On 1 April 2013, the Belgian newspaper La Dernière Heureran an article claiming that the 2015 Tour de France would start from Doha, the first stage held in a specially constructed air-conditioned arena, followed by a night-time mountain stage culminating in a six-kilometre climb that would be built to resemble the final stages of Mont Ventoux, replete with a replica memorial to Tom Simpson. This ‘grand départ’ would reproduce key elements of the Tour's heritage, the only element lacking being the emblematic saucissonproducers like the red-and-white chequered Cochonou that are a mainstay of the Tour’s daily advertising caravane. Cochonou – ‘le bon saucisson comme on l’aime chez nous’ – would not make the trip, as ‘throwing samples of pork-based products to a crowd that doesn't eat them would show a lack of respect and contradict its no-waste policy’.

Most readers quickly realised that this was an April Fool's prank, the shock award of the World Cup to Qatar two years before still seemed so improbable and fantastical that it made even the most outlandish hoaxes and parodies about other sports seem plausible. In 2013, in a four-page exclusive, Oliver Kay, lead football writer for The Times, broke the news that Europe's leading clubs were about to leave Europe to form a new world championship soccer league in Qatar featuring Europe's top clubs called the Dream Football League. Kay claimed that the details of the scoop came from a reliable source in France, but it later emerged that the story came from a satirical article run by the Cahiers du foot blog, presented as a press release from ‘Agence Transe Presse’ (a play on Agence FrancePresse) and quoting the fictional Directrice of the IBIS (Institut bruxellois d’intelligence stratégique), Bonnie Pascal-Fasse – a parody of the esteemed commentator on geopolitics and sport Pascal Boniface, director of the Institut de relations internationales et stratégiques (IRIS) in Paris. This farce, embarrassing for The Times and a source of much mirth for the writers of the Cahiers du footblog, provides a freeze frame of the paranoia and possibilities bubbling under the surface of a sporting landscape that has experienced tectonic shifts in the last thirty years.