PARIS—Lucky for the Sportstrotter, my new compatriots, the French, like their sports. What’s more, they really like their sports. And nowhere is this widely held love of competition more apparent than in the identity of the country’s highest-circulation national daily newspaper: nope, it’s not Le Monde or Le Figaro, but rather l’Équipe, a broadsheet dedicated entirely to the coverage of sport.

I learned this remarkable (and, admittedly, somewhat unverifiable—the art of circulation auditing being what it is) fact only today. It’s been a weird day so far. It began with a trip to a French immigration office, where the official Sportstrotter fiancée and I had to wade through a fifty-strong pack of agitated foreigners (mostly North Africans, it seemed) crowded at the front door, thrusting passports in the face of the less-than-impressed woman manning the entrance, just to make our way inside for an appointment.That was followed by three hours of Kafkaesque bureaucratic circuitry, where we visited three separate police prefectures across the city just to get one document explaining that another document we were waiting for hadn’t yet been processed. And after giving up waiting in an interminable queue to simply gain entrance to the Pompidou library, I now find myself in another library that I had to literally beg my way into to write this dispatch (apparently, you’re not supposed to visit a library unless you want to consult that library’s particular holdings, which in this case is a great collection of home decoration periodicals).

I’m chalking this silliness up to the fact that today is a leap day, February 29. Happy 12th birthday, motivational speaker/firewalker Tony Robbins! Thank goodness we only get these days every four years. Even better, the next leap day falling on a Friday won’t occur for 28 more years. I now give official notice, dear editor, and to you, loyal reader, that the Sportstrotter will not be filing a column on February 29, 2036. I just can’t handle the stress. Fortunately, today I have l’Équipe to keep me level.I’ve been buying this paper each morning at the newsstand outside my métro station, from a nice man who looks like a French Eugene Levy, justifying the €0.85 daily expenditure by the fact that I’m simultaneously improving my French language skills and enlightening this blog. Really, though, I just love having a daily newspaper dedicated to nothing but trivial, meaningless sport.

For example, in Toronto I would routinely buy the Globe and Mail for nothing more than the sports section, leaving the News and Review and Focus sections sitting on my desk or kitchen table. These sections went completely undisturbed for days, until I could no longer maintain the charade that I would ever read them. On the plus side, carrying a stack of unread sections down to my building’s recycling bin was much easier without stray (i.e. read) pages hanging out.

A more accurate comparison for l’Équipe would be to the Toronto Sun, a paper useful for little more than its above-average sports section. Still (and thankfully), there are differences: l’Équipe has more transcribed interviews with famous athletes, and fewer aging white men writing about things they hate or that make them angry. Best of all, l’Équipe’s tidy 12-or-so pages fit much easier in my shoulder bag than a hefty edition of the Sun packed with “news�? I’m never going to read, about Karla-Homolka’s-killer-dogs-winning-the-lottery-while-simultaneously-murdering-6-babies, and how this bloody tragedy is entirely the fault of the Liberal Party of Ontario (or at least that’s what the paper’s headlines often seemed to me to be about). Still, I do miss those Sunshine Girls.

While last week’s papers, with the resumption of the Champions League and a big weekend rugby match in Paris between France and England, were full of scintillating news and match previews, this sporting week has been comparatively slow. Witness today’s cover story on French basketball hero Tony Parker of the San Antonio Spurs, returning from injury and giving an extended interview to journalist Olivier Pheulpin. Really, the overseas NBA gets 2.5 pages of ink? More than one fifth of the paper dedicated to a player who plays his home matches in the city that brought us the Michelob Ultra River Walk Mud Festival?

Still, within the three Parker/Spurs-focused articles and editorials, I was surprised to learn the astounding level at which the 25-year-old Belgian-born (shhhhhhh!) point guard is revered in France and seen as the great hope for the country’s international basketball fortunes. “Il est de la trempe des Zinédine Zidane, Yannick Noah, Bernard Hinault ou Alain Prost,�? reads today’s editorial note. “Sa parole est suffisamment rare et pertinente pour qu’on s’y attarde.�? In other words, the staff at l’Équipe is pushing Parker up on the same lofty platform as the country’s greatest athletes (Zidane the world-class footballer, Noah the tennis star, Hinault the dominating cyclist and Prost the F1 champion). Pretty optimistic rhetoric when we’re talking about a 25-year-old athlete who’s probably the third-best player on his team (and definitely the best rapper on the team), but I do admire the guts of the paper’s editorial staff for at least considering the possibility.

That’s part of why I love l’Équipe: the reverence with which it treats the country’s athletes and their play. There isn’t the same spirit of grumbling and complaining and villainizing that I’ve grown accustomed to over the years in North American publications—not as much bitching about how the local team sucks, the local star should be playing better, and arguments among columnists about how everyone else is ignorant and wrong in their opinions (I call it the Stephen-A.-Smithification of sports media). With l’Équipe, one finds a real veneration of high athletic performance. True, the gushing poetic sentiment describing sublime matches and impeccable displays of talents is at times overblown (every day seems to bring a new candidate for Greatest Match Ever Played), but nothing gets me going in the morning like reading a newspaper where I don’t have to pretend that I’m going to read the political op-ed, scan the obituaries and do the crossword later on; this is sports, all sports and nothing but sports. Good times.

(Of course, nothing’s ever good enough for the French — a colleague of the official Sportstrotter fiancée’s, upon learning of my new fixation, proceeded to bitch that French had only one daily sports paper, while the Brits get several. They have no idea how good they have it!)

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Posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 5:09 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.