A flippant expose of the country and people hosting this year’s Paris Olympics. Senior Correspondent Mike Osborne flexes his muscles with some of France’s sporting elite.
The track and field is starting at the Paris Games and while Cathy Freeman holds a unique place in Australia’s national psyche, her one-time arch rival Marie-Jose Perec is equally central to France’s sporting legacy.
Just as Freeman lit the flame at the Sydney 2000 Games, Perec also lit the flame at these Games along with judo champion Teddy Riner, later watching the golden balloon rise over the Tuileries Gardens.
Perec, who won two Olympic 400m titles in Barcelona (1992) and Atlanta (1996), became known as Mademoiselle la Chicken in Australia after fleeing the Sydney 2000 Olympics before Freeman had a chance to line-up with her in the 400m – the most anticipated event of the Games.
It was an unkind moniker for Perec who, like Freeman, had won two 400m world championship titles heading into Sydney, as well as the 200m gold medal at the Atlanta Olympics.
Despite finishing second to Perec in Atlanta, Freeman appeared to have the French woman’s measure from 1997 onwards. Just as Freeman remains the face of the Sydney Games, Perec is a national hero with sports stadiums and streets named after her in France and in her native Guadeloupe in the Caribbean.
With three gold medals Perec is tied with retired cyclist Felicia Balanger as the most successful female French Olympian.
France’s leading Olympic champion is Martin Fourcade, who won five gold medals in the biathlon at the Winter Games in Sochi 2014 and Pyeongchang 2018.
At the Summer Games France’s most venerated Olympians are fencers Lucien Gaudin and Christian d’Oriola with four gold medals each in a sport the country has dominated over the past century.
President of the Paris 2024 Olympics and the face of the Games Tony Estanguet is the first French Olympian to win three gold medals in the same event, dominating the C1 slalom canoe event in Sydney 2000, Athens 2004 and London 2012.
France also has a strong history in pole vault, soccer, tennis and cycling.
Alongside Balanger are four other male cyclists with three Olympic gold medals each – Florian Rousseau, Daniel Moreton, Robert Charpentier and Paul Masson. But the country’s most famous cyclist is Bernard Hinault who won the Tour de France five times.
In the pole vault Thierry Vigneron set five world records from 1980-84 with a best of 5.91m while fellow vaulters Pierre Quinon won the gold medal at the 1984 LA Olympics, Jean Galfione won gold at the 1996 Atlanta Games and Renaud Lavillenie was the London 2012 champion.
On the football pitch, France’s greatest round ball magicians include Thierry Henry, Michael Platini, Eric Cantona, Dicier Deschamps, and Patrick Vieira. But perhaps the best known internationally are Zinedine Zidane and Kylian Mbappe.
Zidane, or Zizou, played more than 100 times for his country and scored twice when France beat Brazil to win the World Cup in 1998, the year Mbappe was born.
Like Zidane, Mbappe also scored in a winning World Cup final when France beat Croatia in 2018, and notched a hattrick in the 2022 final despite losing to Lionel Messi’s Argentina on penalties.
In tennis, France’s legendary centre court queen Suzanne Lenglen won eight grand slams in the 1920s while her heroic male equivalent Rene Lacoste won seven slams in the same decade.
In more modern times Amelie Mauresmo and Mary Pierce both won two tennis grand slam titles including the Australian Open, while Pierce was also successful at Roland Garros and Mauresmo triumphed at Wimbledon.
Yannick Noah is France’s best known modern male tennis player having won his only grand slam at the French Open in 1983. Noah remained in the public eye post-retirement as a dread-locked pop singer.
Another big French name on the world sporting stage is Alain Prost, now 69, who won four Formula One titles and formed a fierce sporting rivalry with Brazil’s late Ayrton Senna, despite both racing for McLaren for two years in the late 1980s. Prost’s last race was at the 1993 Australian Grand Prix in Adelaide.
In 1999, French magazine Athlétisme voted distance runner and marathoner Alain Mimoun as the ‘French Athlete of the 20th Century’. A four-time world cross country champion, Mimoun had a series of memorable duels with the legendary Czech Emil Zatopek before striking Olympic gold in the marathon at Melbourne in 1956.
The most unusual French sporting champion is wrestler Andre Rene Roussimoff, better known as Andre the Giant. Dubbed the “eighth wonder of the world”, the towering 2.13m Roussimoff had an ongoing feud with America’s Hulk Hogan, the most recognized wrestling star worldwide. During the peak of the World Wrestling Federation in the US, Roussimoff famously defeated Hogan to win the 1988 heavyweight championship.
When he wasn’t wrestling Roussimoff was a part-time actor starring on TV as Bigfoot in the Six Million Dollar Man. His most famous role was on the big screen in the hit 1987 cult film The Princess Bride where he played Fezzik, an outlawed giant from Greenland who conspired to kidnap the Bride Buttercup.
Perhaps the most amazing French athlete of all-time is the virtuoso pianist and track and field champion Micheline Ostermeyer – who won two gold medals at the 1948 London Olympics in the shot put and discus, despite having picked up a discus for the first time just a few weeks after arriving in London.
Ostermeyer, who also took bronze in the high jump, was the first French woman to win an Olympic medal in athletics and became the inspiration for a legion of future French athletes including Marie-Jose Perec.
After retiring in 1950 Ostermeyer returned to being a full-time concert pianist saying: “I practised sport for pleasure; the piano was always my priority.”
In 1992 she was decorated with the Legion of Honour, the highest French distinction, for being a woman of sporting and cultural excellence who represented the perfect embodiment of body and soul.
NOTE – This is the latest in a series of “Frivolous facts about France for Olympic bon vivants”. You can read other Frivolous Facts stories by clicking on these topics: Art, Architecture, Language, French Heroes, French Inventions, Olympic History, French Pacific.
Michael Osborne has been a journalist for more than four decades including 35 years with the national news agency Australian Associated Press, rising from junior reporter to Editor.
He was AAP Editor for 11 years and served four years as Head of Sport and Racing. He was also posted to London and Beijing as AAP’s Bureau Chief and Foreign Correspondent.
He has worked at six Olympics and five Commonwealth Games, covered tennis grand slams, golf majors, international cricket, rugby world cups and numerous sporting world championships. He also co-ordinated and managed AAP’s teams and coverage at three Olympic Games in Athens 2004, Beijing 2008 and London 2012.
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