Numerous men and women from the world of sport in France have taken a public stand over the past days to warn, either explicitly or in general terms, of the danger of a far-right government being elected in the legislative elections to be held in the country on June 30th and July 7th.
They have notably included footballers Kylian Mbappé and Marcus Thuram, former tennis champion Yannick Noah, former athletes Marie-José Pérec and Monique Ewanje-Epée, yacht-racing skippers Isabelle Autissier and François Gabart, and former professional footballer Thierry Henry, coach of the French football team taking part in this summer’s Olympic Games in Paris.
But the reactionary old guard of French sport responded this week, in the form of former Olympics champion Guy Drut, 73, who is a member of the International Olympic Committee and as such a director of the 2024 Paris Olympics and Paralympics organising committee.
In an interview published on Tuesday in French daily Le Monde, Drut applauded the position of the head of the conservative party Les Républicains (LR), Éric Ciotti, who, along with a minority group within the party, has entered into an electoral alliance with the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party. Ciotti’s decision outraged many fellow conservatives, and has led the party to the brink of implosion.
In the interview with Le Monde, Drut said Ciotti “was right” to call on the electorate to vote for the far-right in face of what he described as “the fascist threat of the Left”. Drut, who twice held the world record in the 110-metre hurdles, including as gold medallist in the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal, was elected as a conservative Member of Parliament in 1986, remaining so for almost two decades, and was for two years a sports minister under the presidency of Jacques Chirac. In 2005 he was handed a suspended prison sentence after he was found guilty for his part in a corruption scam involving illegal party funding, but was granted an amnesty by Chirac the following year.
Drut told Le Monde this week that, regarding his support for the far-right, “several sports personalities are in the same line of thinking as me, but won’t say it”. Drut took aim at Marcus Thuram, the 26-year-old son of World Cup winner Lilian Thuram, who plays as a forward for the France national team and Italian club Inter Milan and who was the first French footballer to openly comment this month on the elections.
At a press conference last week in Germany, where he is playing for France in the European Cup tournament, Thuram told the media that people “must go and vote – as a citizen, one must fight so that the RN doesn’t get through”.
Drut told Le Monde: “If Marcus Thuram doesn’t feel at ease in this country, he can go and play in England or elsewhere.”
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Drut was also fiercely critical of Emmanuel Macron. “It’s been seven years that we’ve tried to work with Macron, and seven years that he’s been sending us packing,” he told the daily. “His problem is that he listens only to his mirror, and that it is today broken.”
Soon after that interview was published, sports minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra took to X (formerly Twitter) to denounce Drut’s “degeneration”. She highlighted a quote from the interview with him, in which he said that he was not worried about the threat of a terrorist attack during the upcoming Olympic Games because “the Munich attacks in 1972 didn’t prevent the Games from being held”.
Questioned by Mediapart about Drut’s comments, the organising committee for the Paris Olympics said only that “the comments by Guy Drut concern only himself”.
On June 16th, several high profile figures involved in the organisation of the Paris Olympics – including former fencer Astrid Guyart, secretary general of the national Olympic Committee, the former athlete Marie-Amélie Le Fur, president of the French Paralympic and Sports Committee, and also the boxer Sarah Ourahmoune – co-signed an open letter with other sporting personalities in the sports daily L’Équipe in which they very clearly underlined the incompatibility between the values that sport represents and those of the far-right RN party.
The support for the far-right expressed by Guy Drut has, with regard to his post, made a mockery of the argument by the heads of a number of sports institutions, such as Philippe Diallo, president of the French Football Federation, that a “neutrality” must be expected of them, a notion which effectively hides them from taking up a position in face of a racist party. By embracing the party of the Le Pen family – the sworn enemies of his former boss and Gaullist conservative Jacques Chirac – Drut has also underscored how Emmanuel Macron got it so wrong when he in effect suggested that there is nothing political about sport.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse