One of my favourite parts of summer is following the daily action of the Tour de France – the world’s most prominent and arguably, most difficult bike race.

Riding for five to six hours, nearly every day for three weeks is not only a big challenge for the competitors but also for the TV presenters who have to come up with things to talk about in the long stretches between the attacks and sprints.

In one lull in the action early in the year’s race the presenters were discussing how teams were making extra efforts to encourage fans to buy and wear team jerseys. One of the many quirks of cycling culture is that most cyclists frown upon wearing a pro “kit”, believing that if you have not been selected to a pro team, you have not earned the right to wear the jersey.

That’s a sharp contrast with most other professional sports where merchandise sales are such a priority the actual competition starts to feel like an afterthought.

One of the presenters issued a challenge to the audience when he asked – “If you love cycling, why wouldn’t you wear the “kit” of your favourite team or rider?”

This got me thinking – why indeed? Would I wear the jersey of my favourite rider or team?

A factor that is important to that decision is that in cycling, teams don’t have their own names and logos – they are named after major sponsors. Because they are expensive, those title sponsorships are often shared among more than one company. Team names end up being odd mashups of multiple brand names like Soudal-Quick-Step or Lidl-Trek.

So wearing a team jersey doesn’t just signal your support for the team or a rider, it implicitly implies support for the sponsor(s). And because cycling tends to attract European-based sponsors, the brands tend to be less familiar to North American audiences.

This lack of familiarity has always made cycling feel less commercial to me – I just don’t feel like I’m being advertised to when see a team called “Groupama-FDJ” because I have no idea what those companies are. I would probably feel differently if a team was called “Scotiabank-Loblaws” for example.

So if I’m going to consider wearing a jersey, I should figure out who the sponsors are first.

In this year’s Tour de France, there are 22 teams representing a total of 38 major sponsors. About half of the sponsors are companies that sell products, retailers and lotteries targeted at consumers. A handful of sponsors sell products and services that target businesses.

However nearly one in three teams is sponsored by a fossil fuel company or a nation-state that is a major fossil fuel producer – and that creates some awkward situations as cyclists struggle with the effects of climate change while promoting countries, companies and some financiers of the fossil fuel industry responsible for it.

Once again, this year’s tour got underway amid a record heatwave in Europe. In other years, extreme temperatures have caused organizers to spray water on the roads to prevent them from melting. Officials have also had to relax rules to allow riders to rehydrate early in the race.

Much of the drama on the first day of this year’s racing concerned Mark Cavendish – an aging champion, coming back from injury to hopefully win one more stage of the tour to earn the all-time record for most career stage wins.

Cavendish struggled brutally with the heat on day one, vomiting multiple times as his team tried to cool him with socks filled with ice stuffed down his jersey – a jersey promoting Astana, Kazakstan – the capital city of one of the world’s major oil-producing nations.

In the end, Cavendish managed to get through the 200km stage in just under 6 hours – just under the time limit allowing him to continue in the race.

“The world’s warming up, that’s clear,” was the comment from Zak Dempster, the head of the Ineos Grenadiers, another top cycling team, named for one of the world’s largest petrochemicals companies, Ineos.¹

There’s an irony to cyclists commenting on how climate change is affecting them while at the same time wearing uniforms promoting fossil fuel interests to the more than 3.5 billion viewers.

For years the Tour de France has served as a prime showcase for both astounding athletic performances as well as the beauty and diversity of the French countryside. Increasingly though, it is highlighting some of the most alarming impacts of climate change, guiding cyclists through drought-stricken farmland, past melting glaciers, near raging wildfires, and into the path of historic heat waves.

Many are questioning the appropriateness of this beloved bike race, imperilled by climate change, accepting sponsorship from companies and nations that are directly responsible for the fossil fuels that are responsible for the crisis.

The business model of professional cycling is particularly dependent on sponsorship funding. Unlike sports like football which allow teams to sell tickets to their stadiums, the most popular cycling races take place on public roads over thousands of kilometres and are rarely ticketed. Prize money is also limited. This year’s Tour de France will divide up €2.5 million (~$3.7 million CAD) in prize money among all of its top finishers and sub-category winners.

Contrast that with the UEFA Champions League (football/soccer) where the total prize pool is almost $3.0 billion CAD, with the winning team receiving about $190 million.

While sports in general and cycling, in particular, are very hard-pressed to refuse any form of advertising and sponsorship, there is a growing momentum to ban oil and gas advertising.

Governments aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels are increasingly taking action. In August 2022, France became the first European country to ban fossil fuel advertising. Similar legislation has been enacted in Amsterdam and Sydney, Australia.

These bans do not extend to sponsorship deals for sports competitions and teams, which frequently amount to hundreds of millions of dollars and are becoming a critical battleground.

“Sponsoring sports events and teams, as well as arts and cultural events, is a trick the fossil fuel industry took straight from Big Tobacco’s playbook,” said Silvia Pastorelli, a Greenpeace climate and energy campaigner in Brussels in an article published by Bloomberg last year. “They create a sense of familiarity with their brand, while at the same time disassociating it from the catastrophic impacts that their products have on the environment.”

Climate protests in sports are on the rise. In 2022, the Tour de France was disrupted by activists from the group Dernière Rénovation on three occasions by flares and by gluing themselves to the road. Climate protestors have disrupted major sporting events in tennis, Formula 1, soccer, golf, rugby, cricket and snooker – to name a few.

As we approach the Paris Olympics, athletes will face a much warmer climate compared to a century ago. Average temperatures in Paris during the 2024 Olympics (July 26 – August 11) have increased by 5.5°F since the city hosted the games in 1924. With the risk of competing in extreme heat increasing, nearly a dozen Olympians are demanding heat protections and an end to fossil fuel sponsorships.

Those demands are modelled on rules that curb the promotion of tobacco products. In the 2000s, tobacco company sponsorship in sports and cultural events largely vanished due to stricter global legislation on harmful products. Activists hope similar laws will soon curb the promotion of fossil fuels.

So, it’s safe to say that there is a lot of baggage that goes into a decision to wear the jersey of a favourite cyclist.

One of the most popular cyclists today is the Slovenian phenom Tadej Pogacar. His team UAE Emirates, is sponsored by a nation whose oil and natural gas reserves are the world’s seventh and eighth-largest and which is considered to be an authoritarian dictatorship by the Economist’s 2023 Democracy Index and has been subject to criticisms for abuses of human rights.

I don’t know how much Pogacar thinks about all of this as he wears the yellow jersey, emblazoned with the UAE logo in this year’s tour.

It is safe to say that when the Tour de France was started in 1903, no one imagined the extreme temperatures that riders would be facing today – the original yellow jersey was made out of wool.

1. Ineos also runs a somewhat complementary auto business, manufacturing the Ineos Grenadier, a range of muscular off-road utility vehicles. ↩︎