“He died alive,” says his biographer Frantz-Olivier Giesbert. There is no better way to put Bernard Tapie’s years of fighting cancer into words. The crook and juggler let the public take part in it. He recently appeared on television with black eyes and swollen lips after a robbery in his home in which he and his wife were brutally beaten.
The showman was initially an accomplished businessman who bought up and restructured ailing companies – profiteer and savior at the same time. The socialist President François Mitterrand sent him on television and to Marseille in the 1980s. Tapie’s mission: Reconciling France with entrepreneurship and fighting the emerging Jean-Marie Le Pen. In Marseille he became a member of parliament and president of the football club Olympique Marseille.
He was the first Frenchman to stand up to Le Pen in the media exchange of blows. With his career from dishwasher to billionaire – who will gamble away his fortune again – he brought the French a new dream. He had learned in the army that the outsider, who was born in humble circumstances, could achieve something. But he was not happy either in politics or with money. He was also a singer and also did theater on stage.
The adventure in Marseille
In the film – directed by Claude Lelouch – he played his own role. The love of his life belonged to his family, cycling and football. Whenever he felt reasonably strong in recent years, he got on his racing bike. Sport gave him the most intense years of his life and saved it in the extension it deserved.
Bernard Tapie was still young when he bought the Look company, which makes ski bindings. He launched a cycling team for his organic food chain “La vie claire”. He managed to hire Bernard Hinault, the multiple winner of the Tour de France. Tapie staged the rivalry between Hinault and the American Greg LeMond. It triggered the inflation of salaries and bonuses. For “La vie claire” he devised ambiguous commercials: “We only sell products without pesticides and doping.” When he retired from cycling in 1989, the child of the Parisian banlieue had already gained a foothold in Marseille: he was a member of the Parisians National Assembly elected – and later also ministers.
The Marseille adventure began with a meal with Mikhail Gorbachev at the Soviet embassy in Paris. Bernard Tapie sat next to the writer Edmonde Charles-Roux, wife of Mitterrand’s Interior Minister Gaston Defferre, mayor of Marseille for more than thirty years and looking for a crown prince. Defferre arranged his presidency at Olympique Marseille (OM), it lasted from 1986 to 1994.
At the 1990 World Cup, he invited himself to the FIFA press conference the day before the final between Argentina and Germany in Rome and announced that he had taken over Adidas. “Tapie becomes the world champion of sport,” headlined the Liberation newspaper. Because he was too heavily in debt, he had to sell Adidas again after thirty months.
Olympique Marseille supporters say goodbye to Tapie in their own way in front of the stadium.
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Bild: Picture-Alliance
He later claims to have discovered how he was ripped off by the Crédit Lyonnais bank. The legal battles lasted for decades. Tapie claimed the recovery of Adidas for itself until the very end. As president of OM he invented the rivalry with PSG in the capital and put together a first-class team. Tapie brought Rudi Völler as a player and hired Franz Beckenbauer as a coach. “I couldn’t resist his charisma,” Beckenbauer said to L’Équipe after Tapie’s death. The season on the Mediterranean was “especially enriching”: “Even if it bothered me that he constantly interfered in sporting matters. He changed tactics just before kick-off, I had no other choice. He always wanted the last word. “
“I learn quickly,” said Tapie after the semi-finals in the European Cup against Benfica Lisbon in 1990. He accused the Portuguese of bribing the referee. The following year, Marseille lost the final in Bari against Red Star Belgrade – but in 1993 Tapie’s team won the European Cup against AC Milan in the Munich Olympic Stadium. The competition was called for the first time: Champions League. In addition, the President of Olympique was Minister in Paris.
The fall at the absolute height of his career was brutal. The Adidas debacle and the bribery affair in the French championship (in the insignificant game against Valenciennes, the opponents should raise their legs so that the stars could spare themselves for the Munich final), therapy – temporarily – broke the neck. Bernard Tapie was sentenced to prison. He was in jail for five months. He could no longer become mayor of Marseille. OM was stripped of the championship, PSG did not accept it.
Tapie remained a controversial figure, making headlines for trying to buy Club Méditerranée, and becoming a French legend for the second time with his cancer. He also took his dying from a sporting point of view: “Those who live are not afraid of death.” The fans of Olympique Marseille supported him in his last battle with various actions. Thousands of them now pay their last respects in the stadium, where a memorial has been erected.
Marseille is the first French Champions League winner “forever and ever”. And to keep it that way, they support the PSG’s opponents every time they play. Bernard Tapie still owns the La Provence newspaper in Marseille, with which he wanted to become mayor and whose editor-in-chief is Frantz-Oliver Giesbert. On Monday he printed the front in black: “Adieu Boss. Bernard Tapie (1943-2021) ”.