Lost in the shuffle of the past eventful week is the 60th anniversary of the Rome Olympics.
The 1960 Summer Games were a watershed in numerous ways. As David Maraniss noted in Rome 1960: The Olympics that Changed the World, it was the first time that the revolution in television broadcasting technology enabled a sizable global audience a front row seat to the tournament. The impact of sports’ mediatization reverberated deeply and ultimately sculpted our global sports world today.
But the 1960 Games were also the “zero hour” of French sports.
Throughout the 1950s, there were real fears within France about the country’s perceived decline. It was no longer a Great Power in a postwar world dominated by the superpowers of the new Cold War world, the United States and the Soviet Union. The empire, a source of pride since the 1880s, crumbled following two wars of decolonization (Indochina, 1946-1954; Algeria, 1954-1962) and President Charles de Gaulle’s 1959 decision to grant independence to French West Africa the following year. The burgeoning youth crisis—the strain on state infrastructure thanks to an unprecedentedly large baby boom—and the new consumer culture added to a sense of anxiety.
Then came the Rome Olympics, and France’s twenty-fifth place on the overall medal table punctured the illusion that de Gaulle sought to cultivate: that of a rejuvenated, revived Fifth Republic.
Presenting at the May 2015 Cold War Sport conference in Moscow.
The story of France’s “zero hour” is part of my contribution to the Sport in the Cold War project (2015-2018), led by Drs. Robert Edelman and Christopher J Young. Listen to my episode of the Cold War Sport podcast here, where I pay attention to Les Tricolores, as Les Bleus of basketball were then known—just one snapshot in the larger Making of Les Bleus story.
Sixty years later, the sports policies and youth development systems that originated out of the ashes of this “zero hour” are producing championship- and medal-winning athletes for the state, from swimming, skiing, and fencing to football (soccer), basketball, handball, and judo. As sports daily L’Équipe noted in August 2018, some 150 French athletes held world or Olympic titles following the 2018 FIFA World Cup.
There’s clearly something to the “Made in France” sports equation, and the recipe for success is hardly a secret, as The Making of Les Bleus articulates. Although it took several decades, without Rome 1960, French sports success today would look vastly different.