Older generations of athletes from overseas have often denounced the racism or stereotypes of which they were victims when arriving in France. Is this still the case?
Allison Pineau, Wendie Renard, Analia Pigrée, Teddy Riner, Rudy Gobert, Yannick Borel, Dimitri Bascou, Bassa and Mickaël Mawem… The French contingent of high-level athletes is made up of numerous sportsmen and women born or from the departments and communities of ‘overseas. Before them, Christine Arron, Marie-José Pérec, and Malia Metella, set down their bags in France to successfully realize their medal dreams.
The reception did not always live up to their expectations: clichés about overseas people, racism… These athletes, although fully French, were not considered as such: “Here, there are people who said things to me like ‘dirty black girl, go home’, confided Marie-José Pérec, triple Olympic champion in 200 and 400 m in 1992 and 1996, in an interview with musician Manu Katché in 2021 on Yahoo. “When I arrived in mainland France, I experienced a lot of things compared to the West Indians. People said that we didn’t have a plan, that we were nonchalant, etc. And I wanted to show them that no, that we knew how to do things.”she added in an interview with AFP in early January 2024. Nearly forty years later, has the situation changed?
Racist clichés and biases
Overall, what the athletes interviewed now raise are the clichés, which sometimes amount to racism: “The fact that we come from the West Indies and that therefore, obviously, we are tall, we are strong, we are muscular, and that that would give us ‘an advantage'”, says Yannick Borel, Guadeloupean fencer, team gold medalist in epee at the Olympic Games in 2016, five-time world champion. “The speech that kept coming back was: ‘It’s easy for you, you were born like that.’ While fencing is a fairly demanding discipline, which does not only require physicality.he insists.
Olivier Pulvar, lecturer at the University of the Antilles, in Martinique, is not surprised by the persistence of these clichés, these racist biases, towards overseas athletes: “Sport is only a revealer of something deeper. From a reading that French society has of overseas and which is expressed in sport. Stereotypes circulate in society, on television, in the imagination. Because we never learned what overseas territories companies are.”
Roland Monjo, former technical and sports advisor to the regional swimming league in Guadeloupe, provides another explanation, linked to the lack of knowledge among coaches: “According to studies that have been done, athletes have slow muscle fibers for distance running and fast muscle fibers for sprinting. These studies show that ‘whites’ have more slow fibers, except athletes from the Atlas plateau, and that Anglo-Saxon, black-American populations, etc. have more slow fibers. have fast fibers. Many coaches in athletics and swimming relied on this.“According to him, these studies are today”widely questioned but these a priori are still omnipresent in many states of mind.”
“We are seen as a bunch of muscles, not as an individual who can also think, understand his discipline.”
Yannick Borel, French fencerat franceinfo: sport
Same story for Joris Bouchaut, middle-distance swimmer several times French champion. Confronted with clichés about black people and swimming, the Guadeloupean admits that he ended up integrating them, without really questioning them: “These are things that remain and are anchored: there is this thing of saying that black people swim less well. I had accepted it. And I ended up asking a scientist who works with the French Swimming Federation, who told me that no study had ever shown that. That we should rather look for cultural causes.”
Racism, neocolonialism and ignorance
“Last week, a coach told me: ‘You black people don’t float as well.’ says the swimmer. I see it as misunderstanding, I think it’s people repeating what they’ve always been told.”
This cliché has no reason to exist. Roland Monjo, who knew Boris Bouchaut details: “It’s simple, we have a buoyancy test: we inflate our lungs, we keep our arms alongside our body and we don’t move. Athletes will have their neck and chin above water. And others will sink like stones. Regardless of skin color, there are some who float better than others.”
According to Olivier Pulvar, the vision of French France of its overseas territories is still part of a pattern of colonial power on its lands, without understanding the complexities or the differences. “From colonial ideology comes a whole colonial imaginationspecifies the researcher. It is not necessarily racist, but for example, we imagine that women in the West Indies are very naked during Carnival. It’s a vision that we have. And, more generally, by describing athletes like that, we take away their humanity, their ability to think.”
“The situation of sport in France is part of something more global: the denial of French colonial history.”
Olivier Pulvar, lecturer in communication sciences at the University of the Antillesat franceinfo: sport
Yannick Borel was not confronted with the cliché of the black swimmer, but rather denounces that of the ultramarine who was bound to win: “You are de facto seen as a potential champion. Basically, if you don’t succeed, it’s your fault. Now, we are recognized as a ‘guarantee of success’, having strong potential to be a high-level athlete. It’s totally in the cliché box.”
According to him, itThis situation leads to a difference in treatment, with equivalent records, between a white athlete and a black athlete: “I have the impression that, since we were not born here, and we are non-white, we have less room for error. You have to be indisputable in the eyes of the selectors. If I’m not, I could potentially fall behind someone else for reasons that I don’t understand. Maybe it’s a belief, but I know it’s shared.”
“There is, on the part of the overseas, this request for citizen recognition, we always have to prove that we are French. There is a misunderstanding”agrees Olivier Pulvar.
Credibility through results
The medals collected by athletes from overseas represented around 30% of the French totals at the Rio and Tokyo Games: 17 medals out of 42 in Brazil, 15 out of 33 in Japan. Individual and team sports included.
Joris Bouchaut prefers to take it as additional motivation: “The result closes the debate on the fact that we are capable and that we are a force for France. That said, we’ve had results for a long time, Marie-Jo Pérec, Christine Arron… Malia Metella’s medal [argent en 50 m nage libre aux JO 2004], for me, it is a highlight of Guyanese swimming. It allowed us to open doors, to show us that it was possible, to make coaches of following generations want to go there. It’s a kind of virtuous circle.”
Hoping that, from now on, performances will be judged completely objectively. Yannick Borel puts forward an argument which could argue for this impartiality: “In terms of sport, there is still a form of meritocracy, people are attached to that.”