2023-10-30 14:28:00
Liberation at 50 DossierBread and games? If in the 70s, sport was often seen as entertainment through the prism of competition alone, “Libé” will change perspectives from the 80s, by putting the athlete at the center of the story.
In the 1970s, Libé looked at sport through a narrow lens, between condescension and incomprehension. These balloon-pushing games would only be the ridiculous pleasures of drunken chauvinists and franchouillard rednecks. These entertainments in shorts would smell bad of opiates putting to sleep a stupefied people whom the power would stuff with bread and games to distract them from the ardent revolutions. Let us add that the blue-white-red results are far from magnificent and do not encourage us to sociologize the rare victories.
The situation changed in the 80s. The reconquest of the body asserted itself. And Libé will take his part. In a flamboyant way. The idea is to put an end to the dualism which would like the head and intelligence to be celebrated and the legs and other lower parts to be denied. Imagined by Jean Pierre Delacroix and Jean Hatzfeld, ardently supported by Serge July, this rehabilitation enterprise will take various forms which, all of which, will consist of strengthening one’s thinking, chasing the complexity of winged feet or surfing the wave of movements of restless crowds.
Make athletes write. The Libé sports department believes that the competitors had something to say at the time. It is no longer just a matter of collecting their words through classic interviews, but of lending them their pen. Asked by Patrick Le Roux, the Tour de France couriers take up the pen to recount their stage, instead of slipping their shaved legs under the cool of the sheets. Better still, the sailors of the first Vendée Globe impress with their evocative power, telexed from the oceans, before the satellites transform these slow scratches of foam into an Instagram post. And it is possible that the horses that Homeric, the former lad, skillfully corralled, also stamped their hooves on the keyboards. At the same time, Libé authorizes all stylistic licenses in the narration of sporting events, in order to move away from the minuted report to detail the psychologies and illuminate the attitudes. We will see Serge Daney focus on tennis. Or Marguerite Duras questioning a Michel Platini delighted to discuss with a personality so “ignorant of football things” who will see in him a “blue angel”.
Enter the physical fray. It is no longer enough to quietly watch the show from the press stands but to experience the sensations of the practitioner or to put yourself in the place of the champion. Journalists from Libé share the training sessions of the football teams, get into a ring, whip a filly from the sulky, drive racing cars, board trimarans, lay ropes at the foot of the Aiguille des Drus with the mountaineer Catherine Destivelle. Or more basically, on a strike day, join the Porte de Clignancourt and the Porte d’Orléans to prove that by jogging you get there better than by metro or car.
Show the complexity of the performance. The idea to challenge is that the feat would just consist of running fast, hitting hard, jumping high. It must be demonstrated that the athlete does not simply activate his natural mechanics and is not a decapitated duck. Libé dissects the difficulty of winning and explains how much technicality, mental preparation, medical monitoring, economics and obviously politics go into it. On Saturdays, Libé publishes ultra-in-depth interviews with specialists in a discipline. Before the proliferation of television magnifiers and digital data, these practitioners were splitting hairs with, sometimes, the jubilation of sophisticated Géo Trouvetout.
When sport becomes a social phenomenon. The 80s and 90s saw jogging explode and indoor gymnastics adopted leotards. Sneakers and tracksuits are starting to take a backseat to conventional suits. Beyond the French successes of Hinault, Noah, Rives, Prost, Peyron and Platini, the Sports department delights in this unusual influence on an era that cherishes performance. It details the marriage of sport and business. Coaches lacking a bench, champions at the end of their cycle or disembarked skippers come to provide incentives. Michel Hidalgo, Daniel Herrero and Isabelle Autissier motivate executives by analyzing their past exploits or their management recipes.
Recognition, and after? In the 2000s, the athlete no longer has anything of the laughable outlaws of yesteryear. Here he has become a buxom role model, an inappropriate star, a fascinating rich person. The jubilant innocence of the rehabilitative era has gone out of fashion. The discovery of Lance Armstrong’s cyclical and cynical doping is the most symbolic backlash. In his reports from the Tour stage, Jean Louis Le Touzet confronts it by putting irony in his poetry. Standardization is nearing completion. And the champion will soon be just another powerful force, to be kept at a critical distance. In 2022, in the sports pages, a delicate “at the same time” is in season where distrust and admiration coexist.
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