“I remember, you may remember, that the summer of 1976 was scorching. It had not rained since May. The temperatures between June and July had continued to rise. The grass of the meadows The peasants of my little town – four families still at that time, the Dehans, the Guillaumonts, the Poulets, the Roussels – were lamenting and we were pitying them. The land was cracking, giving the Lorraine countryside the appearance of a Sahel. The cattle howled at the Moon. […] I was fourteen. The heat seemed to stretch my long vacation even further. […]

What would become of me in these long days? Fortunately the Olympic Games were about to open. To Montreal. That is to say, in a way at home. A distant home, wrapped in a lilting French full of strange words, but a home all the same. Our home in the “Belle Province”. In our household, the television was still a new object. Revered. Lit sparingly. TV-news. Screen Folders. The Spectator Sequence. The Grand Chessboard. Intercity. Roland Garros where, in this year, neither of my two idols, Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert, had shone. And above all, the Tour de France won on July 18 by Lucien Van Impe, ahead of Joop Zoetemelk and Raymond Poulidor, while Jacques Goddet, imperial and standing in his convertible, seemed a Roman tribune escaped from the Circus Games. To watch TV, you had to ask permission. We didn’t turn on the “station” like that. For fear of wearing it out, no doubt? To shorten its resistance? Or to consume too much of his insidious drug? […]

Exactly one week before the opening ceremony, the Seveso disaster took place in Italy, but at that time we had not yet understood the extent of it, and it would be several weeks before the world was moved by it. The Games could therefore begin and punctuate my evenings, due to the time difference. […] During the XXI Olympiad of the modern era, I became passionate about two extraordinary athletes, dissimilar in every way, but who managed to leave their mark on my life. The first, I won’t talk about. Or barely. Because loving her, being fascinated by her, mentioning her name, is so banal that it makes you cry because so many others before me have done it better than me. Come on, I still say his name. Nadia. Nadia Comaneci. The small, slender, graceful, so young, too young Nadia Comaneci. […] We are the same age. I was an anonymous prepubescent schoolboy pricked by the crude pin of an incandescent summer on the shriveled cork of the Lorraine countryside. She was a Romanian perfection, supple, leaping, who defied gravity, the rigidity of our skeletons, their resistance, and pushed back all the limits of her art. How then can you not be in love with her? […]

Guy Drut, this “attractive guy”

And then, and then there was Guy Drut. Other format. Another emotion. French. Masculine. Powerful. Arrogant almost. No doubt there were young and old people who fell in love with him like me with Nadia Comaneci? Because the guy was attractive, as big as a statue, broad shoulders, bulging muscles, a smile of infinite self-confident beauty, all bundled up in the equipment of the time, mini‐shorts – pleonasm! – and tank top revealing perfect shoulders. Guy Drut.

A bit boastful. A little bravado. A bit of a king of the world. In every way French, therefore. I didn’t like the 110 meter hurdles any more than I liked gymnastics. I loved running since childhood, jumping ditches and low branches, but from there I turned it into a discipline. No. Never. Besides, the word “discipline” always had something to irritate me. Yesterday and today. It seems to me that the fascination I had with Guy Drut and the 110 meter hurdles was due to two factors: The man, his beauty, his big mouth – he looked like many bad boys a little older than me , who I saw having beers at the Globe, their jukebox bistro, rue Mathieu, with the Gitane on the corner of their lips, and who kissed girls with long thighs under their suede miniskirts, then killed themselves a little later, with them or without them, but always without a helmet, in the vicious turn of a departmental road, on their 750 Kawa, at the age of Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, and Jim Morrison whose face they had as an angel and curly hair.

And then also the absolute artificiality of this race. Where you have to run fast. But I can understand that. But run fast while jumping close obstacles, and do it in an absolutely artificial way, throw one leg horizontally, above the obstacle, bring it down as quickly as possible so that the foot touches the ground quickly, and at the same time, bend the other, bend it into a hook and immediately deploy it as if it were moved by a spring. Repeat at each hurdle. […] I don’t know what sick spirit gave birth to this? But well done. It’s dance. Wonder. Pure, delicate, perfect, sublime wonder. Guy Drut performs well in the heats, quietly finishing fourth in 14.04 seconds. He misses his semi-final. Second in 13 seconds 49. Isolates himself in the stadium. Sucks up. Or play fool around. Because the others are watching for him. Spy on him. All this is bluffing and playing. Guy Drut concentrates. Four years earlier he won silver. In Munich. Bavaria. Bloody games. We said it. Money is good. But now the money cannot be enough. It’s the gold we dream of. Nothing else. Guy Drut is strong. One of the strongest. He was injured but. We’re waiting for it. We observe it. The competition is tough. A Cuban. An American. Guy Drut. Besides, we hesitate, Dru

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