• Tour de France - “New ideas! Bold Initiatives!” were necessary to pull the Tour de France out of the relentless rut of tedium. Race director Henri Desgranges steadfastly maintained the Tour's founding ideal of “individual heroism.” The very powerful trade teams, whose members rode for “team“ not “ individual”, dominated the Tours of the mid to late twenties. Desgranges took a bold step in 1930 by eliminating the trade team system and instituting the National team structure. The elimination of the trade teams meant the elimination of the commercial sponsorship money. The race director needed to find a way to pay for each team's lodging and to purchase cycling equipment. Desgranges, taking the advice of Pierre Thevenin (advertising manager of Menier Chocolates), came up with a masterstroke of advertising. He introduced the Tour's first “Caravane de Publicite” (publicity caravan). For the advertising money invested in the Tour, the sponsor got the opportunity to show their products along the Tour's race route. The most popular sponsor in 1930 was Menier Chocolates. 500,000 cycling fans came early to their place along the route to get the chocolate handouts.

• MIT - 1930, the computer age began at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when scientists started work on the first computer.

• World Cup - The first ever Football (Soccer) World Cup was held in Uruguay. Host nation Uruguay beat Argentina 4-2 to win the 1st World Cup.

• Germany - Adolf Hitler gained significant political power in the aftermath of the collapse of the German economy and the Wall Street crash. Hitler's National Socialist Party gained 107 seats Reichstag.

• Pluto - Clyde W. Tombaugh discovered the ninth and smallest planet in our solar system.

Notable Deaths -
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859-1930, British author and creator of the Sherlock Holmes detective stories.

Sport Figure of the Decade 1930-1939 -
L'Equipe's athlete of the decade was Jesse Owens, USA. He was a multiple Gold Medallist at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In the face of Hitler's superior Aryan athletes, Owens, a black man, won 4 gold medals. He became a folk hero in America when a furious Adolf Hitler snubbed him after his great performance. Owens would go down in history as one of the greatest track and field athletes of all times.

1929

1931

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