Cycling’s most famous pig disappeared from the podium this year – and nobody seemed keen to explain why.
Mathilde L’Azou for Team Cofidis
There are some things you come to rely on in life: death, taxes, a podium pig at Tro-Bro Léon.
The French 1.Pro-ranked race is a bit like an underground Paris-Roubaix in vibe, transplanted to the opposite side of the country and replacing cobbled sectors with dirt farm tracks. But while the cobblestone trophy of Roubaix is one of the sport’s most beloved, it’s got nothing on the prize that awaits the first Breton finisher at Tro-Bro Léon: a living, squealing piglet.
A dispatch from the Tro-Bro Léon pig
Cycling’s strangest trophy shares some thoughts.
As you can probably expect, this particular trophy has long been a source of some fascination at Escape Collective Towers. I’ve imagined a day in the life of the podium pig, hoped that the piglets become pets rather than pork, and found out where the most recent one ended up. Last week, I looked at the calendar, saw Tro-Bro Léon, and thought ‘well there’s a story for next week’.
But this year, something was different. There was no podium pig – or, more accurately, there was a representation of one. Look, here’s a picture of leading Breton, Alexis Renard (Cofidis) standing there holding it:
It’s not trying to snuffle out snacks in his hand. It’s not squirming its little trotters about. It’s just a wooden pig. A fine podium prize – cute, even – but not the same.
On the search for why, I turned to my friend and yours: the internet. But that yielded few immediate or definitive answers. Someone on Reddit claimed, with the typical confidence of an anonymous internet user, that the living pig had been substituted out just for the podium ceremony, and that Renard would have a photo op with his new pet away from the noise and chaos. Jez Cox on commentary, meanwhile, suggested that the pig was swapped with the farmer in exchange for cash. A classic pig pro quo.
Neither of these excuses sat well with me, seeing as the podium pig is a central feature – maybe the central feature – of the race. It’s on the promotional posters, in the artwork produced showing the winner, and every single year in recent memory there has been an abundance of social media clips of the pig from the winner’s team and from the event organisers alike. In the case of Valentin Madouas’ prize pig, Léon, he’s an occasional feature on his Instagram page, too:
So, what gives? The obvious answer was that the event organiser – Amaury Sports Organisation, who you might remember from other smash-hit bicycle races like ‘the Tour de France’ – realised that there was at least some segment of the viewing public that was broadly not on board with the industrial meat complex – or, specifically, felt that it was a bit fucky to give away a farm animal to a professional athlete without most of the necessary conditions or temperament to care for it (Madouas aside, obv. We’ll also give a pass to Tom Steels and his Tour de France horse.)
All of that might have explained the initial silence from the ASO press officer, who did not acknowledge my request of a week prior to the event:
“Is it possible to find out everything I can about the Tro Bro Leon piglet that will be given away this weekend? How is it selected, does it have a name, what are the attributes of this pig in particular, is it possible to talk to the farmer/owner?”
But it probably didn’t explain why my shorter, blunter follow-up message on Monday (“Are the Tro Bro Leon pigs gone? Just a wooden statue now?”) also went unanswered. Or, when I escalated my request to a more senior ASO press officer, why she also didn’t respond. No, this felt calculated.
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