Sport & Exercise Research Group Seminar: Lance Armstrong and suiveur reporting in Libération, 1999–2013: A Case Study in Sports Journalism

As national institution and site of memory for France for over a century, the Tour de France is a privileged locus for investigating the interactions between sport and cultural meaning. Literary journalism chronicling the race has a long history of representing the multiple meanings and dimensions of physical performance, particularly of heroic champions, in the Tour. During the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the Tour itself and French culture more widely were destabilised by the ambiguous hero Lance Armstrong, and, in a context of guarded reporting on the facts of doping, literary journalism was able to give a creative account of complex sporting performances. Based on an article co-authored by Hugh Dauncey and Ruadhán Cooke, this discussion examines the journalism of Jean-Louis Le Touzet in Libération as an example of suiveur reporting in the tradition of Antoine Blondin, and will attempt to show how the freedom enabled by literary journalism allowed Le Touzet to accurately reflect academic perspectives on Armstrong, politics, culture and sport.

Ruadhán Cooke teaches French in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Research interests include the overlaps between sport and literature, sports journalism and the cultural impact of sport.

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