From the mid-1920s onwards, Jeff Dickson, an American who had come to France a few years earlier as a war photographer and had started his career selling lucky bags in cinemas, moved into boxing. Within a few years, he had established himself as Europe's leading promoter and, in 1931, took over the management of the Palais des Sports, thanks to influential supporters such as L'Auto. This sports entertainment company, housed at the Vélodrome d'Hiver, staged the biggest European sporting events of the interwar period and gave Dickson considerable notoriety. This article looks back at Dickson's career and seeks to understand the conditions that made his rapid and exceptional rise possible. Drawing on a variety of sources relating to Dickson, his entourage and several companies, the aim is to highlight the extent to which this promoter and his team succeeded in appropriating the particularities of the sporting and spectacular arena and optimising the use of their respective resources. In so doing, we aim to show that Dickson succeeded in concentrating all the symbolic and economic gains from the events he organised, enabling him to establish himself as the boss of the sporting spectacle in Europe.