Special envoy to the Grand-Colombier
The Tour de France attracts hundreds of millions of viewers every year, sixty channels broadcasting the event live. A show in mondovision which obliges the organizers to take maximum precautions on the visibility of the roads, a giant field of expression to be seen by the cameras. For twenty years, the Grande Boucle has had its own team responsible daily for removing messages deemed undesirable. “We remove any wild advertising, racist or political inscriptions not falling within the scope of the event”, explains Clément André, event project manager at Doublet, the northern company responsible for tracking down annoying messages.
Nicknamed the “Erasers”, the duo of cleaners are overwhelmed with work. At the wheel of their van, they trace the route of the day’s stage daily, armed with brushes and a pot of paint to divert drawings or inappropriate comments. At the top of the charts this year, we find anti-Macron or anti-Paris 2024 Olympics messages. Each era has its trends. In the early 2000s, at the heart of the anti-doping scandals, it was necessary to fight against the inscriptions “EPO”, transformed into “888” after a quick smear, or to make sure to divert the embarrassing syringes. Recently, it was necessary to fight against the messages of the shepherds of the Pyrenees angry against the reintroduction of the wolf or the bears. 2022 was also the anti-Vladimir Putin edition.
Apart from burning news, there are timeless ones like the slogans of unions railing this year against the pension reform, but especially the giant sexes, a great classic, which flourish everywhere on the 3,400 km of road. Over the years, erasers have found a solution by transforming them, depending on the mood of the day, into a butterfly, a caterpillar or even a squirrel with a little imagination and a nice brushstroke. But a second pass is sometimes necessary, because the showdown between the designers and the erasers now turns into a game of cat and mouse. “Some, like the French Federation of Lose (a parody sports news account, editor’s note), have fun painting the road with sexes, they hide while waiting for us to take a photo or film a video immediately put on social networks”, explains with a hint of annoyance Clément André.
Patrick Dancoisne, one of the historical erasers, has even ended up acquiring a little notoriety over the years with the public, who now ask him to pose for selfies with a brush in hand when he gets out of his van to intervene. This former undertaker, now retired, decides what should or should not remain on the roadway by showing tolerance when it comes to schoolboy humor and originality in puns. The “Go Julian Alaphilippe” transformed into “Go Alain Philippe” or even “Go Mathieu van der Poel” become “Go Mathieu sells hens” still have good days ahead of them “because the Tour de France must remain above all a party “.