Constructing and contesting the (post-) national sporting hero: Media,money,mobility and Marie-José Pérec

Introduction

This article traces the mediatisation of a single sportsperson, Marie-José Pérec, from when she first emerged as a promising athlete in the late 1980s, through the highs and lows of her sporting career, to her continuing, if increasingly sporadic, media appearances today. Over the course of the 1990s, Pérec became the most successful French track athlete of all time, and, in terms of media coverage and sporting achievement, dominated French athletics throughout this period. Pérec’s performances leave behind a vast corpus of audiovisual and written material that, when analysed within the context of the ‘sport/media/identity’ triptych that is the focus of this collection, illuminates a variety of topics that have been to the fore in French public discourse over the last 25 years. In particular this article analyses how a sporting figure serves as a prism through which prevailing attitudes towards money, America, race, sexuality, and the media’s role in society are reflected. The article thus decodes the multiple meanings at stake in Pérec’s iconic status, whereby icons, following McLuhan, are considered ‘unified and compressed images of a complex kind; [t]hey focus a large region of experience in tiny compass’ (2001 [1964]: 246). Specific emphasis is placed on the way in which Marie-José Pérec was constructed and contested as a national hero by French media. The athlete’s physical appearance, her material wealth and her transnational mobility emerge as key issues in this process.

The media forms analysed here consist primarily of print journalism (national daily newspapers and weekly or monthly magazines, sport-specific publications and some regional newspapers) and television (terrestrial and cable/satellite channels), and the advertising featured in them, with the occasional support of autobiographies, biographies and documentary films. This corpus incorporates the work of prominent journalists, photographers and television presenters, and refers to a plethora of key figures in the athletics world in order to provide insights into the social, economic and political developments that shaped France’s sporting landscape throughout the 1990s. The article is organised thematically with each section introducing and concentrating on a particular topic, which is further developed throughout the remainder of the article. The first section outlines the cultural context within which athletes compete in contemporary mega-events, describing the predominance of national frames of reference in this environment, and the concomitant creation of national heroes through sport. The focus then turns to how representations of Pérec’s performances have consistently dwelled on her blackness and sexuality, and how these elements interact with constructions of Pérec as national hero. The second part charts reactions to Pérec’s leaving France to pursue her career in the United States, a moment that reveals insights into abiding concerns at that time regarding America’s role in the world and the role of money in sport. This leads to a consideration of how the media interpreted Pérec’s wealth and commercialisation as distancing the athlete from her national allegiances and obligations. This is also the central theme of the final section, which focuses on Pérec’s heavily mediatised non-performances.

Although this article follows a rough chronological order, the thematic emphasis to the sections necessitates a brief outline of key moments in Pérec’s career. In Tokyo in 1991, she became the first French athlete to win a gold medal at a World Championships. She followed this with victory in the same event (the 400 metres) in the Barcelona Olympics of the following year. In 1994 she controversially left France for the United States, which was also the site of her career high-point, the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, where she won gold in both the 200 and 400 metres, making her the most successful French athlete of all time. She again provided headline news at the Olympics four years later when, due to compete against local favourite Cathy Freeman, she left Sydney before the competition began. She retired from athletics in 2004 but has maintained a media presence through her work as a consultant for television and print media.

The multiple avatars of ‘la Pérec’

Marie-José Pérec first came to international mainstream media attention when she won the gold medal in the 400 metres at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. The profile of the athlete that appeared the day after her momentous success in France-Antilles, the daily newspaper in her native Guadeloupe, included a photo of her modelling an outfit for designer Paco Rabanne, with the opening text explaining that: ‘Comme Josephine Baker, Marie-José Pérec a deux amours. Pour l’une, c’était son pays et Paris. Pour l’autre, c’est la piste d’un stade et les avancées des défilés de mode’ (France-Antilles, 1992a). Why did the journalist choose to compare and contrast an American expatriate famous in 1920s Paris as a cabaret dancer and one of France’s foremost sport stars of the 1990s? What could they be seen to have in common that could justify such an unexplained allusion? Responses could potentially read something like this: both were black women working in highly mediatised domains whose bodies, as displayed in their physical performances, were the object of much comment and representation throughout their careers; both became iconic figures – ‘la Baker’ and ‘la Pérec’ – who transcended their artistic and sporting domains and who were both branded ‘divas’ as a result of the mediatisation of their personalities and personal lives; both plotted transatlantic itineraries (Baker from the United States to Paris; Pérec in the opposite direction, having first left her native Guadeloupe for the French capital in the pursuit of professional and personal success). Whilst this Baker–Pérec conflation foregrounds the discursive intertwining of Pérec’s feats on the track with her extra-sporting media performances, it also points to the potential of considering, in Pérec’s case, what Scheper has achieved for Baker in analysing ‘the politics of [her] mobility and her complicated staging of race, sexuality, and nationality by interpreting her performances … through the lens of spectatorship and reception’ (Scheper, 2007: 74).

Nations remain the dominant representative model in the major athletics events. During the World Championships and Olympic Games, athletes compete in their countries’ colours, tallies are kept of the medal counts of respective nations, and, according to the rituals that have become an integral part of the mediatised performance, successful athletes drape the national flag over their shoulders during their lap of honour and stand erect on the podium as the national anthem rings out. The images and information repackaged and relayed by media outlets thus inevitably interpret such achievements according to what they are seen to mean for the nation in question. Within this frame of reference, medal-winning athletes are immediately enshrined as ambassadors for their nation on an international stage. This status, whether desired by the athlete or not, is invested with a series of obligations whereby the performances of the athlete, both on and off the track, are discursively constructed as reflecting the state of the nation and demonstrating the athlete’s relationship to their home country. This phenomenon may be considered as being institutionalised and politically legitimised in France, given the relatively important role (as compared with the United States, for example) of the state in the training and preparation of athletes, and the fact that sport is officially and legally imbued with a public service role (Krasnoff, 2013).

Elite athletes simultaneously perform within a heavily mediatised global environment in which multiple commercial interests invest in order to publicise their products. In the ‘star system’ – ‘l’économie du vedetteriat’ (Mignon, 2007: 155) – that dominates elite sport, the very few athletes who win medals are the almost exclusive focus for these corporate interests. These athletes therefore monopolise the associated monetary rewards, with the fractions of seconds that separate them from their rivals on the track translated into vast disparities in terms of their respective revenues. These star athletes are thus at the convergence of multiple interests, with their performances appropriated simultaneously by commercial partners desiring to be associated with success and national institutions determined on celebrating such performances as public achievements. These interests do not necessarily correlate, and with private enterprise increasingly important in the financing of athletics events since the watershed Los Angeles Olympics of 1984 (the first Olympics that was funded by a combination of state and private funds), the potential for the image of the star athlete to be contested by these various stakeholders has increased. In the case of the media treatment of Pérec, we see multiple manifestations of the fear that commercial obligations would interfere with the athlete’s national allegiances and loyalties.

The athlete’s image in both national and commercial frames of references is mediated by their representation in television, radio and the written press. There was a massive increase in the mediatisation of sport in France following the liberalisation of the television market in the mid 1980s. These shifts contributed significantly to the process highlighted at the 2007 themed exhibition on heroes at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, whereby, over the course of the 1980s and into the 1990s – a period corresponding to that analysed in this study – sport became the forum par excellence for the construction of heroic figures:

D’ailleurs, le culte de la performance … s’élargit dans les années 1980 quasiment à l’ensemble de la société. Mais la figure la plus exposée – la plus médiatisée – sur les affiches, sur les écrans, dans les médias, est le sportif. Aucun exploit ne parvient jusqu’au public sans être préparé, mis en scène, commenté à satiété. (Faliu and Tourret, 2007: 118)

It also led to an increase in the mediatisation of sports stars’ personal lives, a phenomenon that Patrick Mignon has lucidly described as ‘la désinstitutionalisation de l’information au profit du spectacle et la promotion de l’individu authentique, qu’il soit homme politique, sportif ou citoyen quelconque, capable d’exposer ses émotions’ (2007: 153). An analysis of the mediatisation of a contemporary sports star must therefore also consider their non-sporting performances.

As in the case of many of her sporting contemporaries, for Pérec ‘l’héroïsation … repose largement … sur la belle action médiatisée et le modèle de la réussite sociale’ (Faliu and Tourret, 2007: 118). In terms of the former, commentators were spellbound by Pérec’s running style, in particular the grace and efficiency of her remarkable ‘foulée’, as well as other aspects of her aesthetic attractiveness discussed below. In terms of her social ascension, Pérec traces a typically heroic narrative in leaving behind a poor childhood in the Caribbean to attain glory in major cities and mega-events. In the mid 1980s, a teenage Pérec, like many of the foremost Antillean sportspeople of recent time, left Guadeloupe for Paris and the Institut National du Sport et de l’Éducation Physique (INSEP) in the Bois de Vincennes. There, Pérec quickly garnered the moniker of ‘la gazelle’ – a laudatory term emphasising speed and graceful movement that has been used to describe black female sprinters from both sides of the Atlantic for generations (including most notably the star of the 1960s Olympics Wilma Rudolph). Later, this departure from the Caribbean for France was to be remembered as a painful exile for this ‘frêle demoiselle’:

Son pire effort, à Marie-Jo, fut sans doute de se lever un matin pour quitter l’île de son enfance, son grand bleu, son sable chaud, la douceur de ses cocotiers, la saveur de la cuisine créole, l’odeur de ses bougainvilliers. (Safra, 1996)

When Pérec won France’s first ever gold medal at a World Championships in 1991, the cartoonist for the national sports daily L’Équipe, Bernard Chenez, whose sketches often provide the most salient commentaries on the social significance of sporting events, depicted her win as a poignant demonstration of Guadeloupean success in adversity with a cartoon of a smiling matriarch and her family congregated around a television in front of a corrugated iron-roofed hut, sheltered by palm trees. Under the heading of ‘Médaille d’or pour la Guadeloupe’, the family claim independence for their island, while simultaneously admitting that ‘c’est seulement pour faire chier la France’ (L’Équipe, 1991). This cartoon encapsulates the nature of the discourse surrounding the achievements of French Caribbean athletes on an international stage since the time when the Guadeloupean Marius Trésor first captained the French football team in the 1970s to the mid 1990s, which combines fascination at the otherness of these athletes as regards their origins and skin-colour vis-à-vis the majority of their compatriots and anxious reaffirmations that their successes are victories for the nation, resulting in a public interrogation of exactly how ‘French’ such athletes can be considered.

The consensus in sporting discourse dictated, therefore, that Pérec’s victories should generally be imagined as a demonstration of French national prowess drawn from its overseas departments and territories, inscribing her achievements within the history of national athletics while highlighting her difference within this narrative – a difference for which her skin-colour provided a conveniently evocative signifier. In France-Antilles (1992b), for example, ‘la jeune Guadeloupéenne a piétiné ce poncif déplaisant qui collait depuis si longtemps aux sportifs français, ce cliché des“loosers” [sic], des perdants magnifiques’. While French athletes generally were seen as underperforming on an international stage, Pérec was ‘le bel arbre tropical qui cache la forêt d’incertitudes’ (L’Équipe, 1996a). As her ascension continued she metamorphosised into ‘la Divine’, ‘la fille aux semelles de vent’, and also ‘l’ange noir’ and ‘la magnifique idole noire’, with the colour of her skin a signifier of her exoticism as a national ambassador and ‘fille des îles’ (France-Antilles, 1992c).

As Pérec’s fame grew and other non-sporting media outlets took greater interest, ‘la diva’ – another term that underlined Pérec’s difference vis-à-vis perceived societal norms – was added to the plethora of race-related metaphors. The ‘diva’ term neatly evoked Pérec’s flamboyance on the track, erratic behaviour in media appearances, and the sexual allure she held for many commentators from sporting and non-sporting milieux. As France-Antilles stated: ‘“L’ange noir” … aurait mérité un “e”, car cet ange-là, aux enjambées de 2,50 mètres qui lui donne des ailes, a aussi du sex-appeal’ (1992c). The construction of Pérec as a sex symbol was facilitated by her appearances in non-sporting, celebrity-oriented publications: she was the first athlete to grace the cover of Elle magazine in a special edition concentrating on ‘notre sexualité’ (Elle, 1996), as well as appearing on the cover of Paris Match on a number of occasions – a measure that has been used by French sociologists to define a public figure as a celebrity (Chenu, 2010). She appeared as a catwalk model for Paco Rabanne, in photoshoots in bed with her boyfriend, and wearing nothing but body-paint and the imprint of gazelles running along her thighs (Canal+, 2003). This 1989 photoshoot was covered by a journalist from L’Équipe Magazine, who was taken aback by Pérec’s apparently provocative physicality and intimidating sexuality (1989). His report constitutes an early example of the troubled relationship between Pérec and significant French media outlets, as well as a manifestation of the public fascination with Pérec’s physical appearance. Pérec took offence at the same publication when, two years later, it dedicated half a page to a photo of her posterior in a piece celebrating her World Championship win. At the high-profile press conference that followed her victory at the Olympics the following year, Pérec castigated L’Équipe for this editorial decision, with her choice of this pseudo-event, which would generally have been expected to constitute a banal celebratory exchange with an admiring press corps, for the settling of scores with journalists exemplifying her consistently confrontational attitude towards sections of the media. This example of the objectivisation of Pérec was symptomatic of the discursive transformation of elite women’s sport into a sexualised spectacle through the gaze of the male journalist, prevalent in the 1990s in mainstream media and encapsulated by this description of a race by Patrick Besson (1996) writing in Paris Match:

Les femmes qui courent sont émouvantes, parce qu’on imagine qu’elles nous courent après. Je ne connais pas de spectacle plus beau au monde qu’un 200 mètres féminin avec sur la piste Ottey, Privalova et Pérec. C’est tellement érotique que ça devrait passer en codé à minuit sur Canal+.

L’Équipe was not the sole newspaper fascinated by Pérec’s derrière. So too were the editors of Libération who made a rear-view image of Pérec the full-page photo for their front page following her victory at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, and subsequently the main image on the cover of their book that collected the most significant front pages in the history of Libé (Libération 1996; 1997). This image also provides the central conceit of a 2004 retrospective written in Le Figaro by novelist Patrick Grainville a number of weeks after Marie-José Pérec had announced her retirement from athletics. The piece recalls the Olympic successes of Pérec and reprises several of the recurring metaphorical tropes associated with her throughout her athletic career, combining them in a lyrical essay that provides an acute example of the male and nationalistic gaze through which Pérec’s sporting feats were interpreted. Importantly, the moments that Grainville recounts here were initially experienced by the author through the medium of television. The article is therefore effectively a commemorative endeavour that constitutes a commentary on the mediatisation of the athlete’s performance and its reception. Moreover, the physical performance of the athlete is doubly refracted through the work of television initially, and subsequently through the work of the writer. These temporal and material factors combine to produce a text wherein coalesce the multiple avatars the media had foisted on Pérec over the course of her career.

In this article, Pérec is eroticised and exoticised through, respectively, the sensual imagery and multiple allusions to African culture that are characteristic of Grainville’s prize-winning writing (Prix Goncourt in 1976 for Les Flamboyants). Describing her race in Barcelona, and the particular aesthetic grace with which she achieved her victory there, Grainville collates a series of African-inflected metaphors (presumably inspired by the colour of Pérec’s skin) with allusions to classical literature (recalling the Olympic setting and the ancient heritage that inspired the modern events):

L’envol de Marie-Jo, les javelots de ses jambes minces, les sagaies de ses cuisses aux longs muscles tendus, ailés … Si brune, si dorée, si fuselée. Antilles! Océanique! … Le surnom de gazelle dont on l’avait affublée me paraît pittoresque et caricatural. D’un exotisme paresseux. Elle était amazone et centauresse. Au paradis d’Homère et de la Toison d’or. (Grainville, 2004)

Pérec’s post-race celebrations, also broadcast live on television after she won the 200 metres, attracted both awe and ire from commentators transfixed by the aesthetics of her performance (Gex, 2008: 19). Pérec, who on numerous occasions had expressed her dislike for the way these post-race performances were staged and considered obligatory, allowed the French flag she was ritually handed on her lap of honour to trail on the ground as she jogged around the perimeter of the track. Numerous commentators at the time were scandalised by this apparent disregard for a national symbol, but these gestures inspired instead more African-infused romantic and classical allusions in Grainville’s retrospective. This time Grainville imagines Pérec as Flaubert’s Salammbô and the tricolore as the sacred veil of Carthage:

Je la revois encore et toujours marcher dans son triomphe, tournoyer autour de la piste. Tantôt laissant la flamme du drapeau tricolore flotter à ses pieds telle une muleta, ou le déployant dans les airs, bras dressés, pareil au voile sacré de Salammbô, oui, le zaïmph! Fille d’Hamilcar ou reine de Nubie, à tout le moins! (Grainville, 2004)

Fascinated by the beauty and sensuality of Pérec’s body as televised live and subsequently ad infinitum in news reports and replays, the writer, like the editors of L’Équipe and Libé before him, is transfixed by Pérec’s backside and addresses the object of his desire directly. Rapt by Pérec’s revealing Team France running attire that adjusted itself during the race to further expose the athlete’s posterior, Grainville imagines the coming together of the blue fabric of her outfit and her body as the physical effect of a patriotic act. As the writer searches frantically for heroic models with which to elucidate Pérec’s stature, the athlete is consecutively African queen, exotic romantic heroine, classical Greek goddess and, finally, conclusively, national icon:

Et le monde entier regardait ton maillot bleu roi, enfoncé entre tes fesses comme pour mieux les révéler, altières et coriaces, roues de Ramsès et carquois de tes flèches ! Le monde découvrait les prodigieux ressorts charnus, les rouages noirs et dorés de ta propulsion. Et tu devins plus lente et câline. Sensuelle avec la France. L’éblouissant drapeau t’enveloppait d’une langueur de gloire. (Grainville, 2004)

This article could be considered a twenty-first-century example of a writer ‘perpetuating “Black Venus” narratives of primitivist exotic sexuality’ (Scheper, 2007: 76) and subsequently appropriating this sexuality as national patrimoine. Moreover, while the lyricism of this article is unusual for a sports-related piece, the article is symptomatic of the processes whereby the athlete’s origins and sexuality were appropriated as constitutive elements in the construction of Pérec-as-hero.

Living in America

Elite athletes inhabit an intimate global network consisting of meets and mega-events, sponsors and journalists, coaches, teammates and adversaries. The elite athletic world is geographically extensive but relatively concentrated in terms of the number of actors involved. As eminent sports geographer John Bale succinctly explains in his work on ‘running cultures’: ‘Elite athletes are compulsory cosmopolitans, facilitated at the global scale by time-space compression and the variety of human agents who are concerned with the production of an athlete [performer] from a runner’ (Bale, 2004: 137). The top athletes in the world are wealthy and effectively footloose individuals, whose success enables them to seek out the best conditions and coaches possible within a worldwide network.

In the autobiography she wrote following her win at the Barcelona Olympics, Pérec expressed her admiration for American athletes, particularly the way they handled the post-race media obligations. According to Pérec, American athletes prepared for the happy case of victory and the obligatory celebrations and lap of honour that would follow, a practice that French athletes were too self-conscious or modest to consider. For Pérec, this was a reflection of her compatriots’ difficulty in maintaining a winning mentality (1993: 164). In her autobiography, Pérec also describes her desire, driven by the memory of her poor upbringing, to make the most of the lucrative opportunities presented by her success on the track. Her determination to pursue and enjoy the fruits of these opportunities clashed with the principles of her coach at this time, Jacques Piasenta, who disapproved of what he saw as her obsession with monetising her image (L’Équipe, 1994). Pérec admitted never wishing to be ‘l’héritière des Spartiates’, unlike coach ‘Pia’ who refused to accept any money for his coaching and imposed a strict code of conduct for his athletes (Pérec, 1993: 135). When Pérec failed to appear for a meet at Bercy in Paris, the pair separated, with Piasenta citing these differences in attitude as irreconcilable. In the media, Pérec’s no-show was seen as being provoked by her extra-sporting interests and the influence of her expanding entourage, which included the company managing her image (JPPA) and her sponsors, sportswear company Reebok (L’Équipe, 1994).

Pérec left France in 1994 to become part of the team coached by John Smith at the University of California at Los Angeles. Smith’s team would go on to be formally labelled HSI, an acronym for both ‘Handle Speed Intelligently’, and ‘Hudson-Smith International’ in reference to the coach himself and the attorney Emmanuel Hudson who formed the other half of the duo in charge of the group. HSI were later to gain notoriety within the international athletics community for their brash verbosity and arrogant celebrations, which were accompanied on occasion by the victors brandishing flags marked with a HSI logo and were viewed particularly disapprovingly by influential media outlets in France (France 2, 2000). The acronym revealed the underlying aim of the organisation – to assemble a multinational group of elite sprinters where identification with the group (and hence with the coach) would take precedence over national allegiances. During Pérec’s time at UCLA (1994–6), Smith spoke of his desire for such a post-national organisation of athletic mega-events, in which teams would be ‘truly’ professional and organised in multinational teams like his own group, rather than by nation (Navarro, 1996a). Smith’s cohort thus represented a revolutionary post-national model of organising and representing athletics teams, in an era when multinational corporations had become the financial driving force of major athletic events. The disquiet that greeted Pérec’s choice of the USA over France was thus further enflamed by her joining an elite team that considered the enduring national model of representation in elite athletics to be outdated.

Smith and his team were seen to epitomise many of the apparent paradoxes of American sport and society that fascinated commentators in the French media at this time: arrogant and hard-working; obsessed with money while managing to maintain a relaxed and convivial working environment; highly successful in achieving their sporting ambitions while fostering commercial interests and ensuring a spectacle for the audience. The perceived Americanness of these values is highlighted by the constant contrasting of Smith, the one-time television and film actor turned full-time professional coach, with Pérec’s previous mentor Piasenta. ‘Véritable homme de terrain’ (Jolly, 1996), Piasenta was seen as embodying the strict amateur traditions of athletics as conceived by the founder of the modern Olympics Pierre de Coubertin, and also a related and particularly French notion of coaching. He saw himself as an educator, inculcating his students with a certain set of values that implicitly included a mistrust of non-sporting commercial interests, as well as preparing them for elite competition through a ‘sens de discipline et de la rigueur’ considered characteristic of French educational imperatives (Canal+, 2003). Smith, on the other hand, did not interfere with the personal lives of his athletes, encouraged them to maintain a prominent profile in the media and considered himself a consultant whose sole task was to improve his athlete’s performance. This did not prevent him from being widely cast as a ‘guru’ with an oversized ego, obsessed with winning and money and in charge of a stable of athletes imbued with similarly hedonistic ‘greed is good’ principles (Soler, 1997). Piasenta, staking a claim to more noble ambitions in an increasingly mercenary environment, thus played Apollo to Smith’s Dionysus in this playing out of styles and values that was readily if simplistically mapped onto the series of comparisons between French and American societies that were topical at this time.

Despite the concerns expressed by numerous commentators as regards the moral virtue of her new group, this self-imposed ‘exile’ was ultimately an unqualified success for Pérec, enabling her to enjoy a new-found personal and professional freedom discursively associated with the mythical ‘American Dream’: ‘à l’aise dans ses Reebok, dernière candidate au rêve américain, ange black revenu de l’enfer dans une cité qui ne croit plus en rien si ce n’est en l’argent’ (Leclaire and Bigo, 1994). Television programmes replayed footage of a smiling Pérec, her casual clothing adorned with sponsors’ logos, speeding along the beachfront in an open-top convertible to the sound of James Brown’s 1985 hit Living in America (France 2, 1996). In light of Pérec’s new-found personal fulfilment, commercial success and athletic achievement in Los Angeles, the image of Piasenta – venerated as a ‘véritable idéaliste inspiré et fervent’ (Billoun, 1991) – was transformed into that of a quaint relic of an anachronistic model of athletics that had been superseded by the ambitions, prowess and material wealth of the American model. The code of conduct he insisted on for his athletes was now considered too restrictive for the new generation of footloose and image-conscious athletics stars and the exercise machines he constructed in his garage for his athletes were ridiculed in comparison to the technology of the weights room at UCLA. In light of Pérec’s departure, Piasenta had ostensibly been reduced to a ‘puriste de l’athlétisme aux méthodes rigides mais dépassé de son propre aveu par un sport devenu trop mercantile à son goût’ (Jolly, 1996). By the time the Atlanta Olympics had finished, Pérec’s two gold medals had provided a clear answer to the question L’Équipe Magazine had posed two years previously: ‘Alors Pia-Pia ou John-John? Méthode “cool” ou “douze commandements d’un athlète de haut niveau?” Le Hollywood du sport ou le système D [‘Débrouillardise’] bien de chez nous?’ (Leclaire and Bigo, 1994).

Pérec’s departure from France came during a period later described by economist Joseph Stiglitz as the ‘roaring nineties’ and characterised in the USA by a combination of unprecedented levels of prosperity and ‘near-ideological’ commitment to free markets (Stiglitz, 2004). The example of Pérec can be seen as crystallising abiding French attitudes towards the United States, characterised, on one hand, by admiration for American technological and economic prowess, and, on the other, by distrust of its status as sole world superpower and the growing prevalence of American commercial and cultural production, facilitated by increasingly liberal globalised markets and media. This discourse emerges especially during the 1996 Olympics, held in Atlanta, an event that was exceptionally successful for French athletes in terms of the number of medals won, but that was also remembered for problems with the communications and transport network, the chauvinism of the crowds and the aggressive merchandising of associated consumer brands (especially by the Coca-Cola Company, which has its origins and headquarters in Atlanta). Thomas Ferenczi, writing in Le Monde, employs the Atlanta Games and Pérec as a means of comprehending France’s ‘schizophrenic’ relationship with the United States, oscillating between admiration for American dynamism, creativity and sense of freedom, and repugnance at the American desire for domination and its disregard for other nations (Ferenczi, 1996). For Ferenczi, the Atlanta Games could have enabled Europe to rid itself of this schizophrenia and wholeheartedly embrace outright americano-phobia, with the shambolic organisation, belligerent patriotism, and rampant commercialism on display proving suspicions that American society did not provide a model to follow. Moreover, the Games could have been seen to contravene de Coubertin’s (and by extension, traditional French) sporting ideals:

Atlanta consacre le triomphe du mercantilisme, le règne de l’argent-roi, la victoire du commerce sur le sport, au point qu’on en vient à se demander si les Jeux de 1996 ne seront pas les derniers. Dans ce contexte, les performances des petits Français, habitués à n’être que d’humbles figurants dans l’arène internationale, apparaissaient comme autant de réponses à l’arrogance américaine. (Ferenczi, 1996)

However, according to Ferenczi, the example of Pérec complicated this dystopian vision of American society:

Qu’elle n’aurait jamais obtenu un tel résultat si elle n’avait pas choisi de vivre et de s’entraîner aux États-Unis. Que la décontraction et le plaisir de courir dont elle avait fait l’expérience en Californie l’avaient délivrée de ses angoisses et de ses peurs. Que, loin de regretter son exil au pays du capitalisme et de la libre concurrence, elle se félicitait chaque jour d’avoir quitté la France pour développer, auprès de son nouvel entraîneur, ses talents naturels. Ainsi l’Amérique n’était pas seulement l’enfer du dollar triomphant, mais aussi le paradis de la volonté individuelle et de l’effort récompensé. (Ferenczi, 1996)

Pérec, who worked towards and reached the pinnacle of athletic achievement in the USA, thus provides an example of the possibilities for success and personal fulfilment in American society, redeeming the image of America as a land of freedom and opportunity in French eyes and rebalancing France’s turbulent love–hate relationship with American sporting and cultural production.

As reigning Olympic champion and France’s best hope for a medal at the Atlanta Olympics, Pérec was chosen by the National Olympic Council to carry the French flag during the opening ceremony, a choice that inspired Gérard Rancinan’s photograph of Pérec that appeared in Paris Match the summer before the Games. The photograph shows Pérec, dressed in patriotic blue and brandishing a giant tricolore, mounted on rocks at the seashore and gazing defiantly out to sea over the waves. The fact that the photograph is taken in Los Angeles serves to emphasise the condition of the contemporary sports star, tracing a transnational itinerary in the pursuit of personal and sporting success while being endowed with a status of national icon that comes under especially close scrutiny on the occasion of global mega-events. The perspective of the shot, Pérec’s stance, and the way she steadfastly grips the tricolore in the midst of the turmoil at her feet, evokes Delacroix’s ‘La Liberté guidant le peuple’, with Pèrec positioned as the contemporary sporting Libérté guiding her nation to victory on foreign shores (Luc, 1996).

In the inaugural ‘grand doc’ by the newly launched terrestrial television channel L’Équipe21, Pérec revisits the sites of her Olympic triumphs and talks about how she considered carrying the flag at the opening ceremony to be a symbolic moment of recognition for ethnic minorities in France (L’Équipe21, 2012). This part of the documentary concentrates on Atlanta as a centre of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and dwells particularly on Pérec’s black identity. Visiting the Martin Luther King memorial as Sam Cooke’s anthem for the civil rights movement (‘A Change is Gonna Come’, 1964) plays in the background, Pérec explains how she imagined her performances as flag-bearer and on the track as continuing the proud black heritage of Atlanta, while simultaneously gaining recognition for black French people on an international stage:

Pour moi, être noire et être choisie comme porte-drapeau, c’est tout un symbole … je représente la France, je représente les miens, et je représente une minorité aussi … Atlanta, c’est une des plus grande villes des noirs aux Etats-Unis … et en tant que noire, arriver dans cette ville, c’était quelque chose de très fort parce que moi, durant toute ma carrière, parler du racisme, parler des conditions du noir, tout ça, dans les années quatre-vingt-dix, en France, on n’en parlait pas.

Pérec has reflected publicly on numerous occasions on how her time in the United States was pivotal in terms of her consciousness of her own blackness. As her son plays with other children in the fountain of Centennial Park, which was built for the Olympics, the images and non-diegetic soundtrack (this time playing the emblematic African American spiritual Amazing Grace) reinforce the documentary’s retrospective reconstruction of the Atlanta Games as a baptismal moment for Pérec, through which she was enabled to fully assume her black identity.

The symbolic portent of a black woman becoming the star of the Atlanta Games was also recognized by commentators at the time. Gilles Navarro (1996b) drew a direct link between Pérec’s slave ancestry and the significance of her victory in Atlanta:

Quatre ans après son sacre de Barcelone, la Guadeloupéenne a récidivé à Atlanta, ville symbole de la reconnaissance des Noirs et aux États-Unis, sa nouvelle terre d’accueil, berceau des plus grands champions d’athlétisme. Une double signification pour l’enfant de Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe, née pour courir.

As a double gold-medal winner on the track, Pérec was the female star of the Games’ athletics programme, equalling the victories achieved in the men’s 200 and 400 metres sprints by the American Michael Johnson. With Carl Lewis becoming the most decorated track Olympian of all time with his win in the long jump and Mohamed Ali having lit the Olympic torch in the opening ceremony, the Games in general were celebrated by prominent media commentators in France as powerful demonstrations of black achievement, endowing the event with a representative value that acted as a counterpoint to the Coca-Cola-led appropriation of the event for commercial purposes (Schaller and Hennaux, 2003: 500).

This confluence of evocative race-inflected symbolism and rampant commercialism inevitably provided ample opportunity for the commodification of black cultural identity. A full-page advertisement for the sportswear company Reebok that appeared in L’Équipe the day of Pérec’s final in the 400 metres provides a particularly flagrant example (L’Équipe, 1996b). The advertisement consists of Martin Luther King’s face in profile, with the heading ‘“I have a dream” (“J’ai fait un rêve”) / Martin Luther King, Atlanta’ and a Reebok logo at the bottom of the page, just below a discrete caption that reads: ‘Atlanta 1996: Marie-José Pérec au départ de la finale olympique du 400 mètres’. In order to decode this advertisement it is worth recalling McLuhan’s arguments that ‘any acceptable ad is a vigorous dramatization of communal experience’ and that ‘ads use the most basic and tested human experience of a community in grotesque ways’ (McLuhan, 2001 [1964]: 248–9). It is also necessary to point out that by the mid 1990s sportswear was increasingly popular as casual clothing for French youth as an element of a burgeoning street culture in French banlieues that took its inspiration from American music and fashion. In such contexts, sportswear products (and brands more generally, as in this case) are conceived by marketers as cultural resources that aid consumers in their ‘cultural or lifestyle projects’ (Crockett, 2008: 250). This advertisement is then ‘making a claim on black cultural identity’ (2008: 246) in order to legitimise the product as cultural resource. By an interposition of text and image that creates meaning ‘by comparing that which is expected (but not present) to that which is represented’ (2008: 249), black cultural identity is channelled from Martin Luther King through the specific geographical and historical coincidences that valorise the blackness of Pérec in Atlanta, before lending itself to the promotion of the brand in question.

This advertisement can also be read as an example of the more general desire to attach grander social and political importance to sporting performances within prevailing discourses on race and ethnicity. French footballers, including the nucleus of the side that were to go on to become the black/blanc/beur World Cup winners, had recently completed a relatively successful campaign at the European Championships in England, during which the team’s ethnic diversity was targeted by National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in order to promulgate his racist agenda and highlight the supposed evils of immigration. Sport had thus been brought centre-stage in the divisive debates on immigration and multiculturalism. Pérec, in conjunction with fellow gold-medal winners such as judoka Djamel Bourras, fencer Laura Flessel and pole-vaulter Jean Galfione, were effectively a black/blanc/beur team avant l’heure, proving that ‘métissage est un atout pour la France’ (Askolovitch and Chatenay, 1996). Further influencing this discourse is the fact that, at the time of the Atlanta Olympics, a unipolar geopolitical climate reigned that differed fundamentally from that of the successive Cold War boycotts of the 1980s, when the Olympics had been the battleground for symbolic supremacy between conflicting world orders. In a climate where this particular history, if not history itself, despite Fukuyama’s famous claim (1992), had ended, the media were intent on interpreting sporting performances as politically significant in other ways. The social ascension and legitimisation of historically oppressed ethnic minority groups through sport thus came to the fore.

Such discourse reached its zenith in France two years later with the footballers’ World Cup win, but the example of Pérec in Atlanta is an insightful study in its genesis. An article in L’Équipe on black athletes’ domination of the ‘must-see’ events of the Olympics neatly summarises the key message: ‘La domination des “princes noirs” de la vitesse, aujourd’hui définitivement scellée, est aussi celle des enfants des ghettos de la pauvreté du monde’ (Billoun, 1996). As this text highlights, Pérec’s performances are incorporated into a discourse of transnational black emancipation, whereby the poor and oppressed of the Western world take centre-stage. In this light, the cultural capital sold by Reebok in the aforementioned advertisement is not solely black cultural identity but rather a global message of emancipation. The purchaser of a Reebok product can thus vicariously participate in Martin Luther King’s dream and partake in an ethereal act of liberation, which through a layering of signifiers designates Pérec’s victory on the track as the latest episode in a transnational resistance movement. Such processes are indicative of the media’s desire to proclaim, if not recreate, a ‘Smith/Carlos’ moment and the readiness of commercial interests to instantly commodify such a performance. These examples also presage the events of the following Olympics in Sydney, where the media discovered a moment that they could compare with Tommy Smith’s and John Carlos’s ‘black power’ salute at the Games in Mexico in 1968. In this instance, Pérec – her symbolic significance exhausted along with the goodwill of media commentators – was to find herself on the ‘wrong’ side of this emancipatory discourse.

Pérec–Pepsi–Reebok

Pérec’s time in the United States, and particularly her performances in Atlanta, were thus integrated into dual (and occasionally intertwining) discourses on transnational identity: one related to the colour of her skin and ancestral origins, the other related to her material wealth and allegiance to her sponsors. Since the 1960s, left-wing intellectuals in France had derided the servitude of the contemporary sportsperson towards their commercial sponsors, the ‘homme sandwich’ whose ultimate purpose was to sell products to the masses duped by the modern sporting spectacle (Brohm, 1975: 13). By the time of Atlanta the influence of corporate investment in athletics and the allegiance of athletes to their sponsors were seen in some quarters as having become so inescapable and corrosive that even token gestures towards (now impotent) nations and nationhood no longer rang true:

Nos antiques dieux du stade ont été remplacés sur le podium par les veaux d’or de la consommation et de la vile marchandise, de la pacotille hissé au rang de divinité, de toutes les marques de produits qui feront rêver des milliards de téléspectateurs écrasés pendant deux semaines devant leurs téléviseurs … C’est à la parade des nouveaux pouvoirs que nous aurons droit à Atlanta: non plus ceux, devenus désuets et uniquement symboliques, des athlètes nationaux exhibant fièrement mais naïvement leur drapeau lors de la cérémonie d’ouverture des Jeux, mais plutôt ceux, omniprésents à l’échelle du globe, du néolibéralisme économique qui a réussi à asservir l’athlétisme olympique à ses fins promotionnelles … Et ce sera de nouveau sur l’autel du dieu argent que sera sacrifié le sport devenu l’otage de publicitaires sans patrie ni éthique. (Desjardins, 1996)

The mid 1990s was the time when Coca-Cola and Pepsi were waging a battle for market supremacy in France, in what Kuisler has described as the ‘cola wars’, and while the Atlanta Olympics were remembered as the Coca-Cola Games, Pérec became Pepsi’s figurehead in France while she trained and competed in the USA (Kuisler, 2012: 194). Given that Pérec’s leaving for United States had already been discursively constructed as a demonstration of her prioritising her personal material and sporting success over her loyalty to her national federation, within this heightened awareness of the evils of ‘sportsbiz’ her dutiful parading of sponsors’ logos was used as further evidence of her lack of dedication to her nation. This public perception of Pérec was sealed through an unfortunate episode that was filmed live for the main evening news on TF1 shortly after Atlanta. In this trackside interview, Pérec suddenly interrupts her interviewer before gesturing towards the cameraman, jumping up and down and leaning over the barrier. Although the producers quickly returned to the studio and the mystified presenter continued the programme, an Envoyé spécial report on the strategies of the major international sports clothing brands broadcast months later revealed the reasons behind Pérec’s strange behaviour. She had asked the cameraman in advance to film a wide-angled shot so that her main sponsors’ names, emblazoned on her polo shirt, would be visible (France 2, 1997). When he failed to do so she took umbrage with the reporter and his crew and attempted to improvise. This moment, and Pérec’s tirade at the reporter that followed (and which was originally recorded off-air), were replayed ad nauseum in television programmes that discussed her personality, or sport and finance generally (in a show on M6 in 1998 discussing the ‘histoire d’un tabou’ on the relationship between money and sport, for example), and wereseen to epitomise the ‘misère et servitude du sport lorsque l’argent s’en mêle de trop près’(Pereira, 1997).

One of the most succinct barometers of public perception on this matter is found in the satirical Les Guignols de l’Info on the Canal+ channel, which subsequently made Pérec the caricature of ‘des travers de l’argent dans le sport’ (Le Bailly, 2000). Having a dedicated guignol is in itself a sign of having achieved a certain degree of notoriety in French society, and the running joke for Pérec’s puppet was her willingness to act as human sandwich-board for her various sponsors. Before the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, while the puppets of other renowned athletes were portrayed as parading dutifully behind the official flag-bearer David Douillet (a judoka whose media-savvy and political astuteness, as evidenced in his subsequent political career, were in stark contrast to his predecessor in the role of flag-bearer), Pérec parades under the logos and colours of her various sponsors, singing a ditty promoting Bonne Maman, Géant Vert and other sponsors, rather than the national anthem (Canal+, 2000). Pérec was thus discursively transformed from standard-bearer for the brave new world of French athletics that Rancinan depicted to a parody of the moral hazards of sports business and celebrity. She was seen as belonging, materially and affectively, to her sponsors, and hence to a global elite that severed her from the values of athletic endeavour that were inextricably linked with her status as national hero: ‘On la sent déjà dans son temps, celui de l’image et de son argent, du sport-roi qui s’amuse avec la réalité … Elle figure en bonne place parmi les nouveaux dieux du village planétaire et s’appelle désormais Pérec-Pepsi-Reebok’ (Le Guilledoux, 1996).

‘Le feuilleton Pérec’

In the years following Atlanta commentators’ tolerance of Pérec’s ‘caprices’ waned in parallel with her performances on the track. This was exacerbated by her periodic and sometimes unexplained failure to compete in athletic events when the organisers had counted on her presence to attract the public, and her unwillingness to take part in sprint relay teams (often coached by her former mentor, Piasenta) that were then a particularly fruitful source of medals for French teams at international championships. Also, since her time in the USA, Pérec habitually did not stay with her compatriots during major championships, preferring the company of her personal entourage, explaining this choice as logical given the imperatives of the domain in which she worked: ‘Je n’ai jamais vraiment été en équipe de France, sinon pendant les grands championnats. Je pratique une discipline individuelle’ (Soler, 2000).

Such logic and forthrightness was unappreciated in many quarters, and again considered symptomatic of a deeper malaise. Writing in Le Monde, journalist Alain Giraudo describes his and his sports journalist colleagues’ fruitless attempts to track down Pérec’s whereabouts in the lead-up to the World Championships in Athens in 1997. While there was a place reserved for her at the ‘modest’ French team hotel, the journalist resents, for personal and practical reasons, Pérec’s choice not to stay there, which he subsequently extrapolates into a commentary on Pérec’s affective allegiances generally (Giraudo, 1997a). As the journalist details the efforts to track down Pérec on her mobile phone or discover where she has hidden herself with the other members of her ‘clan’, Giraudo revives the (by now flagging) metaphor of the gazelle. ‘Elle se dissimule dans le paysage’ in order to evade the ‘colonie de journalistes français’ on the hunt for the heavily fortified luxury seaside hotel she shares with her training partners from Los Angeles – a group tellingly described as ‘cette forme de tribu moderne’. Pérec and her colleagues, thanks to their material wealth, were able to place themselves beyond the gaze of the global media. However, Giraudo’s metaphors serve to primitivise the athletes and invert the power dynamic. The athletes are rendered prey to the journalists intent on ‘colonising’ a multinational group of star athletes who through the journalist’s evocative language are transformed into an anthropological marvel – an authentically post-national sporting tribe.

This article is the second in a remarkable series of articles that appeared in Le Monde over the course of a week in August 1997 (Jolly, 1997; Giraudo, 1997a–f). Taken together these articles serialise the details of Pérec’s partial participation in this event, with the titles betraying the self-knowing and ironic tone adopted by the journalists: ‘Elle est là, elle parle’; ‘Elle est là, mais elle se cache’; ‘Elle est là, sans montre’; ‘Elle est là, son agent aussi’; ‘Elle est là, en piste, enfin!’; ‘Elle est là, en pleurs’; ‘Elle n’est plus là’. The journalist, tiring of the dramatics of the Pérec saga and particularly the debate over whether she would or would not deign to compete in the event, adopts a sardonic tone as he recounts the ‘feuilleton Pérec’, conveying the resentment of the journalist in thrall to the whims of the sports star and consigned to reporting the minutiae of Pérec’s preparations and itinerary. While this collection of articles demonstrates the abiding tropes of Pérec’s media representation throughout her career generally (alluding to her blackness, sexuality, avarice and capriciousness) they also collectively constitute a commentary on the nature of sports journalism, simultaneously parodying and perpetuating the genre’s fabricated drama and hyperactive immediacy.

The first article in this series is a commentary on the generally unrewarding work of journalists obliged to attend press conferences organised by the sportswear manufacturers that sponsor the star athletes (Jolly, 1997). The third recounts an official gathering at the French embassy in Athens from the point of view of the diplomats charged with organising the meeting of the Minister for Youth and Sports with the French athletes (Giraudo, 1997b). With diplomats apparently distraught at the shame caused by the absence of the delegation’s leading sporting light, the elusive Pérec appears an hour late, ‘Comme une apparition. En longue tunique grège, le dos nu, les pieds dans des sandales, les paupières alourdies de fard mordoré, et les bras noués autour du buste comme Vénus sortant du bain’. Comparing her ability to predict her time for her races within a margin of a few hundredths of a second to her failure to arrive on time for a meeting with a Minister of the Republic, Giraudo calls into question the insouciant attitude of ‘notre Marie-Jo nationale’ towards her civic duties, disapproving of the egotism of ‘notre très chère diva de la piste’. The fourth article in the series recounts how Pérec’s agent flies in to save her from further faux pas, evolving into a reflection on the role of money in modern athletics (Giraudo, 1997c). For Giraudou, the agent – a new ‘species’ that spread from America – symbolises the moral dilemmas in modern athletics, which the author recounts in a damning description of the agent’s function, which consists of effectively taxing athletes who are otherwise rich enough to be able to avail themselves of tax havens. Giraudo’s disapproval of the agent, which extends to disparaging descriptions of the individual in question, is offset only slightly by the sympathy he feels for her having to deal with Pérec on a daily basis : ‘Reste que manager notre Pérec nationale, la muse Reebok, championne de l’étourderie calculée, du non-dit explicite, de la mémoire sélective et de l’excuse calamiteuse, cela doit relever de la vocation au martyre’. This article, and particularly its juxtaposing with the previous instalment in this series, neatly encapsulates the decade-long musing in French athletics over the role of the agent, who was considered to interrupt the symbiotic link between the athlete and national institutions, and hence interpreted as a corrupting influence vis-à-vis the athletes’ national allegiances.

Three years later, Pérec’s perceived betrayal of the national institutions that had fostered her athletic success was portrayed as her ultimate downfall. The Sydney Olympics was billed as Pérec’s swansong, her final opportunity for success at a major championship after years of illness and inconsistent form since Atlanta. Following the itinerary of the classical hero, the ‘troisième miracle de Marie-Jo Pérec’ would be produced after she endured her ‘descente aux enfers’ (TF1, 2000a). Moreover, the women’s 400 metres was also billed as one of the ‘biggest’ events of the Games, featuring the triple Olympic gold medallist against local favourite Cathy Freeman, the silver medallist in Atlanta. Freeman, the first Aborigine to represent Australia at an Olympic Games when she competed in 1992, was chosen as the person to light the Olympic torch in a gesture interpreted by the local and international press as symbolically reconciling contemporary Australian society with its long-subjugated indigenous community. Freeman herself, ‘la petite-fille d’une victime de la génération volée’ (Benedicte, 2000) was seen to constitute ‘le symbole d’une hypothétique réconciliation nationale’ (Van Kote, 2000) with her races constituting ‘le combat de tout un peuple’ (Collin, 2000). Within this context, her victory in the 400 metres was considered obligatory in order to grace the Games with the emancipatory message demanded by the global media:

Lundi 25 septembre, Cathy Freeman, championne du monde du 400 m, avait un rendez-vous géographique avec son pays, l’Australie; un rendez-vous historique avec sa nation, le peuple aborigène, qui comptait sur elle comme porte-drapeau pacifique d’un difficile combat pour la reconnaissance de ses droits. (Le Monde, 2001)

The notion of the sporting victory of an oppressed people had such transnational appeal that it largely overwhelmed the nationalist tendencies of the French press. This process may also have been facilitated by Pérec’s waning talent and her perceived abandonment of the French team. The race was thus discursively constructed as a moment when ‘Pérec devra affronter non seulement une athlète, mais également un symbole, une culture, un pays’ (Couturie, 2000).

Ultimately, this narrative proved overly burdensome and, two days before the heats of the 400 metres, Pérec left Australia, claiming she had been attacked in her room, and later, in interviews with France Télévisions and L’Équipe Magazine, describing the pressure she felt she was under as a result of being Freeman’s main rival. Pérec was later to explain that she felt that this pressure came largely because of her position as the ‘trouble-fête’ in this process of reconciliation of Australia with its aboriginal population via Freeman (L’Équipe21, 2012). She was thus the victim of the symbolic imperatives of the event promulgated by the global media, which demanded that it be discursively constructed as emancipatory, with Freeman and her associated iconography (Aborigine flag, torch-bearer) designated as the bearer of this symbolic yoke. Pérec was here effectively cast in an opposing role to that which she occupied within a similar paradigm four years previously.

In the aftermath of her leaving Sydney, her geographic and sentimental distancing of herself from the French delegation facilitated the discarding of Pérec from the narrative of national and Olympic solidarity. Television reports showed Pérec refusing interviews with reporters and going through her exercise routine attired in a grey Reebok tracksuit, while other members of the French team, dressed in the official team gear, discussed her ‘fuite’. The TF1 news report from Sydney that covered the affair interviewed various officials who speak of Pérec’s lack of politeness, inability to ‘vivre en communauté’, her ‘envie d’abandonner’, and their feeling of betrayal. The report from the convivial and calm French training camp, ‘en plein nature, loin des agitations des jeux olympiques’, tells us that : ‘Si elle avait choisi de vivre avec l’équipe de France, Marie-Jo Pérec n’aurait jamais été opportuné’ (TF1, 2000b). The report dwells on the tricolore flying over the camp as the narrator ruminates on the consequences of Pérec’s actions, further reinforcing the message that the disastrous course of events resulted from her decision to deliberately distance herself from the national team.

Conclusion

Following the events in Sydney, Pérec was subject to a media ‘lynching’ of such virulence that it inspired a song by singer-songwriter Alain Bashung in his critically acclaimed 2002 album L’Imprudence. In ‘Dans la foulée’, originally titled ‘Lettre à Marie-Jo’, Bashung evokes the athlete’s physical grace and exceptional talent : ‘Elle avait le miracle facile / La victoire au bout des cils / Dans la foulée elle a balayé / Et la houle et les huées’. Repeated invocations of ‘le miracle facile’, ‘la tourmente’ and ‘l’indolence’ presumably connect her character to the over-arching theme of ‘l’imprudence’ and its diminishing possibilities in contemporary society, while Bashung depicts Pérec as a performer who, having battled illness, no longer had the strength to ‘belong to the whole world’, a crime for which she was insulted and banished from the pantheon of national heroes. For Bashung, this incident emphasises the unforgiving nature of stardom, and the impossibility of consistently conforming to the spectacle that the public expects: ‘Et d’un seul coup elle est partie, le monde entier l’a montrée du doigt disant: Tu fais ton job, tu nous emmerde pas. J’ai relié cela à la liberté de pouvoir dire non … On ne peut pas être toujours conforme à l’idée du spectacle qu’on attend de vous’ (Mortaigne, 2002).

When Pérec was winning Olympics and World Championships it was customary in the post-race interview for benevolent radio and television reporters to put the new champion on the phone to her grandmother in Guadeloupe to exchange a few words about the race and their general well-being. In his popular and long-running back-page column in Le Monde, Pierre George employs these confected moments as a trope to interrogate the meanings and futures of an individual who becomes a star (1996). For George this is a repetitive but gratifying conceit but he warns that such charming moments presage many more arduous tasks that will be requested of the national hero by sponsors, the media and politicians. She is no longer a granddaughter, but a superlative, subject to the demands of the nation: ‘la Pérec désormais inscrite à l’inventaire estival et sportif du patrimoine national … ne vous sera rendue que quand elle aura sacrifié aux obligations de sa gloire, de la nôtre et de celle de la France’ (George, 1996). In the years since her retirement, Pérec’s sporting successes have been retrospectively reappropriated into the ‘canon’ of French sporting achievement from which she was discursively estranged during a large part of her athletic career. A particularly striking example of this process was Pérec’s participation as one of the ‘faces’ of the ultimately unsuccessful Paris bid for the 2012 Olympics whereby ‘une fois de plus, elle met sa longiligne silhouette au service des couleurs de la France’ (L’Humanité, 2005). Her status as national hero has been similarly re-embellished through commemorative cultural production such as the L’Équipe21 (2012) documentary and the flag bearing her image that flies at the entrance to the INSEP in the Bois de Vincennes in Paris. It would appear, therefore, that Pérec-as-hero is still subject to the demands of public and nation. Faliu and Tourret, in their consideration of the timeless notion of the hero, state that: ‘Le héros, comme le prophète, tend à être asocial, à échapper aux lois, dans l’Iliade comme dans le western’ (Faliu and Tourret, 2007: 50). In Pérec’s case, her foibles and failures (‘cette souveraineté du héros, ce flamboiement d’orgueil’) and the (media-led) trials and tribulations she endured (‘la “descente aux enfers”’) are ultimately incorporated as indispensable and eternal elements of the narrative of the contemporary sporting hero.

Colette Besson was the first ever French woman to win an Olympic gold on the track, at the Mexico Olympics in 1968 (the year Pérec was born), and in the 400 metres that was Pérec’s main event. Besson, who worked as a physical education teacher, famously benefited from the ‘events’ of May 1968 to take a break from her work and set up an impromptu training base in the Pyrenees. Her victory as a plucky outsider displaying personal initiative in a strictly amateur environment prolonged an enduring model of French potential for success in international sport. Her patriotic tears on the podium, rather than her race on the track, provided the lasting image through which Besson was enshrined as ‘la petite fiancée de la France’. Pérec’s performances on and off the track were consistently interpreted in terms of their meaning vis-à-vis Pérec’s national identity, her attachment and loyalty to France, and within the confines of the traditional national sporting heroine exemplified by Besson – the dutiful, charming and courageous public servant and ‘athlète de la nation’. Pérec’s professionalism, celebrity, wealth, mobility and disdain for the conventions of the sporting spectacle thus provided a model of a sports star that the French media, who were unaccustomed to the phenomenon of extremely wealthy, expatriate national sporting heroes, struggled to comprehend.

The discursive conflation of Pérec’s French citizenship, black skin and Caribbean origins was typical of the discourse surrounding French Caribbean sportspeople in the early 1990s. These efforts to reconcile Pérec’s otherness with her status as national hero were surpassed, bypassed and integrated by the grander narrative in which her successes were enveloped in a global message of emancipation for oppressed minorities that emerged over the course of the 1990s and which also inflected the discursive construction of her downfall in Sydney. While Pérec was thus briefly to the forefront as the sport-media complex conveyed and celebrated the multicultural and multiethnic richness of French society through the success of sporting heroes, the problematic attempts to appropriate Pérec’s blackness and sexuality as national patrimoine remain indicative of the reductive nature of the discursive space that sports media described in 1990s France. This is evident particularly in the media’s inability to conceive of a non-restrictive form of national identity in which the wealth, mobility and celebrity of the contemporary sporting elite, exemplified by Pérec, could be accommodated and reconciled with their sporting achievement. The friction between these models of sporting heroism meant that Marie-José Pérec’s performances provided a site for the playing out of concerns over France’s place in a rapidly globalising world characterised by the accelerating transnational movement of capital and people.