Town hopes to spin Tour profit

Nobody anywhere focuses on the Tour de France so singlemindedly as Lance Armstrong, the American rider expected to win for the fourth year in a row when the race finishes on the Champs-Élysées Sunday.

But Paul Cinquint is almost as obsessed. When the tour starts its penultimate stage from this tiny winemaking village on Saturday morning, it will mark the fulfillment of an eight-year campaign to put his hometown on the map.

And while Mr. Armstrong is chasing a $340,000 winner's purse, along with the glory, Régnié-Durette has its hopes pinned on even more valuable earnings: the economic impact of unprecedented publicity for its little-known Beaujolais red wine, the source of the village's wealth.

Publicity is the Tour de France's middle name. The three-week race is the third-most-popular sporting event in Europe, after the Olympic Games and the soccer World Cup. French TV and radio give the race blanket, start-to-finish coverage. On Saturday, race organizers estimate, half a million spectators will line the 31-mile route of the time trial that begins in Régnié-Durette.

"This is going to be out of this world," says Mr. Cinquint, a winemaker himself since he retired from cycle racing. "There are so many new wines in the world, we get lost. We need as much media coverage as we can get."

The 2,100-mile Tour de France is more than the most grueling test of human endurance on the international sporting calendar. It is also a money machine.

"The Tour de France is our most profitable event of the year," says Philippe Sudres, spokesman for Amaury Sports Organization, the company that owns the tour and which also runs other major events such as the Paris Marathon and the Paris-Dakar car and motorcycle rally.

The annual race around France, a summer landmark here, earns more than half of the company's $65 million turnover on cycling events, according to Mr. Sudres.

Nearly half of that money comes from selling TV rights to the 75 stations around the world that broadcast the race. Another 45 percent comes from sponsorship deals that have allowed the tour to flourish.

A leading French bank, Credit Lyonnais, sponsors the yellow jersey that the overall tour leader wears each day. A big supermarket chain sponsors the red-spotted jersey worn by the leading mountain climber. Fiat, the Italian automaker, ensures that its logo is painted on the road at each finish line.

Those companies, and many others, also are allowed to drive their brightly painted cars, vans, and floats in a massive advertising "caravan" that precedes the cyclists along the tour's route each day, handing out hundreds of thousands of logo-laden pens, hats, sweets, and other goodies to spectators lining the road.

Fifteen million people – a quarter of the French population – turn out to see the tour each year, offering advertisers a vast ready-made and attentive audience.

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