It is July in France, and I am perched on a narrow roadside awaiting the arrival of 176 professional road cyclists in the 2017 Tour de France. Since the tour’s inauguration in 1903 to help boost sales of an ailing sports newspaper (L’Auto), millions of people have been roadside spectators, while many more across the world have followed the phenomenon via media. There is a good chance that you know a little about the tour even if you have never seen it. Eric Reed puts this spectatorship into context in his book, in a comprehensive portrayal of the tour’s economic history and global influence. Tracing the evolution of French cycling and its commercial interests, Reed’s tour analysis is set against a backdrop of globalizing processes in and beyond France through the twentieth century. It is a book that engages foremost with the tour’s economic organization, commercialization, marketing, media, and consumption, and is likely to be of interest to many readers of this journal.

Reed’s tour history unfolds across seven chapters, beginning with a prologue (aptly named for those who know cycling sport) and introduction, and rounded off with an afterword. A well-structured bibliography and notes complete the book. Reed’s analysis is shaped around three broad and interwoven topics: (1) commercialization of sport cycling and the tour, particularly in relation to developments in telecommunications that saw a shift from print media as the main way that people consumed the tour to the rise of television broadcasting in the 1950s and 1960s, and its global expansion in the 1980s; (2) how provincial cities participated in and became shaped by the tour and its commercial initiatives (specifically the cities of Brest, in northwest France, and Pau, in southwest France); and (3) teams and riders who became celebrities with the power to shape and convey cycling identities, as well as identities of France, its regions, and its people, to international consumers. Commercial and cultural globalizing processes provide the binding glue.

Reed’s text has much to recommend it to a wide and varied audience. Not only is the content very well researched (the bibliography is richly detailed and well organized showing the variety of archives, periodicals, autobiographies, interviews, and other academic and gray literature that construct this text) but it is also informative and sprinkled with trinkets of interesting information that will appeal to tour fans and those involved in sport cycling, alongside academics. I am of the opinion, however, that an academic audience is not Reed’s primary focus in this book. While the notes compiled at the end of the book make the text a lighter read for nonacademics, I also found that the text dealt rather fleetingly with many of its concepts and references to other academic work. As an example, there is limited explanation and no critical development of the term “deterritorialization” than its appearance on page 3, despite its relevance for conceptual discussions of globalization. For these reasons, I describe Reed’s tour analysis as set against a backdrop of globalizing processes rather than offering a deep theoretical critique and evaluation of globalization.

However, this is not to discredit a book that otherwise complements academic enquiry. Reed makes a valuable contribution to existing academic tour literature whose various foci have not fully addressed the economics of the tour on which Reed is clearly an expert (also see Reed’s earlier journal papers ^{Footnote 1} ). Reed also evokes much about French society through the twentieth century, and I found Chapter 5—Reed’s analysis of the tour and globalizing processes in two provincial cities—particularly strong, as Reed demonstrates how Brest and Pau used the tour to respond to societal changes (e.g., the decline of wealthy seasonal British visitors to Pau post-World War I, and subsequent modernization and rebranding of the city). Reed not only shows how the tour as a national and international phenomenon was used by these cities to help shape their identities on an international stage but also how the tour’s development was influenced by these cities at local level. In this way, Reed captures, appropriately, the two-way relations of globalizing processes: from the local to the global, and vice versa.

Wearing my figurative academic hat and my red polka dot Tour de France cap, I enjoyed this book very much. Academically, this book ought to be accessible to departments with sport history; economics and marketing; French history; geography; sociology; and studies of culture, commerce, media, and marketing. The tour is also an engaging and more unusual case study for students to learn about and explore conceptual topics. Furthermore, I am always pleased to recommend a book that has potential to inspire further research. This one does, I believe. For example, Reed refers briefly to the role of the Internet in the tour’s global outreach, and I wondered how analysis of social media would complement or challenge Reed’s thesis, bringing it more fully into the twenty-first century. As I wrote this review, a former champion of the Tour de France, Alberto Contador, announced his retirement from professional cycling via an Instagram video, indicating the central role that social media is playing in sport cycling.

Despite the power of media and its extensive influence in globalizing the tour, I would argue that one of the best ways to experience the tour is in person, just as I would encourage those who have an interest in this subject to seek out this book for reading.