By now you probably know that the brand Champion for the French supermarkets will disappear progressively and be replaced by the brand of its holding company, Carrefour.

One of the members of the Club du Tour de France (the 4 most important sponsors of the Tour de France) thus changes its name, a bit like Vittel took over Nestlé Aquarel's place as official water supplier last year. And with this change of name the polka dot jersey will also get a facelift!

To celebrate this name change, Carrefour already started the Tour!

The Tour de France du Maillot à pois

Under the name Le Tour de France du Maillot à pois the company organises since 30 March and until tomorrow, 24 April, a Tour de France of 37 stages over a total distance of 2000 kilometers between Draguignan and Bonneville via for example Hazebrouck (close to Dunkirk) and Bordeaux.

Employees of the supermarket met each other at the parking of one of its stores for a stage in the morning and close to another store for another stage in the afternoon. These stages connected two Carrefour or Champion stores. Accompanied by the motor agents of the Garde Républicaine and for some stages by a cycling hero (Richard Virenque, Christophe Mengin, Jean-Patrick Nazon, Jean-François Bernard, Gilbert Duclos-Lasalle, Laurent Fignon, ...) the Carrefour employees thus crossed France to show that Carrefour takes over from Champion in 2009.

And since it's nice to see a whole peloton wearing the polka dot jersey, Carrefour published on its site (see below) a short video resume of each stage.

The history of the polka dot jersey

30 years after the first Tour de France organised by the L'Auto newspaper, the Tour director Henri Desgrange created for the first time in 1933 a ranking for the best climber of the Tour de France. The first winner of that ranking, Vicente Trueba - a Spanish rider with the nickname the flea of Torrelavega, was so good in the mountains that he easily won the first King of the Mountains ranking but he was such a bad descender that he never won anything else before the creation of this ranking.

In 1975 it was finally decided to give the leader of this ranking a distinctive jersey, the polka dot jersey: its colours, white wit red dots, were chosen by its initial sponsor, Chocolat Poulain. In 1993 the Champion supermarkets became the sponsor of this ranking and thus of the polka dot jersey while Carrefour takes over this role in 2009.

Richard Virenque was the most frequent winner of this jersey: 7 times, from 1994 till 1997, in 1999, 2003 and 2004.

The web site

At the occasion of the name change, Carrefour has introduced the web site C-leTour.fr to show Carrefour's activities in and around the Tour de France.

On this site you can currently find information about the stages and short movie resumes of the Tour de France du Maillot à pois. It also contains a page dedicated to the history of the polka dot jersey and information about A chacun son Tour and L'Etape du coeur which are sponsored by Carrefour.

Furthermore, the site announces a future game which will allow its users to win the new Carrefour branded polka dot jersey: the site currently proposes to train for this game. The last section of the site is Tendance à Pois where we'll soon find everything to get into the polka dot mood: casting of the girls who hand out the jersey, beauty tips, bike coaching, short movies, ...

door Thomas Vergouwen
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this publication is published in: Tour de France | Tour de France 2009 | Marketing

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