The French medal score at Rio is not exactly impressive. Watching the TV coverage of French achievements, I imagined a typical Eurovision evening. France, one point. A Poulidor point. A single silver medal in team swimming. A photo of the silver team is not exactly joyful.
No medals at all in fencing, judo, cycling, ball sports… Waiting for a gold miracle, maybe in pole vaulting. I fear it might be like waiting for Godot. The French are simply not a great sporting people. In exactly the same way that we're not a nation that excels in singing competitions. But we have other prize-winning talents. For example, we can be good at politics, poetry, metaphysics... and silly things like that. We can make all kinds of fine speeches, and write all kinds of fabulous books. We're good at mathematics, and science, too. We've even got around to staging top-quality revolutions. But don't ask us to be worldly, pragmatic, champion singers or sportsmen. That's simply not French.
UPDATE I forgot to mention that France is also very good at building and selling advanced military equipment such as submarines, helicopters, fighter aircraft, etc.
LAST-MINUTE NEWS: The medal situation of France improved considerably today, Tuesday. There has been a lot of talk in France for the last few days about the undeniable role of
dope in the modern sporting world. Speaking of the Chinese swimmer
Sun Yang, the French competitor
Camille Lecourt said publicly that "
his piss is violet". As I see things, the entire sporting world does indeed appear to be grimly infected by dope. The evil American
Lance Armstrong set the ball rolling, and the global situation appears to have worsened enormously over the last few years. At times I wonder if we haven't reached the end of high-level sporting competitions in the nice old-fashioned clean traditions.
