that gave him just enough climbing points to take the jersey away from Pogačar. After the stage, former Tour de France champion Bradley Wiggins guessed that the whole stunt was designed just to keep Pogačar in his own skinsuit for the first time trial.

“We know how important the aerodynamics and the time trial set-up is to the riders,” Wiggins said that day on The Sir Wiggo & Johan Show. “The biggest thing now is the helmet and the skinsuit, and the fabric that it’s made from.”

Wiggins is speaking from experience. During the 2012 Critérium du Dauphiné, another major stage race, he took the yellow jersey on Stage 2 and then tried to lose it on Stage 3 just so that he didn’t have to wear the official race sponsor’s skinsuit (this one made by Le Coq Sportif) in the Stage 4 time trial. That’s right, he wanted so badly to avoid the sponsor skinsuit that he tried to give up his place as the race leader (!) just so he could wear his own.

This is so top of mind that prior Tour de France winners like Wiggins and Lance Armstrong would come to the race with their own skinsuits printed in yellow, with the logo of the official sponsor, and they’d wear those instead. Race organizers eventually closed that loophole.

Santini, which became the official Tour de France provider in 2022, no doubt understands this dynamic and has taken steps to mitigate it. On the eve of the time trials, the company now sends tailors to specifically measure the four riders on their time trial bikes.”

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