Last week the map of the Tour de France 2008 has been changed on the official Tour web site. In this blog post you'll find out why!

The Tour de France has several sponsors and 4 of them form the Club du Tour de France: Nestlé Aquarel is one of them, but for how long?!

A change in the Tour de France 2008 map

On 25 October 2007 maakte I published here the full Tour de France 2008 track and the corresponding map (click here to see the detailed track for each of the stages and the full Tour de France 2008 track in Google Earth).
So, if you regularly visit my website you'll know that the Tour's Grand Départ is not being organised by one city this year (as usual), but by a whole region: Brittany. The Tour de France map therefore indicated the Brittany region with a specific box ... but some people apparently didn't like that and created in February 2008 the Collectif Breton "Non au Tour".
This group fights for the reunification of Brittany: that is Brittany including the Loire-Atlantique department. This department used to be part of the Brittany province, but now is part of the Pays de la Loire region and not of the Brittany region just north of it. The box on the Tour de France map therefore didn't contain Loire-Atlantique since it's the Brittany region which pays for the Grand Départ ...

The Collectif Breton "Non au Tour de France" therefore asked A.S.O. on February 20th to modify the unacceptable presentation (of Brittany) on all types of communication around the Tour de France 2008, either by adding Loire-Atlantique in it or by simply removing the box indicating Brittany's borders. On March 6th the Collectif published a petition on the Internet in which they publicly asked for the same change. This petition has been signed by only 67 people!!
Despite the small number of signatures of this online petition - but probably thanks to the support of some local personalities - A.S.O. has removed the box around the administrative region of Brittany on March 26th from the Tour de France 2008 map.

The Collectif has shown its gladness by saying: This victory, probably only symbolic for some people, is for us a big step forward in the fight for the reunification of Brittany. The Tour has a world wide influence and this reaction is thus to be seen as very important ....

During the Tour de France we will thus probably see the Tour map with only the word Bretagne in bold but without the box around the Brittany region. Apparently this makes some people happy but of course this is already too late since the map with the box has been published everywhere around the world already since October.
the Tour de France 2008 map with the box around Brittany


the Tour de France 2008 map without the box around Brittany

Will Nestlé Aquarel still be in the Tour this year?!

Nestlé Aquarel has been a sponsor and official Tour de France water supplier since 2001 and is currently one of the 4 most important sponsors of the Grande Boucle by being part of the Club du Tour de France.

Its contract with the Tour has been extended with another 6 years in October 2003 and would thus normally end only in 2009 (the contract is estimated at 3 to 4 million euros a year). We should therefore still be able to see the doctor, the clowns and the crazy fireman of the most popular advertising caravan (elected by the public) for another two years on the roads of the Tour ...

However, the strange thing is that Nestlé Aquarel has removed all mentions of its official sponsorship of the Tour de France from its official website and that the website www.leaufficiel.fr - which had been created in 2007 as an online extension of the daily advertising caravan newspaper which is being handed out from the Nestlé Aquarel cars which are just ahead of the advertising caravan - is no longer online and that the domain name registration has been cancelled. For the dedicated section on the Tour de France on Nestlé Aquarel's website we could think that the water brand's marketing department finally realised that it's not very professional and useful to have such a section if its contents haven't been updated since 2005 (as I discovered last year), but the disappearance of a freshly created website definitely brings some doubts about the future of the Tour de France sponsoring by Nestlé Aquarel.

Currently the Tour website still mentions the water brand as a member of the Club du Tour de France, but we'll probably know for sure whether Nestlé Aquarel will still be in the Tour in the next weeks/months. Otherwise, maybe another brand could become the official Tour de France water (after the disappearance of Café Grand Mère [for which A.S.O. as far as I know didn't find a replacement] this would be the second drink supplier of the Tour which stops ...).

Of course the young Antoine will have to go find another preferred water brand as well ... let's have a look: what would be a good rhyme? Vittel t'es(t) belle ? ;-) (Vittel is also part of Nestlé Waters and the brand communicates around sports already ...).

door Thomas Vergouwen
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this publication is published in: Tour de France 2008 | Marketing

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