At Tour De France, Default Language Now Is English

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/16/sports/cycling/16iht-cycling16.html

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PARIS — Among the talents that Chris Froome has brought to Tour de France this year — climbing strength, time trial prowess, a cool head — little has grabbed the attention of his French hosts more than his skill with their language. Stage after stage, Froome, the race leader, stands in the small post-race interview area with Gérard Holtz, a tanned and well-coiffed French television reporter, and talks about, say, his recent performance in the contre-la-montre, or time trial, and wanting to garder l’avantage, or keep his lead, over rivals.

“Merci, Chris,” Holtz has said on more than one occasion, continuing in French: “Thanks for your kindness; thanks for speaking French with us.” This gratitude might once have been seen as merely perfunctory. But the French language’s protracted worldwide decline has finally come home to roost. In the 100th edition of the Tour, English has become an equal of, if not superior to, le français.

Riders like Froome, a Briton who speaks French and Italian, have become scarcer; many rising non-French stars, if they don’t already speak French, prefer to learn English instead.

Communiqués from the Amaury Sport Organization, the race organizer, are now issued in both languages. And teams with multinational rosters, seeking unity, are adopting English, not French, as their lingua franca.

“French is disappearing here,” said Pascale Schyns, the Tour’s official translator. “It wasn’t too long ago that we could say that French was the predominant language, but now there’s more English.”

Schyns, a Belgian who speaks six languages, has had a front row seat for the transition. Perhaps nowhere has change been more prominent than in the daily post-stage news conferences, which feature the race leader and the stage winner.

Anglophone riders have captured the last two Tour titles and a third, Froome, is poised to lift the trophy when the race concludes Sunday in Paris with a nighttime finish. By contrast, the last Frenchman to win the race was Bernard Hinault in 1985; the last time a French rider even wore the yellow jersey, which is worn by the race leader, for consecutive days was in 2010.

In this year’s race, 7 of the 15 stages have been won by native English speakers, while all the others have been won by riders — German, Slovak, Belgian and Italian — who have mostly preferred to conduct their news conferences in English.

And the international media pool has grown to such a size that Bradley Wiggins, during his run last July to becoming the first British winner of the Tour, could opt to do all-English news conferences, even though Schyns said that he “speaks French even better than me.” Indeed, Froome, despite his command of French, now speaks to print reporters in English to save energy at the end of each day.

“The other day, because Froome didn’t have time, we did all the questions in English and then afterward, I translated everything and read it all in French,” said Schyns. “Before that would have been unthinkable. It was always in French, and then maybe in English, you know?”

Schyns, a former amateur racer, was hired by A.S.O. in 1996, a decision prompted in part by Lance Armstrong’s second-place finish that year in Paris-Nice, a weeklong stage race held annually in March.

While Anglophones had enjoyed success in the Tour prior to that — in 1986, the American Greg LeMond became the first native English speaker to win the race; the same year, Team 7-Eleven, an American squad, won a stage — the volume of riders had not merited paying a translator.

“If there was someone in the peloton then who spoke English, you’d look about,” said Sean Kelly, an Irishman who won the Tour’s sprinting jersey four times in the 1980s.

In addition, Kelly, like LeMond and others, was comfortable speaking French, the product of starting their professional careers on the European Continent. Kelly, now a commentator on Eurosport’s English-language channel, will still occasionally jump over to the network’s French booth after stages to do commentary.

Until recently, many Anglophone riders had to go abroad to chase their dreams of racing bikes and juggled learning a language with developing a sense for race tactics and trying to integrate quickly into a foreign culture. France, with its rich cycling tradition, was a destination for current Tour riders like Simon Gerrans, David Millar and Stuart O’Grady, who started his career with the Paris-based team Gan in 1995.

“I had no idea of French, so it was like being thrown in the deep end,” said O’Grady, an Australian. “I couldn’t converse with them at first. Once we got on the bike it was fine, but sitting at a dinner table, having no idea what was going on, week in and week out, was pretty hard. Basically, you learn or you go home.”

At this year’s Tour, though, O’Grady’s post-race dinner conversations are all in English. He now rides for Orica-GreenEdge, the Australia-based team that has had a breakout race, winning two stages and holding the yellow jersey for four days.

Though many in the sport point to Lance Armstrong’s run of seven Tour titles — since stripped from him for doping — as the moment when the sport’s linguistic landscape started to change, the rise of Anglophone teams like Orica, the England-based Sky Pro Cycling and the American Garmin-Sharp squad has tipped the balance.

“The new wave of guys coming through these English-speaking developmental teams quite often don’t have a second language,” said Gerrans, of Orica-GreenEdge. “English is quite often it.”

Teams were once composed of riders from one, perhaps two, countries, and traveled mostly around Continental Europe. Today, many squads boast of multinational rosters and race in Argentina, China and Quebec, among other locations. Finding a common language for team cohesion, not to mention media appearances, has become essential.

In 2008, Team HTC-Highroad became the first non-Anglophone team to implement an English-speaking rule for race briefings and team dinners, prompted by its staff’s experience running T-Mobile, the former German squad.

“In the past on T-Mobile, we had the Spanish racing in Sevilla, a German team and the Italians doing their thing; nobody was talking together,” said Brian Holm, now a Omega Pharma-Quick-Step sport director. “You could see three teams in one at the dinner table, which wasn’t very useful.”

Now, many teams have adopted English policies — including Omega and Team Saxo-Tinkoff, the Spanish rider Alberto Contador’s squad. Though a reporter attending the end of the team’s lunch during the Tour’s first rest day could hear Spanish and Italian casually being spoken, Saxo-Tinkoff’s French sport director, Philippe Mauduit, stressed the importance of English.

“Today, you have to speak to the media in English because the Latin-language speakers are becoming fewer and fewer and there are more English speakers,” he said in French. “Until a decade ago, riders were able to master or become functional enough in Latin languages to communicate. But if you don’t speak English now, it’s a handicap.” Tour de France organizers may not like that development, but they have been aware of it for some time.

Pierre-Yves Thouault, the deputy Tour director, recently recalled that after joining A.S.O. in 1997, he had spent a year in London improving his English. The reason? The Tour was to start in Ireland in 1998. It has embraced its neighbors across the English Channel in recent years, too: The 2007 Tour started in London; next year’s start will be in Yorkshire.

Things have also changed for Union Cycliste Internationale, cycling’s governing body, which added English as a second official language last decade. Though the dual-language policy still exists — a sign informing teams about post-race doping controls, posted near the finish line in Tours last week, was in both languages — English has dominated in recent years. The U.C.I. presidential election this autumn will pit the current leader, the Irishman Pat McQuaid, against Brian Cookson, the president of British Cycling.

That trend mirrors the decline of French in multinational institutions like the United Nations and the European Union. French, once considered a language of diplomacy, is now the ninth-most widely spoken language in the world. But where there have been loud protests by French speakers that the United Nations has become more English-centric, expressing nostalgia for the past seems to be as far as most in cycling will go.

“Historically, the language of A.S.O. and U.C.I. was French, the biggest event in the world was in France and there were many more important small races here,” said Yvon Sanquer, the general manager of the French team Cofidis, who says that even he uses English to communicate with the few non-French riders on his team.

But those who know the passé composé from the plus-que-parfait still have plenty of value at the Tour. The race still takes place, after all, in France.

Not everyone here is comfortable in English, like José Luis Arrieta, the Movistar sport director. Last week, Arrieta, a Spaniard, was asked if he spoke English by a reporter whose Spanish is, at best, a work in progress.

No, he responded, but how about French?

And at Sky Pro Cycling’s news conference during the rest day last week in La Baule-Escoublac, Nicolas Portal, the team’s French sport director, seemed almost as popular as Froome himself. On his way out of the nearly hourlong English-language question-and-answer session between reporters and riders, Portal was mobbed by French reporters.

After the crowd had dissipated, he reflected on the amount of French that he speaks these days. Did any of the Sky riders or even the team’s British general manager, Dave Brailsford, a French speaker, converse with him in his native tongue?

“No, no one want wants to speak French with me, not even Chris,” he said, laughing. “It’s clear that I have to speak English here. It’s an English team. But English has become more and more international. It’s the language of the world, you know.”

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Briton keeps the lead

With a burst of power on the steep final slopes of the imposing Mont Ventoux, Chris Froome of Sky Pro Cycling won the 15th stage of the Tour de France, re-establishing the dominance that had been predicted for him before the Tour began — and that had come into some question just days ago, James Dao reported from Vaison-la-Romaine, France.

The race leader, Froome not only sprinted away Sunday from the young climbing sensation from Colombia, Nairo Quintana of Movistar, but also gained more than a minute and a half on his two closest rivals for the overall title, Bauke Mollema of Belkin ProCycling and Alberto Contador of Team Saxo-Tinkoff.

“To win the way so many big names have won on this climb is really special to me,” he said, calling the victory “the biggest” of his career. At the finish of the 242.5-kilometer, or 150.7-kilometer, stage, the longest of the tour, Froome was administered oxygen for several minutes. Froome said it was the first time he had needed to do that.