The cautionary tale of a Tour de France sponsor
Santini pays millions to supply jerseys to the Tour de France. Does it matter if the best riders sometimes go out of their way to avoid them?
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, we’re talking about millions and milliseconds 🚴💨.
I’ve been obsessed this week with the story of a Tour de France sponsorship gone wrong. Or maybe gone right? You be the judge.
First the backstory: Italian cycling brand Santini is the official jersey provider of the Tour de France. Santini makes the uniforms for sale in the official race shop, plus the hats, bibs and gloves purchased by fans. While riders in the race typically wear jerseys made by their individual team’s sponsors, there are exceptions. The race’s four major competitions each have a special colored jersey—yellow 🟡 for the overall leader, white ⚪ for the best young rider, green 🟢 for the best sprinter, and polka dots ⭕ for the best climber—and if you’re the current leader in one of those classifications, you have to wear a Santini jersey in the race.
Most of the time that’s no problem. In a standard stage, where cyclists pack tightly in groups for a majority of the ride, there’s no major difference between a Santini jersey and one made by any other elite cycling company. But every Tour de France features a few time trials, in which riders go solo for shorter distances at an elevated output. For these stages the riders sport outlandish helmets, flashy bikes and state-of-the-art skinsuits.
Like all the other stages, the leaders of those four classifications have to wear Santini skinsuits for the time trial. And this appears to be an issue.
Race favorites spend months leading up to the Tour in wind tunnels working with their sponsors to build a skinsuit that perfectly matches their body in both fit and fabric. It can mean a difference of 15 seconds over a 40km stage, and that could be the difference between winning and losing cycling’s biggest prize.
On Tuesday, race favorite Tadej Pogačar looked like he might have to wear the polka dot skinsuit for the first time trial. Then, in the middle of a benign stretch of road, his teammate raced ahead of the whole peloton in a bizarre spectacle that gave him just enough climbing points to take the jersey away from Pogačar. After the stage, former Tour de France champion Bradley Wiggins guessed that the whole stunt was designed just to keep Pogačar in his own skinsuit for the first time trial.1
“We know how important the aerodynamics and the time trial set-up is to the riders,” Wiggins said that day on the Sir Wiggo & Johan Show. “The biggest thing now is the helmet and the skinsuit, and the fabric that it’s made from.”
Wiggins is speaking from experience. During the 2012 Critérium du Dauphiné, another major stage race, he took the yellow jersey on Stage 2 and then tried to lose it on Stage 3 just so that he didn’t have to wear the official race sponsor’s skinsuit (this one made by Le Coq Sportif) in the Stage 4 time trial. That’s right, he wanted so badly to avoid the sponsor skinsuit that he tried to give up his place as the race leader (!) just so he could wear his own.
This is so top of mind that prior Tour de France winners like Wiggins and Lance Armstrong would come to the race with their own skinsuits printed in yellow, with the logo of the official sponsor, and they’d wear those instead. Race organizers eventually closed that loophole.2
Santini, which became the official Tour de France provider in 2022, no doubt understands this dynamic and has taken steps to mitigate it. On the eve of the time trials, the company now sends tailors to specifically measure the four riders on their time trial bikes. Here’s Pogačar doing that last year 👇
This has gotten good press, including this glowing writeup in Outside Magazine, but it doesn’t appear to have fully assuaged riders’ concerns.
“I still think that isn’t right,” Johan Bruyneel, a former pro who has won nine Tour de France titles as a team director, told Wiggins on the show. “These big teams invest all these resources in trying to have the fastest fabric ever. On top of that, there’s the comfort of your own clothing, that you’re used to.”
I asked a Santini spokeswoman about the dynamic. She replied that Pogačar “has been wearing our time trial suits since 2022—not only at the Tour de France but in other races as well—and has even won several time trials in them.”3
This whole conversation isn’t really about Santini. Riders don’t want to avoid their product because it’s Santini, they want to avoid it because it’s not what they’re used to. That said, it’s a tough spot for the Italian brand. Sponsors pay millions to the Tour so that they’re associated with the world’s best cyclists. And the photos of race leaders wearing Santini skinsuits are the ROI. Here’s a recent Santini social media post 👇
Does it matter if the riders don’t always want to wear them? I’m not convinced that it does. Most people viewing pictures or videos from the race aren’t aware of this dynamic.4 And as the old adage goes, maybe all press is good press.
I’ve been trying to think of a comparable example from major U.S. team sports, and I can’t. Part of that, I think, is because U.S. team sports are already so commercialized. If Club Sportico suddenly made the world’s best wide receiver gloves, Ja’Marr Chase couldn’t wear them in an NFL game. And each player on Duke’s men’s basketball team has to wear Nike shoes whether he likes it or not. There’s almost never a public complaint, even when the star’s shoe comes apart in a nationally-televised game vs. UNC.
American athletes are used to being told what to wear because the league is making money off it. Santini should be sponsoring here.
Jacob’s ⚡ Take: American sports absolutely need to adopt the concept of different jerseys for various stat leaders. A polka-dotted Luka Dončić uni would do crazy numbers. (Also, you absolutely should be watching the Tour de France.)
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.
Pogačar ended up back in the polka dot jersey the following day after he won the next stage. The new prevailing theory is that he knew he would likely win that stage, his 100th pro cycling victory, and didn’t want to do so wearing polka dots. After briefly taking the King of the Mountains kit, Pogačar’s teammate simply said the two-time Tour winner “is a generous person, he doesn't mind sharing.”
Wiggins went one step further as well. His team was sponsored by Nalini, but he preferred the chamois made by a company called Assos, so he sent all of his Nalini shorts to Assos and they would remove the chamois and replace it with an Assos one.
Good answer!
Even if they should be. Cycling’s mix of specific preferences and concealed motives combined with insane levels of detailed preparation are what make its biggest races so compelling.