The Tour de France is one of the most important sporting events of the year. Along with the Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España, the competition on French soil is the joy of after-dinner conversations for both fans of the sport and those who take advantage of it to take a nap. Those who cannot rest (apart from the athletes and their teams) are the minds behind the logistics of such a complicated task as organising a competition that takes place over thousands of kilometres of road.
And within all this logistics, there is a small group that has an extremely specific task: to remove penises from the asphalt. Their name, like the ‘A-Team’, is ‘Eraser Men’.
Fighting virality. Paris is striving to leave the city pristine before the Olympic Games. It is a beastly showcase, but the Tour is something that shows the country from top to bottom; from left to right. It is even symbolic, so the image must be immaculate. That is something that penises can make ugly, since millions of viewers will see that there are huge members drawn on the roads. The Romans didn’t think they were so bad, but each civilization has its customs.
In 2016, the platoon passed by one of these enormous phalluses and the cleaning team began to work. Since then, we’ve seen roads with attempted penis erasure, scribbling over it, or trying to scribble whatever over it.
Eraser Men. These reasons are of no concern to the Eraser Men, whose job for the past few years has been to scour the stage from top to bottom to ensure that depictions of male genitalia are not broadcast on television. Specifically, they are a team made up of two men employed by Doublet – a cleaning and billboard-mounting company hired by the Tour organisers.
Patrick Dancoisne and Joël Gautriand are in charge of carrying out the task and, since the revelation in 2016, they have used their imagination to turn the huge penises into… works of street art? To do this, the duo will use more than 350 liters of paint throughout the competition.
Round tripThis year, the Tour is longer. From last year’s 3,404 kilometres, we’re going to 3,498 kilometres. There are stages of more than 200 kilometres and don’t think that Patrick and Joël have been travelling the roads for months to remove the penises: they do it just before the peloton passes through the area. The reason is obvious: if they erased the members in advance, someone would paint them over and the task would have been a waste of time and money.
In an article in Pèdale! magazine, they explained that they do the route of each stage twice and leave the place at least 90 minutes before the vehicles of the publicity caravan start to arrive. They do it on the way there, erasing the penises they find, and on the way back, they erase any that they may have painted in that time. This was shown very well in a video by Dutch television NOS:
With a huge penis…
To a shiny spaceship. Or something like that
Owls or butterflies. And the truth is that they are really good at their job. The original drawing does not have much imagination, although the couple claims that they come in all types and sizes. But to hide them, they use creativity and turn the different elements of the genitalia into butterflies, bears, owls and even spaceships. Anything as long as you don’t waste too much time and take advantage of the original silhouette.
There are times when they are very rushed, so they limit themselves to making a series of cross-outs or something like that on top of the original drawings and that’s it. On those occasions, the couple cannot get creative because phallus erasure is a race against time.
Apolitical. Of course, they are not only erasing penises, but also other types of political or any kind of messages. Painted with ‘EPO’ (a hormone used in doping) is disguised by changing the ‘O’ to a ‘Q’. The acronym ‘SOS’ becomes ‘888’ (which is still a reference to a betting house, but oh well) and drawings of syringes (also related to doping) can become stairs. Any other political message found is deleted without discussion.
En Pèdale! accompanied the Eraser Men on a 120-kilometre stage in 2021 and found 30 messages of support for refugees in the Mediterranean crisis, 18 penises, 12 political messages and only eight syringes. Cheer up Patrick and Joël, they’re going to need it.
Image | Capture of US
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