Questioning our relationship to the media and information by stepping aside. This is the program of the International Journalism Festival, organized by the Le Monde group (Le Monde, Courrier international, HuffPost, Télérama and La Vie) and L’Obs, which opened on Friday July 14 and will run until to July 16 in the village of Couthures-sur-Garonne (Lot-et-Garonne). “Has rugby lost its soul? “: the question was chosen, “voluntarily provocative”, to stimulate debate between information professionals and festival-goers, confides Clément Martel, journalist at Le Monde, who moderated the debates alongside Richard Sénéjoux, from Télérama.
Two months before the Rugby World Cup, which will take place in France from September 8 to October 28, what could be more logical than to warm up quietly while reflecting on a sport that has long stood out from football, but which is entered in turn into a logic of spectacle. While some matches will take place in Toulouse and Bordeaux, the two cities closest to Couthures, oval ball sport is one of the seven themes that structure the festival program, alongside information fatigue, the place of public service in the media landscape, the climate emergency, the war in Ukraine, or even the psychological consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The first round table of the afternoon on rugby, “The Top 14 otherwise nothing”, opened the ball, to ask the question of the galloping professionalization of this sport coupled with a phenomenon of metropolisation of which the small villages are the costs.
Regional rugby and big city rugby
“There are two kinds of rugby right now: the one that makes you dream, the money one, the Top 14 one. But there is also poor small town rugby which is further impoverished by the bigger clubs. thinks former player and coach Henry Broncan. “There are amateur clubs that keep disappearing,” he warns. Gilles Bertrandias, president of the club of the city of Marmande, confirms that “rugby in mainland France has taken precedence over that of medium-sized towns”. “All our stars have passed through our small villages, that’s where they emerged, we need everyone to respect each other to work together to promote our sport”, adds the president of the club, created in 1911 and crowned champion of France during the 1984-1985 season.
So how do small clubs survive? “We pool and bring together the small towns of the Marmandais basin, this allows us to have a real development path for young people”, explains Mr. Bertrandias, who nevertheless judges that the senior teams and rugby schools must be kept in the village. per village in order to keep a “steeple rugby”.
“We glorified violence”
Another round table, other speakers, but the public remains stunned by the strength of the testimonies about the violence of this sport. Philippe Chauvin, who lost his son Nicolas in a rugby accident in 2018, called for “applying existing safety rules and sanctioning players who do not respect them”. “Hyperviolence is unacceptable on the pitch, professionals need to lead by example!” “, he hopes.
For former Stade Français winger Raphaël Poulain, rugby is “of course an individual and collective combat sport”, but the psychosocial risks experienced by post-injury athletes or at the end of their careers should not be overlooked. , whereas they have long been taboo. “Seven rugby players have committed suicide in recent years,” he points out, recalling in particular the death of Christophe Dominici.
“For a long time, we have glorified violence in rugby, but we have been wondering for a few years about the impact on the bodies and the right way to deal with it,” explains Clément Martel, journalist who covers rugby at Le Monde. His colleague from Sud Ouest, Frédéric Cormary, says he now writes “articles on the physical consequences of matches”. “It’s about how players have to go in the dark to protect themselves after concussions,” he says.
“The question is how to manage to change the image of virility”, adds former player Raphaël Poulain, also author of a one-man show entitled “When I was Superman 2”, qu he plays at Couthures on Friday evening. “Vulnerability and the right to fail should not be a problem”, he insists, while rugby remains a sport in which machismo and sexism still largely persist.
Women’s rugby, a different media treatment
The afternoon ends around women’s rugby. “Haven’t we been a little too obsessed with preparing for the men’s World Cup in recent months, forgetting about women’s rugby? “Asks Amaia Cazenave, journalist for Canal . “There is always a bad reason not to make it a priority,” rebounds researcher Carole Gomez, who counted only forty articles on women’s sport out of nearly 2,000 in the sports daily L’Equipe at the time of Covid. in 2021. “The arrival of the TikTok platform as a sponsor of the Women’s Six Nations tournament has been good and could create a windfall effect”, she wants to believe.
“On the one hand, these are full pages, on the other, paragraphs,” laments one of the festival-goers, criticizing the difference in the media’s treatment of men and women in sport, a “double standard” damaging according to her. “The key word is the will, we must force the clubs to do more for women’s rugby, and we must continue to break down the wall of sexism”, insists Amaia Cazenave, evoking several macho reflections heard again recently.
