In Praise Of... Sponsors

They’re the people who pay for the sport we love to watch. So let’s hear it for laminate flooring, face cream and satellite television

- Trevor Ward

Italian rider Fiorenzo Magni was a seriously hard man, who shook off accusations of being a Nazi sympathiser to win both the Giro and Tour of Flanders three times. He was also known for rubbing a well-known brand of women’s face cream into the chamois pad of his shorts, and in 1954 this would lead to an event that changed the face of professional cycling forever.

Until that point, the sponsorship of professional teams had been restricted to cycling brands only (with the notable exception of a British team that in 1947 operated under the rules of the breakaway British League of Racing Cyclists rather than the UCI and was sponsored by pools company ITP). But bike sales had suffered during the period of post-war prosperity that saw more people buying cars and mopeds. Brands such as Ganna, which supplied the bikes for Magni’s team, had less money to spend on sponsorship.

So Magni contacted the German producers of the face cream he had applied so diligently to the opposite end of his anatomy and convinced them to give him 20 million Italian lire (£200,000 today). The next year, Magni won his third Giro with the name Nivea emblazoned across his jersey.

‘Nivea always thanked me for my idea, even years later. This was the beginning of the salvation of cycling,’ Magni told Bill McGann, author of the two-volume The Story Of The Giro d’Italia in 2006.