Cleaning up
In 2002 a new race was added to the international cycling calendar. The Tour of Qatar seemed like a novelty – a professional race held in the desert – but it had serious ambition behind it, as well as serious money and, perhaps crucially, the endorsement of the greatest cyclist of all time.
Eddy Merckx and his business partner Dirk De Pauw worked with ASO, the Tour de France organiser, to build the Tour of Qatar into a race that attracted some of the world’s biggest teams and stars even as it remained a curiosity. It was an event with no roadside spectators. Unlike so many major bike races, it did not act as part of a marketing campaign for the country – at least not in the traditional sense.
The aim did not appear to be to attract tourists, given that the backdrop to the racing was featureless desert, pockmarked with the industrial infrastructure of an oil and gas superpower that could boast the world’s highest per capita earnings as well as being the world’s largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases.
‘It’s an opportunity to create positive stories about these countries that deflect from their pretty appalling human rights records’
After a few years, as more top teams came
