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The Buttes-Chaumont is one of the biggest parks in Paris, a hilly garden where you can forget there’s a whole city out there. But on Friday night around 8:45 p.m., a distant hollering broke through the quiet: French swimmer Léon Marchand had won his fourth gold medal.

From living rooms to public fan zones to the stadiums themselves, the French have Olympic fever. They make up nearly two in three Olympics ticket-buyers, and they come chanting, jumping up and down, waving flags, shouting “hey” in sync with every French swimmer’s breath. They are painting their faces and dressing up their dogs. Many more gather in fan zones or around free events like the weekend’s bike races. “I don’t think I’ve ever experienced an atmosphere like that,” Bob Bowman, who coached Michael Phelps in 2008 and currently coaches Marchand, told Le Monde of the scene in La Défense Arena, home of the Olympic pool. “This here is simply unique.”

It’s one thing to go nuts at the country’s two flagship sporting events, Roland Garros and the Tour de France, which the French haven’t won in decades. But it’s another thing entirely when the country has compiled its highest-ever medal total with a week left in the competition.

Third in the gold medal count and second overall, the French have slipped into a state of sport-induced euphoria. Marchand, the judokas Teddy Riner and Clarisse Agbégnénou, the ping pong prodigy Lebrun brothers…these have become household names here in the span of 10 days, commanding the total attention of television, newspapers, social media, casual conversation, and even the president himself. So intense is this Olympic fervor that broadcasters are showing hours of fencing every day on television.

An illustration shows French judoka Teddy Riner competing against Japan's Tatsuru Saito. The French mixed team won gold.
Illustration by Logan Guo.

What makes this particularly interesting in France is the way that sport intersects with the country’s complicated racial politics. Not a month has passed since a bitter French parliamentary election, in which the far-right National Rally party surged to win a third of the seats in the national assembly on an anti-immigrant campaign. You barely need to scratch the surface of that rhetoric to find the racist “Great Replacement” theory, and the idea that to be truly French is to be white.

Race remains a taboo subject in France, where the government does not collect data on the subject. But sports have provided a forum to discuss, observe, and take pride in the changing face of French society. French athletes of color have often topped polls of the country’s most popular people. In 1998, France won its first World Cup in Saint-Denis with a squad known as the “Black-Blanc-Beur” (black, white, Arab), and French president Jacques Chirac hailed a “tricolored and multicolored France.” The 2018 team made it official: The suburbs of Paris were the world’s greatest source of soccer talent.

Simon Kuper, the Financial Times columnist and author of a recent memoir about life in Paris, Impossible City, writes about soccer as a bridge between the wealthier, whiter city and its sprawling, ethnically diverse suburbs. Youth soccer, he observes in the book, “turned out to be the most mixed Parisian institution I’d encountered, with children and coaches whose background ranged from Arab to Christian to pagan to Jew… Only one activity brings together the suburbs and Paris literally on a level playing field: football.”

But on a national level those warm feelings tend to vanish quickly. In 2011, after France crashed out of the South Africa World Cup, top officials at the French Football Federation were forced to resign after being caught on tape discussing a racial quota system to limit the number of Black and Arab players in the national training system.

Politics, race, and football once again surged into the national conversation last month, as the Black stars of Les Bleus, then competing in the European Cup, called on voters to reject the far right at the ballot box. At the same time, players on the Copa America-winning Argentina national team filmed themselves singing a racist song about the African roots of the French team.

It was in that context that the Olympic opening ceremony arrived, starting with Zinedine Zidane and Jamel Debbouze and ending with Teddy Riner and Marie-Jo Perec. It’s been lost in all the culture war hubbub over drag queens, but that was France showing power and excellence in its diversity. The whole thing must have been programmed months earlier, but it felt like a deliberate rebuttal to the far-right yearning for a bygone France. “The ceremony awoke a form of left-wing patriotism—a notion that right and extreme right have appropriated for themselves for decades—on the values of openness and diversity,” wrote Le Monde.

The opening ceremony was scripted, but France’s strong performance in the Games since has put even the cynical, skeptical French in a state of general optimism about their country and the state of the world. They are everywhere singing their anthem—over, and over, and over again—and also the Marseillaise.

Of course, it may not signal anything at all when the flame goes out. “It’s clear by now that many people are perfectly capable of loving nonwhite sports stars while voting far right,” Kuper told me. Many European soccer stars have expressed a version of the double-standard: When they score, they are national heroes; when they miss, they are identified by the country of their parents.

For now, though, the patriotic excitement feels like a release from the bind of politics, where national symbols are easily co-opted by the far-right. No sooner had the cyclists passed down the Rue Caulaincourt on Saturday than the French fans took over the cafes to watch the mixed team judo finals. “Allez Clarisse!” they shouted, and when Teddy Riner brought the gold medal home, the whole cafe sang the Marseillaise.

“It’s good to get the flag back,” said one of the young men in the cafe, explaining that the rise of the far-right vote, with its suspicion of dual nationals and immigrants, had rubbed off a bit on the national symbol. “It’s a pleasure to take it back, and the revolutionary song, for France.”

Gold: The diocese of Paris sets up a website to deliver spiritual support to athletes, with the refugee team receiving the most prayers.
Silver: Little clusters of people in public places form to watch Olympic streaming on someone's phone.
Bronze: Novak rides some ferocious clay-court defense to a long-sought gold medal.
Illustration by Slate.




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