The Athletic Aberration

… A FACE. GRIMACING HORRIBLY. LOOKING LIKE IT’S STRAINED WITH EXCESSIVE suffering. Pain twists the muscles, deforms the expression. The mouth is writhing, the eyes look mad. Is it some torture victim dying at the hands of a sadistic executioner? Is it a martyr? Some unfortunate suffering the torments of an attack of madness? Is it …?

The monstrous photograph that inspired these questions was found in a prominent place on page one of one of the most popular sporting reviews, La Vie au Grand Air (December 19, 1908). It showed a runner making the supreme effort to reach the finish line.

Photos like this one are not at all rare. Who among you hasn’t more than once seen in a newspaper the dizzying swerving of autos competing for a trophy? Or a dangerous motorcycle race? Or simply some imbecile (Dorando, for example) fainting after having run forty kilometers? Or a boxing match?

Not counting the innumerable sporting papers dedicated to this kind of brainlessness all newspapers of all parties and all dimensions have taken up the habit of offering their readers, between two sensational crimes, an educational image of this kind, even “l’Humanité” (the organ of the Socialist Party if you please), which in this matter competes in cretinism with the “Petit Journal”—so justly called “Le Petit Idiot”—and “Vélo” and “Auto.”

The more we observe it the clearer it is that the love for violent sports seems to be a veritable contemporary malady. The entire younger generation of today is attacked by it, as well as a large part of the others. What newspapers do young people read? What is the reading matter fated to provide what is called the bread of the spirit? L’Auto, Le Vélo, etc. They know nothing of the problems of life. They’ll passively, sadly, unexceptionally, play their small role, but they know everything about the victories of Jacquelin, Paul Pons, and Jenatzy.

Do they even think of fighting for a better life? Of studying the infinite problems of thought, or even simply of living? You must be kidding! They are burning to equal Farman in the air or to run countless kilometers without a break, or to win the Ardennes Cup. We must renounce putting anything else into noggins stuffed with such foolishness. We must resign ourselves and wait for them to disappear, just as the generations of mediocrities incapable of living must disappear. We must also save the rising ones from the athletic aberration.

For it has all the characteristics of a mental illness. It’s an obsession that succeeds in abolishing all reasoning power in its victim. The runner can’t control himself. He has lost the little free will that the normal man enjoys. Just as the hysteric doesn’t know how to vanquish his pathological desires; just as the alcoholic no longer has the strength to refuse a drink that he knows is fatal; just as the opium smoker or the morphine addict must absorb his poison, the runner doesn’t have the force of will to refuse himself a pleasure that everything shows him to be absurd, dangerous, and painful. And at the end there waits the fatal accident, the pitiful death of an exhausted beast collapsing under the sadistic gaze of the hallucinating crowd. What difference does it make? Run! Run! On foot, on a bicycle, in a car, cover kilometers, savor the giddiness of maddening speed, and reach the goal, haggard, your breast collapsed, your eyes bloodshot, with the buzzing of applause in your ears, with your brain drunk on an imbecilic vision of glory.

This man, just like a drunk or an epileptic, is abnormal. Like certain religious madmen (like Hindu fakirs and Christian ascetics) he tortures himself, submits himself to the worst trials because his madness is accompanied by a need for suffering. Something that is also worthy of note: in all branches of intellectual activity the sportsman stands out as an idiot. This sick brain is incapable of thought or study. It is rare that he even has had a primary education.

And so it is that we can contemplate in sporting reviews monstrosities like those that inspired these reflections.

But it would be a mistake to think that only sporting professionals are struck with this mental aberration. What are we to think of the crowds pressed up against the racecourse of the mad machines with the secret hope of seeing a beautiful catastrophe? What can we say about the select public—the journalists, society types, gens de lettres—who squeezed into the Alhambra in the past to see brutes pummel each other, break each other’s jaws, and give each other black eyes?

Those who enjoy such ignoble spectacles remind me of those primitive peoples for whom animal fights were their greatest joys. They demonstrate a cannibal mentality similar to that of the Romans during their period of decadence presiding over gladiatorial combats. They have preserved the temperament of cannibals.

Like the unfortunate actors of these sad spectacles, the people who find their pleasure in this are worthy of only one name: brutes. And if they didn’t have the excuse of unconsciousness we would have to lose hope.

This said, does it follow that, as some have erroneously concluded after an article that appeared in these same columns (see no. 18 of Le Révolté) that for fear of the athletic aberration we must renounce sports?

I don’t think so. As long as sports aid in the physical development of man they are excellent and can only be encouraged. But from the moment they render people stupid and become a mental illness we must react.

We want a humanity healthy in body and mind. We must fight everything that goes against this goal. Though sports can be a precious factor in the development and maintenance of health, the abusive usage of it renders them harmful.

It is our role to say this.

(Le Révolté, January 9, 1909)