There was a time when, at this time of year, I would at least glance, however mechanically and early in the morning, at the standings of the Tour de France. Not anymore. The Tour has become as predictable as Formula 1, the only suspense being whether we will ever find out what Tadej Pogačar is fueled by. The guy, he is cheater (pronounced “tchité”), as my children say: he is too strong, and if the English term they have creolized evokes cheating, it is probably not by chance. Pog is in yellow, will remain in yellow, and even if he were to be beaten, it will be by another alien of the type of Jonas Vingegaard, who, no later than April, had fractured ribs and a broken collarbone in addition to being injured in the lung, and who is currently 1 min 14 behind Pogačar. Which is not without recalling another miracle whose exploits were likely to fuel suspicion, a certain Lance Armstrong.
But perhaps these young men would be less suspicious of the experts, who are not far from regarding them as a new generation of droids designed in a laboratory, if they would at least make the effort to grimace in pain to keep up appearances. Pogačar, who, in May, chained together supernatural climbs to crush the Giro with a ten-minute lead over his closest pursuer, and Vingegaard in his wheel, if I believe the reports, rather offer, in France, the spectacle of two frail fellows whose performances raise the eyebrows of the scientists of the cycling world when, after another climb defying the laws of physics, they show up at the top of a high mountain pass with something like a smile on their lips.
They could at least pretend to be human. Suffering would make them more sympathetic to us. If they want to learn lessons, they would only have to look at soccer players.
Who, across the Rhine, meanwhile, from Munich to Hamburg, continued to dive at the slightest touch, at the slightest brush of legs, and to collapse each time an opponent put a hand in their face, to then remain on the ground writhing and crying in pain while the jaded referee, more often than not, let play continue. It is rather embarrassing to see a team forced to play short of a man because of a bawling comedian whose bad number is tolerated by an entire sporting culture. I could almost end up finding admirable these athletes from another century who do not yet seem to have understood that the advent of televised coverage exposes, with merciless precision, the ridiculousness of their antics.
The other cultural shock of soccer, for an armchair athlete more accustomed to the tight marking followed by puck throwing of hockey and the virile crushing of American football, is to see unfolding in the stadium, over the entire space of the field, an art of passing whose combinations denote a real tactical spirit and a sense of game construction that changes us from the pushing-the-puck-to-the-bottom-of-the-zone to which hockey seems to have returned in 2024.
I had barely started to take an interest in the Euro round of 16 when I had already heard the words “history” or “historical” mixed up three times in the exclamations of the match commentator and his analyst. “Historic”, the resounding defeat of Italy against Switzerland. Historic, the comeback of “Her Majesty’s selection” (England, according to the commentator) against Slovakia, with its equaliser in injury time on a magnificent “bicycle” kick from Bellingham. And then, historic, of course, the penalty missed by Ronaldo, that other big shouter, during his swan song against Slovenia.
All this was well and good, but beyond the emphasis of the commentators, History, through the front door, had already invited itself to this Euro 2024: of the twenty-four nations that made up the table of this final phase, seven (nearly a third) did not exist as sovereign countries before the fall of the Berlin Wall and its historical convulsions: breakup of the USSR, Velvet Revolution and Balkan Wars. Slovenians, Serbs and Croats, Czechs and Slovaks, and even the Georgians and Ukrainians, still torn apart by Putin’s vengeful territorial ambitions, but very much alive under their national colours, were there, ball at their feet.
Even the questionable ultra-nationalism of the Turkish “Grey Wolves”, an armed far-right organisation, had joined the party, to the point of creating some agitation in the embassies.
I had already written four-fifths of this column and was going to continue in the same vein, on European soccer as a showcase for nations, when, while googling a country, I came across the score of the semi-final then underway between England and the Netherlands: 1-1.
I immediately left my office and went to connect my computer to the big screen in the family living room. “And work?” my girlfriend asked me. “Well, what, I work!”
I was working so hard that an hour later, when an English striker whose name meant absolutely nothing to me, Ollie Watkins, came on as a substitution, I casually floated the idea that this guy was going to score the winner in injury time. And with a superb cross-shot into the box, that’s exactly what happened.
For a third qualifying match in a row, England, who have never won the Euro, had come from behind to beat their rivals to the post. Before them, triple crowned, unbeaten in this tournament and prolific, with their 16-year-old prodigy who could be the next Maradona, now stood Spain.
All that remains is to hope for rain on Sunday afternoon.