You tell us about Eugene…
Eugène, who is splendid in his quiet strength, all white on the front page of Presse-Océan, perched on the knees of his close friend Milena, who is not bad either, round face, firm arms, tinted glasses, and who is the real heroine of the day, let’s be fair: a badminton champion who takes the stage at the Paris Paralympics…
Eugène is Milena Sureau’s dog, who can pull her wheelchair if she gets tired, ward off her crises with his presence alone, and also – I read this over a year ago in L’Equipe – signals to her when it’s time to leave the gym, otherwise she would forget herself, all in her own world…
Milena Sureau then… A kid who in kindergarten was said to be gifted, what potential, before worrying about her silences when she was older, and then finally diagnosed as autistic, this state of mind which complicates relationships with others and at the same time gives the gift of objectifying situations…
Milena Sureau, who had dreamed of being a tennis champion, and who said to herself, when the handicap took hold of her, which one day would prevent her from walking, she gains ground every year, that it was the opportunity to accomplish her dream differently, she would be a para-badminton champion – and it is another sport, other gestures that she taught her arm in just two years.
Milena Sureau who was one of the ultras of AS Saint-Etienne, go greens, and there were trips, fights too… She is a musician, singer-songwriter, to finance her albums she worked in the summer in the salt marshes of Loire-Atlantique, then became a full-time salt worker if I dare say, she has her farm that she has neglected a little to move forward towards the games…
Will she be the Paralympic champion Milena Sureau, the star of Saint-Molf, where the competition lives, who will face the world number one in her first match? She is already in the party – as the Team would say, whose title I love from one…
“Paras is a party”, not bad…
And in our daily newspapers you find stories of champions of destiny, of immense athletes with extra stuff… Our standard-bearers: the para-triathlete Alexis Haquinquant who promises in L’Equipe that the public will take a “prosthesis in the buttocks” and the athletics champion Nantenin Keita, who tells Libération that the Paralympic level has exploded, and who wonders, she is albino and visually impaired, if the purple track of the Stade de France, will not be too bright under the sun to the point of erasing the contrasts that guide her… It scares her a little…
In all sports stories there is epic and technique too, details for the uninitiated but for the champions these are essential constraints – what to do with one’s body? Paralympic athletes have an extra dimension.
Take the time to click and go read on the team’s website how the Toulouse swimmer Ugo Didier, with a Golgoth torso and arms, legs with atrophied muscles, transformed his swimming and literally relearned to swim for the Paris games… He had developed a swimming style based on strength, stiffness, an adaptation swimming style he says, to compensate for the weaknesses of his lower body, he decided to reinvent himself in a more academic swimming style – head position, hand entry into the water, glides. He integrated the movements with patience, at a slow pace, first and then they are in him… Impatience can take hold of me.
Le Monde, on the sidelines of the Paralympics, tells, it’s fascinating, all the intelligence, the technique, the technology that allows the journey from amputation to prosthesis – it talks about athletes or you and me, that an accident, diabetes, hits, and we have to reinvent ourselves… I read stories of phantom limbs, the pain that we feel as if it comes from flesh that is nevertheless gone… I read that we now infiltrate the nerves before amputation, so that the patient’s last sensation is that of an anesthetic and not of a section…
Alongside our heroes of the Games, L’Equipe on its site again, takes up an article from the monthly France-football, really cool and entirely devoted to Japan, and gives me another rare sportsman,
Kazuyoshi Miura. 57 years old, the oldest professional footballer in the world, he starts the season in the 4th division in Portugal, he would go well until 80 years old, he has the life of a globetrotter, an adventurer of heroes, his celebrations are a hit in the discos, he inspired a character of “Captain Tsubasa” … What could be more beautiful?
You also tell us about a rugby player…
Who I name in the past tense when he is only 17 years old, Medhi Narjissi, who was from Stade Toulousain and the French XV and under-18s, promised the best things and that his parents Jalil and Valérie yesterday recounted in a press conference reported by Sud-Ouest, la Dépêche, le Petit bleu and l’Equipe… “My son, when he saw his French team jersey, he kissed it, he fought to have it. And now it is taken away from me because someone decided to put kids in the water.”
Medhi, who was fiercely beautiful and conquering, disappeared this month of August, swallowed up by the sand and the sea and the current during a “feet in the water” session on a beach in South Africa known to be dangerous, during a tour of the young blues… Only one of his teammates came to his aid, in vain… And his parents want the guilty parties, read on – they owe that to Medhi…
In the Voix du Nord, I read about an old man of 91, whose name is Maurice Dupont and he symmetrically fights for the memory of his father whose story he often tells… This father – I read this on the website of the RC Lens football club, Dupont is a figure from Lens – this father, Maurice would curl up against him as a child for a little tenderness, he would rest his head against his chest, but in this chest he would hear a cracking… Dad was a miner, his lungs taken by silicosis, like a sponge soaked in cement, in the end to avoid dying he would swallow live slugs hoping to grease his bronchi…
It is for this father who died aged 48 and for the thousands of miners who died like him from silicosis that Maurice would like a monument to be erected, to be installed in the park of the Louvre Lens, the pride of the city, so that everyone can see it and no one forgets… But La Voix du Nord tells me that the museum is reluctant to accept this duty of remembrance… And had already been asked to accept a model of the 9/9 bis coal pit, a pit that has disappeared and whose location it nevertheless occupies… Could ingratitude be an art?
We finally talk about resemblance…
Between two peoples that politics has made enemies, but yet they are so close, the Israelis and the Iranians in their way of looking at life, this is what the Iranian actress and director in exile Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who made with an Israeli, Guy Nattiv, a film called “Tatami” which is coming out in a week, affirms to the weekly Franc-tireur: the story of an Iranian judoka that the regime wants to force to forfeit in order not to shake the hand of an Israeli – a political story and a fierce champion, we will see?
Sud-Ouest tells us that in Lot-et-Garonne an imam, long in charge of the miosque of Agen, is also looking for a resemblance. Mohamed Nayma, who does not resign himself to the harshness of the times and who has a language course business, who speaks French, Arabic, Spanish, is looking for a Hebrew teacher to better understand the other. Yalla, Choukran, Toda, Kol Akavod and all that sort of thing!
