Sport. Valentin Deudon's column: Paris 2024 in poetry

It's a wonderful, mixed, and bizarre team, assembled for the occasion. A selection of enthusiasts who have agreed to view a major sporting event in a different way. With poetry, their poetry.

Almost a year ago, 29 French-speaking poets were brought together by the association Écrire le sport to write about the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. It began with a desire by historian and poet Julie Gaucher to pay tribute to the work of Géo Charles, VIIIe olympiade, a collection in which the French writer composed a poem for each Olympic final he attended during the 1924 Games in the French capital.

A hundred years later, an identical form is imposed, collectively this time, the committed being invited to publish online their raw writings, in free quantity, as soon as an ordeal inspired them, upset them, bothered them or other feelings.

The result was a profusion of sensitive and fragile, intimate and intense, critical and admiring, poetic and political texts. In which the pens often lingered on bodies, gestures, falls, struggles, silences, absences.

This project has now become a book, called "Attacking the Sky" and published by L'Appeau'Strophe. A selection of thirty-five poems that begins with a gift, the preface by a giant, Jean-Pierre Siméon, speaking of poetry as a "freedom of language giving a broader, more involved, and undoubtedly more acute understanding of sport."

As we turn the pages, we encounter a few other admirable styles. Milène Tournier in her little blue bar, her first verse—"I watched the butterflies soar"—still resonating with each new beginning. Frédérique Germanaud unexpectedly captured by Léon Marchand, "very masculine and gentle." The death of judo according to Paul Fournel, her "kimonos without judokas in them" that resemble Calvino's nonexistent knight. Two Tournai heroines are also present—Colette Nys-Mazure and Françoise Lison-Leroy—the latter delivering a powerful poem about a distant mother worried about her champion son.

Nour Cadour, Rémi Checchetto, Marie Claes, Sébastien Thibault, Jacky Essirard, Olivier Hervé and a few others complete the list of sports poets who have also played at writing the Paris 2024 Games in poetry.