The Rules
of the Sport

Late last year the French government assembled a committee to choose a name for the vast new stadium that’s being built in a Paris suburb. The committee included an actor, an “artiste,” some functionaries, and even a few athletes. It took a long time deliberating over its choice. Names were submitted: Some people liked the idea of naming the stadium after Verlaine or Saint-Exupéry, and lots of others liked the idea of calling it Le Stade Platini, after Michel Platini, the great French soccer player. At last, in December, the committee announced that it had come to a decision, and the government decided to broadcast the verdict on television. The scene was a little like the end of the Simpson trial: the worried-looking jurors filing to their seats, the pause as the envelope was handed to the minister of youth and sports, the minister clearing his throat to read the decision to the nation. The stadium that would represent France to the world, he announced, would be called (long, dramatic pause) Le Stade de France. The French Stadium. “Banal and beautiful at the same time,” one journalist wrote. “Obvious and seductive. Timeless and unalterable.”

It wasn’t hard to detect, beneath the sturdy, patriotic surface of the new name, an undercurrent of ironic, derisory minimalism. The French are prepared to be formally enthusiastic about American-style stadiums and American-style sports, but they are not going to get carried away by it all. This realization first came home to me when I joined a pioneer health club on the Left Bank and spent four months unsuccessfully trying to get some exercise there.

“An American gym?” Parisians asked when I said that I was looking for someplace to work out, and at first I didn’t know what to say. What would a French gym be like? Someone suggested that my wife and I join the Health Club at the Ritz; that was about as French as a gym could get. This sounded like a nice, glamorous thing to do, so we went for a trial visit. I ran out of the locker room and dived into the pool. White legs were dangling all around me—crowded to the edges, as though their owners were clinging to the sides of the pool in fear—and only after I rose to the surface did I see that the owners were all hanging from the edge of the pool, eating tea sandwiches off silver platters. Finally, after we’d done a lot of asking around, someone suggested a newly opening “New York–style” gym, which I’ll call the Régiment Rouge. One afternoon Martha and I walked over to see what it was like and found it down at the end of a long, winding street. The gym was wedged into the bottom two floors of an institutional-looking Haussmann-era building. We went in and found ourselves surrounded by the virtuous sounds of Activity—sawing and hammering and other plaster dust–producing noises. The bruit seemed to be rising from a cavernlike area in the basement. At the top of a grand opera–style staircase that led to the basement were three or four fabulously chic young women in red tracksuits—the Régiment Rouge!—that still managed to be fairly form-clinging. The women all had ravishing long hair and lightly applied makeup. When we told them that we wanted to abonner—subscribe—one of them whisked us off to her office and gave us the full spiel on the Régiment Rouge. It was going to bring the rigorous, uncompromising spirit of the New York health club to Paris: its discipline, its toughness, its regimental quality. They were just in the middle of having the work done—one could hear this downstairs—and it would all be finished by the end of the month. The locker rooms, the appareils Nautilus, the stationary bicycles with electronic displays, the steam baths, the massage tables—everything would be not just à l’américaine but très New Yorkais. Best of all, she went on, they had organized a special “high-intensity” program in which, for the annual sum of about two thousand francs (four hundred dollars), you could make an inexorable New York–style commitment to your physique and visit the gym as often as once a week.

It was obvious that the once-a-week deal was the winner—the closer, in Mamet language—and that though she had a million arguments ready for people who thought that when it came to forme, once a week might be going overboard, she had nothing at all ready for people who thought once a week might not be forme enough. We asked her if we could possibly come more often than that, and she cautiously asked us what we meant by “often.” Well, three, perhaps four times a week, we said. It was not unknown, we added quickly, apologetically, for New Yorkers to visit a gym on an impulse, almost daily. Some New Yorkers, for that matter, arranged to go to their health club every morning before work. She echoed this cautiously too: They rise from their beds and exercise vigorously before breakfast? Yes, we said weakly. That must be a wearing regimen, she commented politely.

She paused, and then she said, wonderingly, “Ah, you mean you wish to abonner for an infinite number of visits?” After much fooling around with numbers and hurried, hushed conferences with other members of the regiment, she arrived at a price for an infinity of forme. The difference between once a week and infinity, by the way, turned out to be surprisingly small, improvised prices being one of the unpredictable pleasures of Paris life. She opened dossiers for both of us; you can’t do anything in France without having a dossier opened on your behalf.

A week later I dug out my old gym bag, cranked up my Walkman, and set off for the Régiment Rouge. When I arrived, the young women in the red tracksuits were still standing there. They looked more ravishing than ever. I picked out our consultant from the group and told her I was ready to get en forme. “Alas, the work continues,” she announced. I peered down. The renovation seemed to have stopped just where it had been when I saw it before. “The vestiaires and the appareils will now be installed next month,” she said. “However, we are having classes all week long, on an emergency basis, and the Régiment Rouge wishes to make you an award for your patience.” Then she gave me a bag of chocolate truffles. (There is a health food store on the rue du Bac that displays in its window its own brand of chocolates and its own marque of champagne. Tout Biologique! a sign alongside them proclaims virtuously.) I ate one.

A week after that we got a phone call from our consultant. She proudly announced that things were ready at last, and there would be a crepe party in honor of the opening. “We will have apricot jam and crème de marrons,” she explained. We went to the crepe party. Everyone—would-be members and the girls in the red tracksuits—walked around eating stuffed crepes and admiring the pristine, shiny, untouched Nautilus machines and exercise bikes and free weights.

A few days later I went back again to try to use the gym, but on my way into the regimen room I was stopped by another of the girls in red tracksuits. Before one could start work on the machines, she explained, it was necessary that one have a rendezvous with a professeur. When I arrived the next day for my rendezvous, the professeur—another girl in a red tracksuit—was waiting for me in the little office. She had my dossier out, and she was reviewing it seriously.

“Aren’t we going to demonstrate the system of the machines?” I asked.

“Ah, that is for the future. This is the oral part of the rendezvous, where we review your body and its desires,” she said. If I blushed, she certainly didn’t. She made a lot of notes and then snapped my dossier shut and said that soon, she hoped, we could begin.

 

While all this was going on, I tried to tell Parisians about it, and I could see that they couldn’t see what, exactly, I thought was strange. The absence of the whole rhetoric and cult of sports and exercise is the single greatest difference between daily life in France and daily life in America. It’s true that French women’s magazines are as deeply preoccupied with body image and appearance as American ones. But they are confident that all problems can be solved by lotions. The number of French ointments guaranteed to eliminate fat from the female body seems limitless, and no pharmacy window is complete without a startlingly erotic ad for the Fesse-Uplift—an electrical buttock stimulator, guaranteed to eliminate fat by a steady stream of “small, not unpleasing shocks administered to the area,” the ad says. Votre Beauté, the Self of France, recently had a special issue on losing weight. There were articles on electrical stimulation, on nutrition (raw carrots will help you lose weight; cooked carrots won’t), on antiobesity pills, and on something called passive exercise. There was also, of course, a long article on reducing lotions. Finally, buried in the back, among the lonely-hearts ads, was a single, vaguely illicit-looking page of workout diagrams. If all else fails.

Among men, an enthusiasm for sport simply segregates you in a separate universe: You are a sportsman or you are not. The idea of sports as a lingua franca meant to pick up the slack in male conversations is completely alien here. The awkwardnesses that in America can be bridged by a hearty “See the Knicks last night?” exist here, but nobody bridges them by talking about sports. Sport is a hobby and has clinging to it any hobby’s slightly disreputable air of pathos. Also, sport is an immigrant preoccupation: Whereas in America it acts as a common church, here it is still low church. There is a daily sports paper here, titled L’Équipe, but it is meant for enthusiasts; Le Monde devotes one or two pages to the subject, and Libération only a few pages more. Paris has one good soccer team (whereas London alone has six), but you could walk the length and breadth of Saint-Germain and not see a single bit of evidence—not a sign in a window, a pennant in a bar, or a sweater on a supporter—that it exists. France has some terrific footballers, but they play mostly in England and Italy. The nearest thing to a Magic-Michael showdown in France is the affrontements of the French-born players David Ginola and Eric Cantona, but those take place across the Channel, in the North of England, where Ginola plays for Newcastle and Cantona for Manchester United. Still, Ginola and Cantona are regularly dunned by L’Équipe to declare their love of country. “But la France I think of all the time! Not only when I play Manchester! She is in my head and in my heart!” Ginola declared recently. It sounded a little forced to me, but apparently L’Équipe was satisfied. Legend has it that among Frenchmen sex and food are supposed to take the place of sports (“Did you perhaps see the petite blonde with the immense balcon, mon vieux?”), but in fact they don’t. What the French do to bridge the uneasy competitive silences that seem to be the price of a Y chromosome is talk about government and particularly about the incompetence of government ministers; which minister has outdone the others in self-important pomposity is viewed as a competitive event. Though the subject is different, the tone is almost exactly the same as that of American sports talk. “Did you see Léotard on the eight o’clock last night?” one Parisian man might ask another. (The news is on at eight here.) Then they both shake their heads woefully, with that half smile, half smirk that New York men reserve for Mets relief pitchers: beyond pathetic.

If talking about the bureaucracy takes the place of talking about sports, getting involved with the bureaucracy takes the place of exercise. Every French man and woman is engaged in a constant entanglement with one ministry or another, and I have come to realize that these entanglements are what take the place of going to a gym where people actually work out. Three or four days a week you’re given something to do that is time-consuming, takes you out of yourself, is mildly painful, forces you into close proximity with strangers, and ends, usually, with a surprising rush of exhilaration: “Hey, I did it.” Every French ministry is, like a Nautilus machine, thoughtfully designed to provide maximum possible resistance to your efforts, only to give way just at the moment of total mental failure. Parisians emerge from the government buildings on the Île de la Cité feeling just the way New Yorkers do after a good workout: aching and exhausted but on top of the world.

 

A few days after my oral interview I went back to the Régiment Rouge, and this time I actually got on one of the stationary bicycles and rode it for twenty-four minutes. I was in full New York regalia (sweatpants, headband, Walkman) and did it in good New York form (Stones blasting in my headphones, crying out, “One minute!” when there was a minute left to go). By now there were other people at the gym, though the man on the bicycle next to me was going at a speed barely fast enough to sustain life, while the woman beside him, who was on a treadmill, was walking at the right speed for window-shopping on the boulevard Saint-Germain on an especially sunny day when your heart is filled with love and your pockets are filled with money; it was as though she had set the machine at “Saunter.”

I got down from my bike perspiring right through my T-shirt—the first person on the Left Bank, I thought proudly, to break a sweat at a gym. I walked back to the desk. “A towel, please,” I panted (in French, of course). The girl in the red tracksuit at the desk gave me a long, steady, opaque look. I thought that maybe I had got the word for towel wrong (I hadn’t, though), and after I asked again and got the same look in return, I thought it wise to try to describe its function. My description sounded like a definition from Dr. Johnson’s dictionary: that thing which is used in the process of removing water from the surfaces of your body in the moments after its immersion. “Ah,” she said. “Of course. A towel. We have none yet.” She looked off into the middle distance. “This,” she said at last, “is envisaged.” I looked at her dumbly, pleadingly, the reality dawning on me. Then I walked all the way home, moist as a chocolate mousse.

 

A couple of days later I went for what I thought would be my last visit to the Préfecture de Police to get my carte de séjour, a process that had involved a four-ministry workout stretching over three months. The functionary seemed ready to give it to me—she was actually holding it out across the desk—but then she suddenly took one last look at the dossier the préfecture had on me and noticed something that she had somehow missed before.

“Alors, monsieur,” she said, “you have not yet had a physical examination to make sure that you are in sufficiently good health to remain in France.”

I didn’t know what to say. “I belong to a gym,” I said at last, and I showed her my card from the regiment.

“Well,” she said, “this will be useful for your dossier.” I couldn’t argue with that.