The headline reads, “Always the first” meaning, he’ll always be the first French rider to win the championship in what the caption calls, “the Queen of the classes.”
If you want to read some of the writing I did in France (which I rate as my best stuff) it’s published in, “On Motorcycles: The Best of Backmarker”. Now just $18 from Amazon.
From mid-2002 until early 2004, I lived in France. First in Lille, then Paris. I was grateful for the experience mainly because it disabused me of a long-held (by me) notion; namely, that I would be happier if I lived in France.
I wasn’t.
However, I do have a few fond memories of life there and foremost amongst them was the daily pleasure of picking up L’Equipe at the newsstand and repairing to some cozy cafe to read it — partly for sports news and partly to improve my French.
There’s no North American equivalent to L’Equipe. The name is French for “The Team”. It runs about 24 pp per day. It’s available at every newsstand in the country. Why it’s nothing like any North American paper is, it covers all sports in loving, lavish detail. Totally unlike U.S. sports pages that really don’t even try to cover anything but the “Major Leagues”.
To be clear, L’Equipe obviously lavishes most of its coverage on France’s most popular sports. Their premier soccer league; rugby, which is a bid deal over there; the Tour and other major cycling events like Paris-Roubaix; tennis during the French Open of course.
But they also provide detailed, expert coverage of second- and third- and nth-tier sports. And what impressed me was that when they wrote about sports I knew about; motorcycle racing, weightlifting, shooting, archery. One day, in the course of reading about the French archery championships, I was struck by the description of one archer’s release—this is the moment in archery, similar to achieving a surprise break in shooting—and the word they used to describe her release was “limpid”. This is perfect word that captures a very nuanced sense what was going on there.
What I’m saying is, L’Equipe did not write down for a general audience; every fan of every sport no matter how obscure got to read expert coverage. One of the consequences of this is that French sports fans have much more catholic tastes than North American fans. Ordinary people can get really passionate about judo, or speed-skating. Or MotoGP.
(Let’s face it: In an only a slightly different world, Cam Beaubier might have clinched the championship yesterday. I guess that would have made the sports pages in Sacramento, but it would only rate a photo and caption; at most some very short article pulled off a wire service; an interview in the off-season might follow, in which a baffled local sportswriter would try to convey some sense that Cam was a big deal, somewhere else.)
The people who love motorcycles the most, talk about them the least.
—Patrick Bodden
One of the only French people that I befriended at all was Jacques Bussilet, who was L’Equipe’s Grand Prix motorcycle racing editor for decades, going back to the days of Jarno Saarinen. Frankly, I’m not sure that Jacques even rode motorcycles, but he was erudite, very knowledgable, and very, very connected in that world. (By the time we met he’d retired from L’Equipe so I never read his coverage, but I’ve read several of his very good books. Few English-speaking motorcycle writers compare.)
I was introduced to Jacques by the Franco-American moto-journo Patrick Bodden, who once said something profound to me: “The people who love motorcycles the most, talk about them the least.”
What he was getting at was, if you only think about one thing — no matter what it might be — you don’t have a larger context to put it in. By definition then, it’s less interesting.
Which brings me around to today’s L’Equipe, which devoted the entire front cover to Fabio Quartararo. In L’Equipe, it’s in context. And it’s literally front page news, nationwide. It’d be fun to pick it up, carry it to some cafe, order a coffee and have the waiter comment, out of the blue, about Quartararo’s belle victoire.