La Semaine buissonnière

Echoing the title of his first book, L’Europe buissonnière, La Semaine buissonnière was the weekly column Antoine Blondin wrote for the newspaper L’Équipe from 1954 onward. This collection includes seventy-one previously unpublished articles out of the ninety selected, in which Blondin displays a striking freedom of tone and style that justifies their publication.

One is struck by the author’s astonishing versatility, moving effortlessly from prose to verse, from reportage to fiction, while invoking Verlaine, Paul Morand and Marcel Aymé as his literary models. With biting, self-deprecating humor — “Incompetence, that is my privilege! Yet grant me that it excludes neither interest nor fervor…” — Blondin revives the heroic age of sports journalism, when reporters were expected to produce genuine literary feats.

Incompetent perhaps, but passionate, Blondin approaches modern sporting mythologies — the Tour de France above all, but also the Olympic Games, football and rugby — with the confidence of a pioneer, using sport as a pretext to discuss geography, friendship and literature. Beyond his brilliant wordplay (“One first loves the oval ball for its roundness,” “It is at nightfall that French football is seen in its best light”), Blondin entertains, but what strikes the reader even more is the precision of his analysis: La Semaine buissonnière elevates ordinary sports journalism into the realm of art. As Jean-Philippe Bernard writes, Blondin “remains the undisputed reference for high-wire journalism, able to combine information, relevance and delight… Those who know a more perfect introduction to sporting culture are invited to raise their hand” (Le Vestiaire, Antoine Blondin, Le Temps, July 1999).