Introduction

Summary

The image on the cover of this book is a stylised photograph of the French athlete Marie-José Pérec, taken by Gérard Rancinan, which appeared in Paris Matchthe summer before the 1996 Olympic Games. As reigning Olympic champion and France's best hope for a gold medal at the Atlanta Games, Pérec was chosen by the French National Olympic Council to carry the tricolour during the opening ceremony. Rancinan's image foreshadows this presentation of Pérec as the nation's sporting leader, dressed in patriotic blue, figure-hugging running attire and brandishing a giant tricolour. The photograph clearly evokes Eugène Delacroix's 1830 painting ‘La Liberté guidant le peuple’ that commemorates the July Revolution of that year. Whilst Liberté looks towards her fellow Parisian revolutionaries, Pérec stares steadfastly out over the waves, as if she were to lead the Republic in its quest overseas.

In fact, the photograph was actually taken on the shore in Los Angeles, where Pérec was living and preparing for the Olympics as part of the team coached by John Smith at the University of California. Smith's sprint team, known as HSI (an acronym for both ‘Handle Speed Intelligently’ and ‘Hudson-Smith International’ in reference to the coach himself and the attorney Emmanuel Hudson who formed the other half of the duo in charge of the group), was a collection of sprinters predominantly from the USA and the Caribbean who gained notoriety in international athletics for their brashness and arrogance as well as their stunning successes on the track. Smith was advocating a move towards a thoroughly postnational organisation of athletics mega-events such as the Olympics, whereby teams would be truly ‘professional’, organised in troupes such as his own and would display the emblems of these ‘teams’ rather than national insignia.

Pérec's departure from France two years earlier had been met with much dismay in French athletics circles and the media portrayed her as turning her back on the disciplined and rigorous education she had received in Paris under coach Jacques Piasenta – a purist adept in the système D(the ability to make do, se débrouiller, in difficult circumstances) – for the glamour, riches and lifestyle of LA under the tutelage of a ‘guru’ who espoused the ‘greed is good’ mentality of 1990s America.