Four years later he followed his first Tour de France and sat spellbound as he watched riders struggle for more than 16 hours on cols "that were no more than mediocre earth paths, muddy, stony".

Goddet returned the following year and followed every Tour until 1989, with the exceptions of 1932 when he went to the Los Angeles Olympics and 1981 when he was too ill.[1] He became chief reporter at L'Auto and took over organisation of the race when the director, Henri Desgrange, became too ill to continue in 1936.

While he encouraged the newspaper's printers to produce material for the Resistance, he supported Philippe Pétain as leader of France after the Armistice[1] and he handed over the keys to the Vélodrome d'Hiver when the Germans wanted to intern thousands of Jews there.

[7]In choosing those words rather than the liberté, égalité, fraternité which had been France's motto since the Revolution of 1789, Pétain emphasised that he had ended the republic and created his own replacement, the French State.

It was more a traditionalism associated with right-wing movements, a "dream to restore the virtues of hard work, honesty, and respect for one's social superiors" which Pétain thought had existed in rural society.

[9] It was nevertheless a period disowned by the French Republic when Charles de Gaulle restored it and for which France took responsibility only in 1995, 50th anniversary of the end of the war, in a speech by President Jacques Chirac marking the round-up of Parisian Jews in the Velodrome d'Hiver.

[10] Goddet said in his biography, written 50 years later after his wartime words, "History should not confuse Pétain with Vichy, the true patriotic intentions of the old soldier with the political action of the government in place drawn from the gutter [gouffre]".

On L'Équipe's first front page, Goddet wrote anonymously: We are living through a cruel time in the life of a society in which, if we fail to resist it, selfishness will become the dominant passion.

The finances of L'Équipe were rarely sound and in May 1965 Goddet accepted a merger with a company run by the publisher Émilien Amaury, with whom he had earlier made his successful bid to relaunch the Tour de France.

On 17 March 1987 he found the locks of his office changed and a court official waiting to search and clear it amid claims, never proven, of financial mismanagement.