The Tour de France is one of the most iconic sporting events in the world. The three-week carnival is the most viewed annual sporting occasion on the planet and is reportedly watched by 3.5 billion people in more than 200 countries.
Add in the ‘Netflix effect’ with the release of the second season of the streaming platform’s Tour de France: Unchained and that 3.5 billion creeps up further.
The Tour de France is unique, too, in that every one of its editions has been different. While certain dramatic climbs (Alpe d’Huez, Mont Ventoux and Col du Tourmalet) are on regular rotation, and the finish on the Champs-Élysées was a staple between 1975 and 2023, the route changes every year.
But where each stage starts or concludes isn’t solely down to the whims of the race’s route planner. In fact, becoming a host venue can take years of planning and preparation, while there is a substantial cost involved for each location’s 15 minutes of fame.
Who owns the Tour de France?
Before delving into what’s charged to have the Tour de France come to town, it’s worth considering who owns the race – and is therefore profiting from these hosting fees.
The Tour de France is organised each year by Amaury Sports Organisation (A.S.O.), an independent business that is a subsidiary of Groupe Amaury, the family-run media empire headed by Marie-Odile Amaury, the widow of Philippe Amaury, and her two children, Jean-Etienne and Aurore.
A.S.O., and by extension Groupe Amaury, has owned at least 50 per cent of the race’s rights since Philippe Amaury’s father, Émilien, acquired them in 1944 when assisting the then race director Jacques Goddet to start the sports newspaper L’Equipe in post-World War II Paris.
Émilien and A.S.O. eventually secured 100 per cent of Le Tour’s rights when he bought L’Equipe in 1965. While A.S.O. also owns the rights to other events such as the Dakar Rally and cycling races including Paris-Nice and Paris-Roubaix, the Tour remains the jewel in its crown.
“The Tour de France is by far the biggest in terms of the value,” says Alex Duff, author of Le Fric: Family, Power and Money: The Business of the Tour de France. He adds that it’s possible to see from accounts that the family have consistently paid themselves €20 million in dividends each year for the last 10-20 years, and “it's fair to assume that most of it comes from the Tour de France – the other sporting events they own are much smaller in terms of the amount of revenue they generate”.
If that sounds like an eye-watering sum of money, you only have to look at A.S.O.’s most recent accounts to see how profitable its events are. In the year to 31 December 2022, the company made more than €90 million profit – an increase of almost €20 million on the previous 12 months.
Two notable additions that could have been behind 2022’s bumper profits were the launch of Le Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift and the first season of Tour de France: Unchained.
“The two main revenue sources are television rights and sponsorship rights,” says Duff. “They are quite stable sources of income because they're multi-year deals. The hosting rights are less valuable, but they’re still a good income source.”
What are the costs of hosting a Tour de France stage?
While it’s not clear when A.S.O. officially started charging hosting rights, Duff’s book notes how “mayors across France helped out by paying a hosting fee in return for the travelling circus stopping in their towns” as far back as the 1960s, while in 1977 “the mayor of Rennes complained about the cost of hosting a stage of the race, calling it a ‘commercial enterprise, which overshadows a sporting contest’.”
These locations aren’t limited to France either, and the first Grand Départ – where the race starts outside of France – took place in Amsterdam in 1954. It has begun in numerous European host cities and towns since then, including the UK, Ireland, Denmark and Spain. This year it starts in Italy for the first time and in 2026 it will return to Spain.
While A.S.O. refused to comment to Bike Radar on the costs of hosting a Tour de France stage, a spokesman told Accounting and Business magazine in 2023 that “start cities pay €90,000 [$97,000] fees and arriving cities pay €130,000 [$140,000].”
The Grand Départ can set back locations a lot more though. “It depends on the country and the host city. Logistical and organisation costs are not the same,” added the spokesman.
For the 2024 Grand Départ in Florence, the Tuscan city has paid €3 million to A.S.O. to host the first stage, which will see the peloton pass the iconic Duomo and roll over the medieval Ponte Vecchio bridge during the neutralised zone before racing starts in earnest from the city walls.
But the costs of hosting the Tour de France only start with A.S.O.’s fee. In addition to the host costs, all locations must invest in security, improved road surfaces, crowd management, press and marketing, and any side events celebrating the Tour’s visit. It’s how the costs of the 2014 Grand Départ in Yorkshire, Cambridge, Essex and London ballooned from the £4.2 million paid to A.S.O. to £29.4 million in total.
“The Tour de France is a huge show that has no equals in the world,” says Dr Nicola Armentano, a councillor for the Metropolitan City of Florence when asked why the city bid to host the 2024 Grand Départ when Italy already has the Giro d’Italia.
He adds that the total investment, including A.S.O.’s fee, will reach around €5 million, with €350,000 set aside for side events hosted by local associations and cultural institutions to promote the Tour de France but also the legacy of Tuscany’s past champions.
“There was also the aim of enhancing the figures of the great past cyclists because Tuscany gave birth to [1938 Tour de France winner] Gino Bartali, [1960 Tour de France winner] Gastone Nencini and Alfredo Martini. The newest generation knows about Pantani, but they don't go further in the past,” says Armentano.
After Tuscany, the 2024 Tour moves on to Emilia-Romagna and Piedmont for stages two and three, and each of the other regions has been charged a separate, smaller fee to host the start and finish.
“The [Grand Départ] of the tour is more attractive than the other stages,” explains Dr Armentano, before adding that the team presentations and extended accommodation requirements before the first stage mean it will “affect the local economy much more than the other stages”.
Is it worth it?
While the costs involved might sound like bankrupting sums for local councils to cough up, especially in hard economics, having Le Tour pass through a town will provide an economic boom.
“All these cities will run the numbers of what it will generate – they don't just do it in the hope that it might generate income,” says Duff. “They have some economic modelling to work out benefits: how many people will visit, how much people will spend, research on previous hosts, so they have a fair idea how much it will generate. It's not only foreign visitors but people from the host country will also come to visit and increase their spending.”
Dr Armentano forecasts that Florence expects to benefit by about €20 million when you add up the hotel, food and beverage, and general expenses of those directly involved with the event (athletes, staff and media) and visitors.
If anything, those figures sound conservative. The ‘Three Inspirational Days’ report into the 2014 Grand Départ found there was a £128 million boost to Yorkshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex and London because of the Tour de France, while Jeroen Roppe, spokesman for Visit Brussels, says hotels in the Belgian capital earned €5 million extra income during its hosting of the 2019 Grand Départ.
“The occupancy grade of the hotels in Brussels was more or less 85 per cent, so almost all the hotels were fully occupied,” Roppe adds.
The downsides
Putting on a stage start or finish isn’t without its downsides, though. All of the tourism office and council representatives interviewed suggest they hadn’t faced any opposition from local groups to the expense or disruption caused by the Tour de France. But a 2022 study published in the Sports Economics Review revealed the willingness to pay for hosting that year’s Grand Départ in Denmark decreased with the physical distance from the route, suggesting the main reason was high travel costs to see the event.
The race itself is also a logistical nightmare. “It's an incredibly complicated sport to run,” says Duff. “A lot of planning resources are needed to make it happen. It's not like a football match where everything happens in the stadium – you've got traffic to manage, extra police hours, to make sure there are no security risks. A.S.O. does a tremendous job, and it has a huge experience, and it has to work with a city for months, if not years, to get the show on the road.”
For some host cities, there’s no guarantee the investment will pay off. Rotterdam is set to host Le Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift’s Grand Départ in August, and the project director, Lisette Eijgelsheim, concedes that making a business case for hosting has been difficult. It’s the women’s race’s first time abroad, the first edition not run concurrently with the men’s race, and its 12 August start date falls during a popular holiday period in the Netherlands.
“We did predictions about the number of visitors for the permits and police, but economically, it's hard [to forecast],” she says.
The legacy of Le Tour
Eijgelsheim stresses that it’s not only about the bottom line though: “It's important for the city's marketing because Le Tour de France Femmes is broadcast live in almost 90 countries. We’ll also use the event for social programmes to get kids and people on bikes, not only for transport but also for health.”
Rotterdam has organised three months of pre-event activities, including a big cycling festival on the weekend before the first stage, where residents can ride stage three’s closed-circuit individual time trial course.
There is some precedent here, too. In the ‘Three Inspirational Days’ report, 2,000,000 spectators said they felt inspired to cycle more frequently after witnessing the 2014 Grand Départ in Yorkshire and 1,000,000 said they’d cycled more frequently since the race.
Aside from the positive social impact for residents, councils and tourism offices are also banking on a post-Tour visitor increase with their village, town or city broadcast into the homes of billions of potential visitors.
“It’s difficult to measure the exact revenue and whether people decide to come to Brussels because they have seen beautiful images of the city during the Grand Départ,” says Roppe. “I can't say how much Euro we get for that in return, but every article in every magazine, or every report on television, has a certain value – a price value – and that you can measure.”
In a report shared by the Düsseldorf Tourism office, the estimated advertising equivalent value was calculated to be more than €343 million. That’s not a bad return on its €4.5 million fee to A.S.O.
“There's also a certain feel-good factor,” adds Duff. “The Tour passing by makes people proud to show off their town and their village to the whole world. It makes the mayor and local government look good, and there are those political benefits – it's not just about money.”
A worthwhile investment
It could be argued that A.S.O.’s profits show the business doesn’t need to charge hosting fees to remain in the black. But the logistics involved – particularly abroad – are a sign that the Amaury family’s seven-figure charges aren’t pure profit, with the organisation directly involved at a granular level in putting on each of the 21 stages.
While it might be difficult for councils and governments to stomach the costs involved in hosting a Tour de France stage start, finish or Grand Départ – as seen in Britain’s abandoning of a bid to host the 2026 event – the economic benefits alone outweigh the initial outlay.
When combined with the potential for an increase in tourism and positive sentiment towards a location, and a legacy of increased participation, it starts to look like good value for money.
