Each sporting gesture is also a reflection of an era, Thierry Grillet teaches us
The stride for running, the knockout for boxing, the serve in tennis, the penalty that wakes up a somewhat long football match… Each sport has a singular and decisive gesture, which immediately identifies it. This is what the essayist Thierry Grillet explains in his Small treatise on gesture. In each chapter, we discover an Olympic sport and its action, but also the athlete who created it or those who perfected it, the artist who immortalized it and the era in which it emerged.
Taking great care to move away from the hackneyed clichés about sport as performance and surpassing oneself, the author seeks to go beyond the purely physical side of the sporting gesture to restore its ” cultural depth » and spiritual. From the outset, Thierry Grillet warns: the sporting gesture is not a simple movement; it is the ultimate accomplishment of a movement that was sculpted and tamed after hundreds of hours of practicing it over and over until it became natural. Alone with his racket, alone with his gloves, alone with his body, it is in solitude and in effort that the athlete tirelessly repeats the emblematic gesture of his sport to perfectly acquire his technique and make it his own. The whole challenge is to go from natural movement to practiced gesture, from a simple kick to a ” yoko geri », this karate side kick sent at eye level. The author knows something about it, he who practiced this “ fencing of fists and feet » practicing without an opponent. According to him, the gesture has three dimensions: physical, technical and magical-religious. And it is the latter that particularly interests him, thus putting the motto of Olympism in the background: “ always further, always higher, always faster “.
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Like the finger of God, the athlete’s gesture is creative and gives life to the game. This is the case of the tennis serve, whose appearance in 1878 at Wimbledon definitively broke with the French ancestor of the tennis game. For Thierry Grillet, it is obviously Roger Fédérer who remains the master of the service. Under his pen, the Swiss champion becomes a “ priest of the beginning » who dances with racket and ball. In other words, with grace and therefore without apparent effort. But if the service is the initiatory gesture which begins the match and each exchange, it is also the fateful gesture which can end it. “He is the beginning of the exchange while dreaming of being the end “.
Heaven and earth, life and death
For the author, this dialectic between creation and nothingness, heaven and earth, life and death is at the foundation of sport. Thus, the stride is a “ compromise between walking and flying » ; while being subject to the law of gravity, the runner aspires to reach the sky. Uppercut, left hook, right hook, the boxer strikes with the rage to win but also the fear of being defeated by KO. In the head of the archer, there remains the primitive idea of hunting so as not to be hunted yourself, like the runner who runs to escape… If sport has civilized the most archaic instincts of men, the sportsman continues to draw energy from it.
Constantly torn between opposites and constantly moving to overcome them, the sporting gesture is therefore by nature dialectical but it is above all for the historical author. It is the reflection of an era.
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It is no coincidence that the ancestor of tennis, the game of tennis, was born in the society of gallantry, and developed in the aristocratic society of literary salons where enlightened minds ” returned the ball with witticisms »… Another example: the astonishing “Fosbery”, this dorsal high jump which took the name of its author, a non-conformist who relied more on his sensations than on technique. This iconoclastic leap which surprised the whole world during the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico is, for Thierry Grillet, the gesture of a generation, that of libertarian hippies revolting against the rigid norms of a society. By reversing perspectives, the fosbery brought no less to the high jump than what the Copernican revolution brought to science.
Revolutions
The sporting gesture is at once revolutionary, mystical, and also artistic. In an inspired style, Thierry Grillet draws inspiring parallels between the arts and sport. And that’s what makes his essay so original.
Each sport has a particular link with an art. The race is “ a metaphor for writing and life » writes Thierry Grillet, citing the writer Haruki Murakami and his autobiographical book The author as a long-distance runner. Some writers often explain that words come running. The exhaled breath which accompanies the stride joins that of the inspired words. Boxing is more musical. Many jazzmen, starting with the greatest of them, Miles Davis, frequented boxing gyms, finding in the rhythm of this choreography of punches, the missing notes to their swing in construction. For the painter Ushio Shinohara, who uses his gloves to strike his canvases, boxing is pictorial. Everyone has their own gesture. Thierry Grillet also summons Henri Cartier-Bresson to illustrate the “decisive moment” of the photographer like that of the archer; and many other artists, for the reader’s greatest pleasure.
Small downside nevertheless, among the nine Olympic disciplines chosen to illustrate the nature of the sporting gesture, we can only regret the absence of the most emblematic sport of the gesture: fencing which, however, with its lunges and its touches, is the metaphor par excellence of the oratorical jousts that the author seems to appreciate so much. An unfortunate and especially strange oversight given the cover which illustrates… a fencer!
224 pages, Presses de la Cité, 2024
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