Merde at the Paris Olympics (Extract Blog post) by Stephen Clarke

 

From Amazon

Englishman Paul West is living in Paris (where he arrived long before Emily, by the way) and he’s gearing up for the 2024 Olympics.

Paul accepts a job with a French group who are campaigning to get pétanque adopted as an official Olympic event. In Paul’s opinion, lobbing lumps of lead around while drinking pastis is barely a sport – it’s more an excuse for Provençal men to avoid cooking dinner. But he needs the cash.

Meanwhile Paul falls in love with a French tech genius – who thinks he’s an idiot – and tangles with his treacherous ex, Elodie.

Paul also applies for French nationality and has to embark on a war of attrition with France’s Napoleonic bureaucrats.
In the background, Paul’s friend Jake the grunge poet decides that the Olympics and Paralympics discriminate against the lazy, and invents the “Nolympics”.

Let the fun and games begin.

An extract from the book.

'First there was Alain’s opening speech, which gave the history of the sport, mentioning that the first official pétanque association had been founded in 1942, during Nazi Occupation. In his view, this made the game part of the Resistance – though I’d have said it made it part of collaboration. He said that there had been World Pétanque Championships since 1959, involving teams from more than 20 countries, many of which had never been French colonies. The championship, he said, was so open that a British team had once been allowed to win a bronze medal.

  After the history lesson, Alain’s speech got a little aggressive, and began bashing recent additions to the Olympic catalogue such as mountain biking, skateboarding and breakdancing. These were all blatantly American activities, he said, so why was Paris allowing them? And was breakdancing even a game? Next we got down to the Paris committee’s response, which was detailed, understanding and totally negative. They cited lack of time, lack of space, an official list of events already prepared, voting already closed, etc, etc. 

  But reading between the lines, it seemed to come down to one central problem pétanque wasn’t cool. Neither, one could 23 argue, are the shot putt or some of the flouncier kinds of gymnastics, but instead of getting rid of those, it looked as if the Paris Olympic committee wanted to acquire a more modern image by tacking on trendy new events. They quoted the International Olympic Committee’s desire to see “genderbalanced and youth-based sports”. And I had to agree that when you close your eyes and think of pétanque, all you see is a crowd of old male boozer.'

Thanks

My thanks to Helen Richardson for the opportunity to take part in the blog tour of this book by Stephen Clarke.  I look forward to letting the fun and games begin when I read this book soon.