THE AMAURYS

They have controlled the Tour de France for 70 years and now own many of the sport’s biggest races. Famously private and vigorously protective of their interests, the Amaury family holds the key to cycling’s financial future

Writer: Peter Cossins

Meet the Amaurys, the family at the centre of professional cycling’s Game of Thrones. Over three generations, they took control of the Tour de France and its newspaper partner L’Équipe. Since then, they’ve tightened their grip, resisting all attempts to establish any form of power-sharing, particularly with regard to the huge revenue stream that the Tour generates each year. 

This April, their hold on the Tour and a rapidly growing portfolio of events run by Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO) became even firmer when they bought up the 25 per cent stake in parent company Éditions Philippe Amaury. Now EPA’s president Marie-Odile Amaury and her two children, ASO president Jean-Étienne and EPA board member Aurore, own 100 per cent of EPA’s stock, making these three relative unknowns among the biggest players on the world cycling stage.

Before assessing how the Amaurys may want to mould the sport’s future, it’s worth learning more about the past. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the foundation of Le Parisien Libéré, the newspaper set up by French resistance members Émilien Amaury and Claude Bellanger. First published on 22 August 1944, its first headline declared: “Victory in Paris is close at hand!” The paper replaced a collaborationist title and the partners’ resistance activities gave them considerable clout within the publishing industry in post-war France. Consequently, after the French government had considered a number of proposals from groups interested in re-establishing the Tour de France, it finally plumped for Le Parisien Libéré’s joint bid with newly revamped sports paper L’Équipe (formerly the Tour-founding paper L’Auto) for the 1947 relaunch. 

Although the Amaury family’s grip on the Tour gradually increased, they kept their hands off the actual event. Émilien Amaury was initially happy to allow L’Équipe’s editor-in-chief Jacques Goddet to be responsible for both the Tour and the paper. 

The first hint of change in the family’s benevolent approach came in the mid-1980s following a bitter internecine dispute that blew up in the wake of Émilien Amaury’s 1977 death. It stemmed from the Amaury patriarch favouring his daughter, Francine, over his son, Philippe. According to Émilien Amaury’s biographer, Guy Vadepied, he was unhappy with Philippe’s choice of university course, his lack of intellect and even his choice of wife, Marie-Odile Kuhn, the daughter of a Strasbourg dentist. 

Although his father may not have rated him, Philippe refused to be cowed and challenged the will that cut him out of the succession. After a court case that ran for six years, he finally took control of the group in 1983, but ceded some of its titles to his sister. Two years later, he renamed the group Éditions Philippe Amaury. In 1992, the company grouped its growing portfolio of sports events under an affiliate, Amaury Sports Organisation, which to this day oversees the Tour de France.

Like his father, Philippe did not tend to interfere in either the Tour or L’Équipe’s running. A profile in French magazine L’Express paints him as something of a recluse, who rarely spoke with his staff and dined each day in the same Paris restaurant, usually sitting at a table behind a pillar.

“With the Amaury family, respect for independence was absolute, even when the interests of the group were at stake,” former Le Parisien editor-in-chief Christian de Villeneuve told L’Express. This was backed up by L’Équipe’s Jérôme Bureau, who never took a single call from Philippe Amaury during his 11-year tenure as the paper’s top man. If they did have any contact with the family, it was usually with Philippe’s wife, Marie-Odile Amaury, with whom he discussed the running of his business and who tended to act as  his mouthpiece. Amaury’s faith in and loyalty to the people who ran his key enterprises also extended to Patrice Clerc, the former director of the French Open Tennis Championships who was appointed ASO’s president in 2002. During Clerc’s tenure, ASO expanded steadily. In 2002, it bought up Paris-Nice, adding the French Open Golf Championship a year later. In 2008, it bought a 49 per cent stake in Unipublic, the company that organised the Vuelta a España.

By that point, however, cycling was in turmoil. Following a string of doping scandals at the Tour de France, Clerc severed the Tour’s links with the UCI, blaming the sport’s ruling body for creating a culture in which cheating was rife. By 2008, the split between the two organisations became so pronounced that Clerc pulled the Tour from the UCI’s ProTour calendar and ran the race under the aegis of the French Cycling Federation, with dope testing provided by the French Anti-Doping Agency (AFLD). A string of high-profile doping positives at that year’s race hardened Clerc’s commitment to a complete overhaul of the sport. It seemed likely that all of ASO’s events, which now included the Tour of Qatar, Paris-Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Flèche Wallonne and the Dauphiné, would form part of a rival calendar to the UCI’s.

Yet even though he didn’t know it, Clerc’s position was by now tenuous. His downfall stems to a degree from Philippe Amaury’s sudden death in 2006, at the age of 66. Marie-Odile took over his role at the head of EPA, from where she looked on with increasing alarm as Clerc’s initiatives not only produced a split with the UCI but also threatened its relationship with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and, with it, the company’s prospects of cashing in by expanding into emerging sporting markets.

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MARIE-ODILE AMAURY was determined to secure the future of both EPA and her children, lawyer Aurore and her younger brother, Jean-Étienne, who had worked for Bloomberg News in London after completing an MBA at Stanford University. Aurore joined the EPA board in 2006 and remains an influential member. In October 2008, Jean-Étienne joined her and became president of ASO following Patrice Clerc’s ousting.

The first indication of major changes occurred in early 2008, when Marie-Odile reappointed a number of former executives to positions across the EPA group. In a key role, former Le Parisien editor-in-chief Noël Couëdel was charged with cutting costs and staff numbers on the paper. Then, on 10 March, Marie-Odile Amaury made a surprise entrance to L’Équipe’s management meeting at the paper’s HQ in Issy-les-Moulineaux on the western side of Paris. She was there to voice her concerns about the paper’s eight per cent fall in sales over 2007 and to announce that she’d also asked former ASO stalwart and influential IOC member Jean-Claude Killy to attempt to patch up the rift between ASO and the UCI.

In October 2008, the success of this initiative became apparent when Clerc was removed as president of ASO and replaced by Marie-Odile’s son. The young scion of the Amaury family spoke of “a long conflict” that had resulted in “a need for harmonious peace”. Clerc saw it very differently, describing the family’s change of policy as “a handbrake turn.” Clerc added: “The company has chosen to change its position with relation to doping by deciding not to intervene in the politics of the sport any longer and to settle for the more comfortable role of event organiser.”

Staff members at L’Équipe confirmed Clerc’s assessment, saying that Marie-Odile Amaury had made it quite clear that they were to avoid the issue of doping. This resulted in the sidelining of Damien Ressiot, the journalist behind the 2004 story of Lance Armstrong’s 1999 Tour samples showing evidence of EPO use after being tested, and other major doping stories. Rather than being a campaigning paper, she wanted L’Équipe to stick to the news and avoid upsetting other major sporting stakeholders. According to former L’Équipe journalist Pierre Ballester, who co-authored LA: Confidentiel with David Walsh, this “political U-turn… put financial interests above an ethical commitment to the sport.”

Of course, EPA is a commercial enterprise, so such a change to a more conciliatory approach is hardly surprising. However, there has been some criticism of Amaury’s approach, much of it from very close to the family, and most notably from Couëdel, whose tenure at Le Parisien ended just a few days before Clerc’s at ASO after what was reported to be a blazing row with Marie-Odile. Rather than bowing out with a pay-off tied to a confidentiality clause, Couëdel let rip, raging against “the cynicism, the brutality and the incompetence” of his boss in an email that he sent to all of the journalists on Le Parisien and L’Équipe. Of Marie-Odile he wrote, “She sees herself as a great lady of the press, even though she’s not got the capacity for that. And that’s both pathetic and devastating.”

Yet those close to Marie-Odile regard the changes that she has made as being vital to the long-term prospects of EPA and its various subsidiaries. “She is doing her job in a difficult period within a group that is used to earning a lot of money,” a member of the company’s administrative council told Le Monde in October 2009. “She has revealed herself to be both courageous and a good business person. Those who don’t like her portray her as a penny-pincher and brutal in her actions.” In the very rare interviews she gives, Marie-Odile Amaury reveals a notable lack of extravagance. She drives a run-of-the-mill Peugeot 308 and lives in a smallish Paris apartment. She views herself as a typical Alsatian, being hard-working, focused and loyal. Former UCI president Pat McQuaid said that whenever they met it was in an ordinary brasserie and described her as “not flash at all”.

Thanks to these qualities and, more substantially, to cuts made right across EPA, the Amaurys have built up substantial capital reserves – a notable achievement given the French print industry’s ongoing crisis. These funds were put to use this year, when the family bought up the Lagardère media group’s 25 per cent share in EPA for €91 million. In doing so, the family regained 100 per cent ownership of the company. 

Lagardère boss Arnaud Lagardère’s father had initially made the investment in 1983 to assist Philippe Amaury following his messy takeover of the family business. But what had been a good relationship soured when Lagardère was linked with a takeover of ASO that in 2010 included discussions with now disgraced seven-time Tour winner Lance Armstrong. Marie-Odile, though, made it quite clear that she wasn’t interested in selling up.

In the end, the €91 million purchase of Lagardère’s stake valued EPA at almost €400 million, although French media commentators have suggested its actual value is at least a billion, and perhaps twice that. These assessments are based partly on the value of EPA’s holdings, including the Tour de France and L’Équipe, but mainly on the projected value of TV rights for the Tour, which are widely believed to have been undersold by EPA’s conservative management. Many media experts insisted that the company’s decision to complete a seven-year rights deal with France Télévisions in 2010 was a huge coup for the TV company given the yield on rights that even minority sports were getting in some other countries.

EPA has refused to give details on the size of this deal but the UCI has said it amounts to €30 million a year. Garmin team boss Jonathan Vaughters believes the figure is a good deal higher than that, having been in discussions with ASO and the UCI about the future of the sport in his former role as president of the professional teams’ organisation, the AIGCP. Those discussions centred on the widely perceived need to share TV revenue more evenly among the sport’s key stakeholders, as football and rugby currently do. “We need to convince them to see the advantages of reforming the system,” Vaughters said of the Amaurys in an interview with Bloomberg.

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HOWEVER, THE AMAURYS don’t seem ready to yield any of their Tour-related earning power. Indeed, the evidence suggests that rather than negotiating, they are more likely to be more inclined to stonewall and stick to their ongoing plans to expand their interests in cycling and other sports. The most recent example was their decision to establish a three-day stage race in Yorkshire, having failed to win the bid to take over as organisers of the Tour of Britain. Given the huge interest in cycling, the Amaurys view the UK as an important market, to the extent that they have managed to secure a 2.HC ranking for their as yet unnamed tour of Yorkshire, the same level as the race they missed out on has taken years to achieve.

Since Marie-Odile Amaury took over the stewardship of EPA, it has also moved quickly to protect its newspapers, funding short-term launches to scupper attempts by other companies to threaten their print standbearers, L’Équipe, Le Parisien and Aujourd’hui. Interviewed anonymously (as former EPA employees usually are) one former manager told L’Express: “All direct competition is considered as an attack against which a defence must be mounted at all costs. It is a rather paranoid view of business but one that has worked out for them.”

It also seems unlikely to change. There are no clear indications yet that this perspective is going to change. Marie-Odile Amaury continues to oversee the family’s business affairs, while also saying of her children: “They have got real responsibilities. They are active collaborators and not simply passing through.” However, like their parents, Jean-Étienne and Aurore Amaury are happy to remain out of the spotlight, though the ASO president is becoming a regular face at the company’s races and other events. 

With the purchase of Lagardère’s shares completed, there are signs that the Amaurys are looking towards another major deal, although that is likely to be the long-mooted sale of Le Parisien. If concluded, that would automatically increase their focus on ASO and the Tour. But would it lead to new alliances and a wider division of cycling’s spoils? That’s far less certain. Like the Lannisters, the Amaurys don’t appear to be ready to allow anyone to get too close to their throne.

The Amaury dynasty

1947: Émilien Amaury’s newspaper group is appointed organiser of the Tour de France along with L’Équipe

1983: Philippe Amaury takes control of L’Équipe and the Tour after a lengthy and bitter legal dispute with his sister

1985: The establishment of Éditions Philippe Amaury

1992: The establishment of Amaury Sport Organisation, which oversees EPA’s races and events

2006: On Philippe’s death his widow, Marie-Odile, takes over as EPA’s head and brings daughter Aurore onto the board

2008: Jean-Étienne Amaury is appointed ASO’s president following the dismissal of Patrice Clerc