A former student of the École normale supérieure and a graduate of Sciences Po Paris, David Brunat has been a member of several ministerial cabinets. Associate consultant at LPM Communications, David Brunat is the author of ten books. These include
Pamphlettres
(Plon, 2015),
Giovanni Falcone: un seigneur de Sicile
(Les Belles Lettres, 2017) and ENA Circus (Éd. Du Cerf, 2018).
To discover
Michel Houellebecq: "A civilization which legalizes euthanasia loses all rights to respect"
Roger Federer is celebrating his fortieth birthday on August 8.
40 years !
A canonical age for a tennis champion.
Especially if he intends, as is the case of the valiant Swiss, to remain at the top of the bill despite the weight of years and the vicissitudes of a body recreated from trials, sewn up with victories but also seamed with a few setbacks and injuries.
This anniversary is a great opportunity to reflect on what it means to be forty years old.
Remember that this was the minimum age required to become a consul in Rome.
Experience prevailed.
The "
honorum course
" valued gray hair: impossible to skip the steps to reach the highest charges.
Virtues of waiting for the construction of oneself and of one's political ambitions ...
But forty years is also, quite the reverse, the age limit to receive the laurels of the Fields Medal, the highest mathematical distinction.
Encouragement, in this case, to promising young shoots and tribute to youthful creativity ...
"
Forty years is the old age of youth, but fifty years is the youth of old age,
" said Victor Hugo.
David Brunat
In the corporate world, it's yet another story: your 40s push you into the senior category. What ? Have you barely gone halfway through your working life, but you're already almost in the antiques department? Incredible but true.
Relativity, therefore, of the notion of youth, old age, middle age, seniority ... "
Forty years is the old age of youth, but fifty years is the youth of old age
", said Victor Hugo, who so well embodied all the stages of existence: the poet's precocious spring, the ardent summer of literary genius with such prolific fruit, the autumn of the patriarch in love with freedom and justice, and the legendary winter of one of the best advocates of the people that France has never counted in its ranks.
And the Victor Hugo of the ball (yellow), then? Senescent champion but also a very young quadra, a veteran of the courts that he has been splashing with his grace for two decades but also a youngster in the light of the old beards of his personal pantheon - Rod Laver first and foremost -, Federer gives the example of exceptional longevity in its discipline.
Despite serious air holes and growing questions about his physical ability to remain at the highest level, he offers the joyful spectacle of a whitened ace under harness, covered in titles and gold, celebrated, adored, fulfilled, and who could take a more than deserved retirement. But he still asks for more, judging with reason that he has not said his last word with his racket. Driven by a junior's enthusiasm and a thirst for conquest worthy of a Gascony caddy, served both by his fluid, progressive, adaptive tennis to the highest point and by a remarkable management of the calendar and the passing time, he delays the moment to say: "Enough! Stop! Inch !" - that fateful moment which will be a small death for him and a bite for his fans.
Still ranked among the 10 best players in the world, he strives to defeat the great law of life and sporting excellence, that of planned obsolescence.
David Brunat
Other sports allow a more generous longevity.
Navigation, golf, mountaineering, etc.
: one can excel at it at an advanced age.
Do not count it among footballers, sprinters, cyclists, etc.
Explosiveness outweighs the endurance of middle age, full physical shape is essential, experience of life and not only of one's art does not play the same role.
For tennis players, quarantine is roaring and even fatal and most yellow ball cracks end their careers long before this fateful deadline. Federer is a "case", like Serena Williams, born a month and a half after him. Still ranked among the 10 best players in the world, he strives to defeat the great law of life and sporting excellence, that of planned obsolescence. And he seems to take a clever and… childish pleasure in it.
He was once a precocious talent (even if he "exploded" less young than a Nadal or a McEnroe).
For a few years now, he has established himself as an unparalleled old leather, capable of breathtaking comebacks and a persistent signatory of a dream tennis despite painful knees, concentration at half mast at times and inevitable doubts about the next steps ...
A beautiful lesson in life, vitality and love - love for his sport, for the public, and for this tennis world which has allowed him to become what he is.
David Brunat
The main thing, he likes to tell us, is to last and continue to have fun.
He now faces opponents who could be his offspring, he frolic as if he were twenty years old (although ...), he displays a child's smile when he beats young wolves, he groans occasionally like a kid, in short : proud and strong-willed, petulant and in love with the spectacle, he resists!
A beautiful lesson in life, vitality and love - love for his sport, for the public, and for this tennis world which has allowed him to become what he is.
20 Grand Slam titles, 40 years old and 4 children on the clock, it is certainly a good record for this hurried and impetuous former young man who knows the value of passing time and who knows so well how to save his body and his hours to last. still and always.
Carpe diem, Roger!
And if we can share with you a piece of the birthday cake and some of the secrets of your makeover that you simmered in your cauldron of Swiss magic potion, there will be no refusal.
Champagne, “Come on” galore, petits fours, and plenty of wins on the courts.
Happy birthday, friend "RodGER", and hats off to the artist!
