When I was born, my parents – a float from the 1984 Tour de France and a float from the 1986 Tour de France – told me that one day, that could be me. I always believed them. Each off-season, the Tour’s organisers would prepare for the next edition: the ASO’s nice Caravan Promotional Man, Pierre, sitting in his office in Issy-les-Moulineaux, scrawling cheese brands on his vision board, dreaming of non-alcoholic fruit beer synergies. All the while, I would spin my wheels in the family parking lot, racing up and down, practicing what it would be to convey promotional produce from a producer to an adoring public for three weeks on end, day after day after day.
This is what I always imagined would be my destiny. That one day it would be me; that I would be there, driving the roads my parents once did, people astride me flinging their wares to the punters.
I was a late bloomer, but in 2024 I finally got my call-up: I would be at the Tour de France. The stars aligned for a vehicle of my particular characteristics: my mother (a big basket on wheels) and my father (a large quantity of fibreglass biscuits) had produced the perfect progeny for a petite E.Leclerc supermarket vehicle. I would have my moment to follow in the family tradition.
The big day approached. I practised revving my little motor. I waited for my biscuit basket to sit comfortably atop me. I prepared. I dreamed. I drove the long road to Embrun, in the heart of the French Alps, my little motor straining against the gradient. I was so close to my breakthrough moment.
On the morning of stage 19, I woke up, feeling unwell. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I thought I would be able to turn it around. My little tank was filled. My little wheels were pumped. My operator sat on the seat of my silly little buggy and turned the key and I tried – and I want you to know how hard I tried – to turn the engine over, to make it start, to begin my procession through the crowds of people and have assorted dry (and actually quite boring, oaty biscuits) be flung from my back. The spirit was willing, but the body was weak. My engine spluttered. The driver swore, tried to start me again, hit my steering wheel. Punters streamed each side of me, begging for my bad and basic biscuits. “Pardon,’” he said, again and again. “Pardon. Ce n’est pas possible.” And finally: “C’est fini.”
My spirits wilted along with my engine. Time ticked down to the stage start: a string of vehicles streamed past, Skodas and other floats and my E.Leclerc pals – the melon, the strawberry, the cherry, the leeks. Some of their drivers looked over at me, their faces filled with sympathy. Some of the other floats – the TikTok floats, the brash Cochonou sausage cars – sneered as they drove past. Maybe they knew what I was going through, or maybe not. I don’t know – the caravan is kill or be killed, throw or be thrown. I had come to Embrun as a stupid little biscuit basket on a golf buggy, and I was about to learn what it was to be disposable, on this, my most special day – over the biggest mountain in Europe, to the dénouement of the Tour de France. Could I have made it in that thin mountain air? Perhaps not. But I would’ve liked to have tried.
When I was a baby float, my father would tell me about the 1984 Tour de France: about the screaming fans, about the adoring crowds. The way the people would hold their babies up, almost like an offering to the gods of merchandising. It was, he would say, the best time of his life: a time before his promotional biscuits were cast into the Seine, floating in the weeds and the silt as the river slowly drifted along. I dreamed that would be me, before my engine blew in the Alps and I was loaded onto a tow truck as the Tour de France partied around me.
The floats glided past me as I sat next to the flat-bed, dreaming of what could be. My destiny and my dreams, passing me by to the incessant blast of Europop.
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