Sport & Exercise Research Group Lecture: A Case Study in Sports Journalism- Antoine Blondin, L’Équipe and the Tour de France

A product of the early twentieth century’s ‘sport-media-industry complex’, cycling’s Tour de France has engendered novel forms and styles of newspaper coverage and has attracted the interest of a variety of writers.A prominent right-wing novelist in the early fifties, Antoine Blondin (1921-1991) was a guest follower for French sports daily L’Équipe on four stages of the 1954 Tour. The highly original and stylishly composed “chroniques” he delivered warranted an invitation to the following year’s race as the featured “Writer on the Tour”, a literature-infused column he would make his own until 1982. This unique legacy, nostalgically and at times frivolously celebrating the myth of a largely invented tradition, has been captured in a posthumously compiled corpus of all 524 chronicles published in 2001, representing something of a memory site in its own right. Situated in the context of broader discussions relating to journalism, sport and society, this seminar will explore how one of the Tour de France’s most significant followers reads and interpret its story while drawing, in an inimitable tone and style, on the resources of the French literary canon.

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.