Writing about sports in Le Monde is a lesson in modesty. There isn't a journalist who hasn't been told by a champion or potential medalist: "Oh really, Le Monde covers sports?" For a long time, the prestigious daily's authority seemed to stop at the gates of stadiums, swimming pools and gymnasiums. There are also plenty of loyal readers with an allergy to the topic, who will have already stopped reading by just the third word of this article. Then there are those colleagues who, after dissecting the previous day's match over the coffee machine, will think that this article is wasted space that could have been better used for other, more important topics. "At Le Monde, they tell you more about the Ugandan deputy secretary of state than they do about [cyclist] Bernard Hinault," quipped French author San-Antonio, alias Frédéric Dard.

Nevertheless, Le Monde actually covers sports. For 80 years, in fact – long before the summer Olympic Games decided to make a stopover in Paris at the end of July 2024, where it will find itself camping at the newspaper's front door. Sports have been covered in Le Monde since December 27, 1944, to be exact, when issue no. 8 of the paper, at the time merely a single sheet of Berlin-sized paper, featured the word "sport" in the headline above the result of an anonymous field hockey match at La Croix-Catelan in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris. It was set next to a slightly longer note on the state of food supplies, listing the countless shortages and announcing that there would be no chocolate at Christmas.

The birth of the sports section itself was wonderfully recounted by Olivier Merlin in his 1986 memoir, Une Belle Epoque. 1945-1950. Having served as a lieutenant in the French army in 1940, this former journalist for Swiss daily Le Temps had just spent five years in a prisoner-of-war camp when he met up with Hubert Beuve-Méry in mid-1945. The young chief of Le Monde, then 43, with his Jansenist reputation, took a liking to this Merlin, five years his junior, who cultivated a hedonistic spirit that was Beuve-Méry's exact opposite. In 1945, Beuve-Méry offered Merlin a job in the politics department, the journalistic equivalent of the Legion of Honor. This was politely refused. "I'd like to create a sports section," the kamikaze dared to suggest. Hearing this heresy, André Chênebenoit, an old hand in the media business, gasped. "A sports section! With two pages, or rather only one recto-verso, and so much serious copy we don't have room for..." Sports are a trivial matter, anathema to the paper's orthodoxy. How could such frivolities fit in Le Monde's pages?

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