Jacques Goddet

Jacques Goddet (Paris, 21 June 1905 – Paris, 15 December 2000) was a French sports journalist and director of the Tour de France from 1936 to 1986.

His father, Victor Goddet, was co-founder and finance director of L'Auto, the newspaper that organised the first Tour in 1903. When Jacques Goddet had ended his studies in 1931, he became editor-in-chief of L'Auto. In 1932, he covered the Olympics in Los Angeles.

In 1924 Jacques Goddet went to work for his father's paper in the rue du faubourg-Montmartre, Paris. Four years later he followed his first Tour de France and sat spellbound as he watched riders struggle for more than 16 hours on cols "that were no more than mediocre earth paths, muddy, stony". Goddet returned the following year and followed every Tour until 1989, with the exceptions of 1932 when he went to the Los Angeles Olympics and 1981 when he was too ill.

He became chief reporter at L'Auto and took over organisation of the race when the director, Henri Desgrange, became too ill to continue in 1936.

Goddet's role during the German occupation of France after 1940, by which time the Tour had been suspended, is hazy. While he encouraged the newspaper's printers to produce material for the Resistance, he supported Philippe Pétain as leader of France after the Armistice and he handed over the keys to the Vélodrome d'Hiver when the Germans wanted to intern thousands of Jews there. It is an episode which Goddet barely mentioned in his autobiography, L'Équipée Belle.

The academics Jean-Luc Boeuf and Yves Léonard said of Goddet's writing in that time:

From the several 1,200 articles published by Jacques Goddet in the rubric D'un jour à l'autre between September 1940 and August 1944, comes a strong Maréchalisme [support for Pétain], both from sentiment and from attraction for the National Revolution, at least until the winter of 1941, finding its roots in the 'trauma of 40'. This Maréchalisme is strongest in the first months, such as in particular in an article in L'Auto of 4 November 1940: In 1940, France is starting another life. The Marshal is going to give us a purifying bath.

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