The Tour de France in the middle of French riots
What should you do when a sporting event happens amidst social unrest?
Dear readers,
First off, thanks for indulging our (unannounced) break last weekend. We’ve been grinding away these past couple of weeks, and we decided that we could use the holiday weekend to sit around and unwind a bit. We hope you all had a similarly relaxing Independence Day.
That said, the two of us used our downtime to tune into one of our favorite annual sporting events: the opening stages of the Tour de France, which kicked off last week in Bilbao. This year’s tour is a bit different, though, as it’s unfolding against some of the most widespread social unrest to hit France in the past two decades. More on that below.
-Calder and Ian
On June 27, less than a week before the riders in the 2023 Tour de France crossed the border from Spain to France, police officers in a suburb of Paris shot and killed Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old of North African descent. The events that led to Merzouk’s death are all too familiar: two police officers pulled Merzouk over after he committed a minor traffic violation, the teenager attempted to flee, and the officers pulled their weapons and fired. Merzouk died at the scene, and his two passengers were arrested.
News of Merzouk’s death quickly spread across France, sparking widespread riots and civil unrest. Now, it’s worth acknowledging that the French have a long history of taking to the streets, and the standards for “violent unrest” are much higher there than they are over here in the ol’ US of A. (Street protests in France that would send Fox News anchors into a blubbering tizzy if they took place in an American city often don’t even make national news on the continent.) Yet even by the high standards of French protests, these demonstrations were brutal. As of this week, the riots have caused an estimated $1 billion in damages to businesses, and French authorities have responded with characteristic muscle, deploying armored vehicles to the streets and arresting hundreds of protesters, many of them young men. The images coming out of cities across the country are fairly shocking.
Viewers watching the Tour, though, could be forgiven for thinking that everything in France was hunky dory. Incredibly, the protests and riots have left the celebrated race untouched. In a statement put out before the first stage, race organizers said they were “ready to adapt” if the protests threatened to disrupt the race, but so far, the race has proceeded according to schedule. The riders have been similarly tight-lipped about the unrest, with only a handful of them even acknowledging that demonstrations were taking place outside the bubble of the Tour. The result has been a bizarre bit of visual dissonance: shots of sinewy men riding placidly through the French countryside juxtaposed with images of buses burning in French cities.
Is there an easy way to reconcile this dissonance? Probably not. Of course, the firebrand in us wants the riders to express some support for the protesters’ underlying grievances — about police violence, racial discrimination, and the smug indifference of France’s ruling elite — even if they distance themselves from the violence. But it’s clear that that’s not going to happen. For one thing, the vast majority of the riders on the Tour aren’t French, meaning they’re probably not eager to wade into French domestic politics (if they support the protests in the first place). On top of that, the riders, working through hundred-mile rides up mountains and all, express a laser-focused dedication to their craft that’s at another level from popular American sports. Not every sporting event will react to political unrest like the NBA reacted to the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, with an impressive (if short-lived) work stoppage.
But it’s hard not to wonder whether the racial demographics of the Tour have something to do with its distance from the unrest. This year, there is only one Black rider among the 176-person field — the Eritrean cyclist Biniam Girmay — and no riders from North Africa. All the French riders are white. Unlike American sports teams, the Tour doesn’t draw heavily from the minority demographics that are most often affected by police violence. It is insulated both geographically and demographically from the protests.
That geographic distance might change toward the end of the Tour, when the race passes through major cities like Paris. But for now, it’s a tale of two Frances: one with its legs on fire, and the other with its buses burning.
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