The force of the Tour: a big day in the life of a French village
July 21, 2004 - Agence France-Presse
The day after the Tour de France rolls through the quaint town of Arreau in the French Pyrenees, you wouldn’t know you had just missed one of the biggest days of the year for the town’s merchants.
“That’s because they’re all asleep!” says bartender Jean-Jacques Dumont, himself looking a bit groggy-eyed. At noon, there’s not much going on in Arreau.
Claire Guillot, his companion and managing partner at Arreau’s tiny bar, Le Peyresourde, pulls out the cash register tape for the previous day from an envelope behind the bar. Broken down by the hour, it shows steady sales throughout the morning, while people were watching the Tour go by less than a kilometer away.
At around 3 pm, however, once the riders passed Arreau and began making their way up to the Col d’Aspin mountain pass, the numbers on the till spike and stay well above normal for several hours.
“As soon as the Tour went by, it was like a flood of umbrellas coming down the street into town, then we must have had 90 people watching it on our television,” says Guillot while gesturing around the room.
Dumont walks back from the other side of the bar after tending to a slowly growing number of customers. “You should have seen it,” he says, “I think I counted 130 people at one point!”
His partner rolls her eyes and smiles. Whatever the correct number, putting 90 or 130 people in the tiny bar would be an impressive feat.
Though it passes by in a brightly-colored flash, the Tour means big business for small towns like Arreau along its route.
Even Dumont, who announces himself as only “moderately interested” in the event, has a special “Tour Edition” of a bicycle magazine open to the two pages covering the leg they’re watching today between Lannemezan and Plateau de Beille; on the magazine’s map, he knows exactly where the pack is riding.
For the cafe managers and the town’s other merchants who cater to tourism, the days surrounding the Tour’s arrival can be some of the busiest of the year.
“People come from all over France, Europe and the rest of the world, and go to the butcher, the baker and the grocer’s while they’re here,” explains Dumont, “they need stuff to eat along the route and even if they just come through and buy a saucisson (dried sausage), it’s not negligible.”
More importantly, whether it’s a saucisson, a drink at the bar or a hunk of cheese, he says, “It’s a first step in getting to know Arreau.”
“They discover the town and will come back again,” says Dumont, who doesn’t hide his interest in eventually becoming the town’s mayor. “It’s like when a kid goes to summer camp in a region, then comes back to the area regularly when he’s an adult.”
As he talks, two Dutch cyclists pull up out front to buy the Dutch newspaper, De Telegraaf, at the newsstand next to Le Peyresourde. Sjef Essink and his son Leon have come to the region with their family to follow the Tour for five days.
“We love cycling in the mountains,” says Leon, a student and avid cycle racer, “and Holland is a bit flat!”
At the butcher’s, Henri Delarue is busy restocking a nearly depleted display of his homemade saucissons. “The tour puts the town on the map and brings in money to me,” he says with a grin from behind a stack of jars of the foie gras he makes.
“In Arreau, we’ve got the luck to be on a street called ‘La Route des Cols’ (the mountain pass road),” he says.
Indeed, nestled in a valley, Arreau seems to be perfectly placed between mountain passes to perpetually benefit from the Tour coming through; the mountains are always an important proving ground for cyclists on the Tour, and Arreau is near to towns like Lannemezan that compete in fierce bidding wars to host a beginning or end of a leg of the tour.
What if the tour didn’t happen to come near Arreau any more? “I’d make about 50,000 francs [just under 8,000 euros] less!” says Delarue as he makes a diving motion with his hand.
At the small grocery chain next to Delarue’s shop, store manager Mary-Lise Martin agrees. “It doubles our take for a day. I wish it would come through once a month!”
Back up at La Peyresourde, a slow trickle of locals and tourists have rolled into the bar and everyone sits facing the television to watch the day’s race. Dumont tugs at my sleeve, “I was talking with a buddy of mine about the Tour—we agreed that anybody who thinks that it doesn’t bring much to the region is kidding themselves.”
