“We will have to return to the country…” – L’Express

I remember a flame. Yes, it’s a flame that I remember. A flame lit on July 19, 1996, in the sky over Atlanta. […]. And from a corridor where we saw a black man appear all in white, white t-shirt, white pants, white shoes: he had won a gold medal at the Rome Games, thirty-six years earlier.

Thirty-six years earlier the story begins in the air. In the air where no way, I won’t go, says Cassius Clay, 18 years old, who already knows what he wants, and there’s no question of flying, he doesn’t want to. If necessary I will take the boat then the train but the plane, no. He is told that the Olympic Games are in Rome, and that if all roads lead to Rome there are not 36 ways to get there: “Either it’s the plane, or the Olympics will pass you by.” under your nose – which, they add, would be a shame: a medal awaits you there.”

“It’s okay, I’ll go,” young Clay finally said. Then he buys a parachute that he will carry with him throughout the trip, a trip that he will carry with a Bible in his hand. In the end the flight went rather well, and it was quite leisurely as we descended towards Fiumicino airport, specially built for the occasion. The ground temperature is 36°C, we invite you to return to your seat, raise your tablet, ensure that your hand luggage is located in the compartments provided for this purpose, disarm the slides, check the opposite door , Welcome to Roma.

“We almost want to put a tutu on her”

On Thursday August 25, 1960, the day of the opening ceremony, in front of a little less than 100,000 people, a little more than 5,000 athletes paraded, including Abebe Bikila, a barefoot Ethiopian whose story we would have gladly told, the birth deep in the bush, enlistment in the Imperial Guard of the Lord of Lords Haile Selassie, selection in extremis for the marathon event which he won without shoes, but we are running out of space and that is not the point.

The subject is American, he is afraid of flying but otherwise, he is not really afraid of anything – not even the Polish boxer he meets in the final. Looking at his footwork, his sense of dodging, the way he jumps and frolics around the ring with his arms at his sides, you almost want to put a tutu on him. So of course, every now and then you have to strike, so he strikes, throws jaw-dropping right hooks, and there you have Cassius Clay on the top step of the podium, where an Olympic medal is hung around his neck.

The medal is gold. On the obverse, we see a shirtless athlete carried in triumph by the crowd. In highlight, engraved circularly, in capital letters, the word boxing in Italian : Pugilato. On the reverse, draped with an antique stolathe allegory of Victory holds a palm leaf in the left hand and brandishes a laurel wreath in the right, with this inscription in the background against the backdrop of the Colosseum: Giochi della XVII Olympiad Roma MCMLX. This medal is put around his neck, but he barely cracks a smile. Job is done. Now we’ll have to get back on the plane. We will have to return to the country.

And Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali

The country is the United States of America, and worse than the United States of America: the south of the United States of America. Everywhere else it would have been worn in triumph, but not at home, not in the South of the United States of America, not in the 1960s where an Olympic medalist or not a black person is a negro. This is what a group of bikers, with white skin and long hair, leather jackets and tattoos, insults and spitting, will try to remind him of. And Cassius Clay may not be afraid of anything except the plane, he may know with everyone’s weapons (his two fists) to fight like no one else, all alone against ten there is nothing other thing to do than run away, so he flees, returns home then comes out in the night, to a bridge where he throws his Olympic medal at the bottom of the Ohio River.

The rest is known, it is part of the legend. We know how he abandoned the name Clay, “a slave’s name”, a name whose echo mingled with that of the lashes in the sugar cane plantations and cotton fields; we know how he became Mohamed X then Mohamed Ali; we know his abandonment of the white Jesus with blond hair, his conversion to Islam, his refusal to serve in Vietnam, his fights in the courtrooms and his fights in the ring, against the Supreme Court of the United States of America, against Liston, against Frazier, against Foreman, the Rumble in the Jungle, THE Thrilla in Manila. We know that he fell ill, Parkinson, and how the one who proclaimed himself “the Greatest”, The Greatest, and who flew like a butterfly, and who stinged like a bee, and who claimed to have once fought an alligator, and to have wrestled with a whale, and to have killed a rock, and to wounded a stone, and to have sent a brick to the hospital, how the one whom boxing had elevated to the rank of demi-god was no longer anything but a man, in the Sartrean sense of the term: a man made of all men and who was worth them all and who was worth no matter Who. A 54-year-old man with a hesitant gait, who could no longer speak, and whose hand was trembling.

But that evening, that evening of July 19, 1996 at the Olympic stadium, when he was clutching the torch, the time it took to set the Atlanta sky ablaze, his hand stopped trembling.

Taken from I remember… Pérec’s stride (and other sporting madeleines), directed by Benoît Heimermann. Threshold, 226 p., €19.90.