Fignon was called the intellectual because he wore round glasses with thin, golden frames, glasses like those worn by those who lose sight from so much reading.
Guillaume Martin, he may not be as great a cyclist as the Parisian who won two Tours, but he is not that far either (he runs his fourth Tour de France, and after the first of his three parts has been completed, third gear, the podium position in which he finished the recent Dauphiné; a runner who already belongs to the group of favorites) and does not need glasses, but his reasons for being considered an intellectual seem more solid, or, at least, less folkloric, and the least of them is that he trains listening to the debates of the radio
France Culture:
a master's degree in philosophy (TFM:
Nietzsche and sport),
a published novel (
Socrates on a bicycle
) and a premiered play (
Plato and Platoche
).
“My latest performances, so brilliant, do not change the way I approach the sport at all: the goal will always be to finish first.
The only difference is that now I am not that far away, ”says Martin, Cofidis leader, small climber, 27-year-old Norman.
Question.
How does your status as a high-level professional athlete influence your intellectual experience, your understanding of the world?
Reply.
Sport is a game.
And I don't stop looking at it as such, no matter how difficult and serious professional cycling may be.
Life itself is a game and, in that sense, there is a perfect coherence between sports practice and what I would call my everyday philosophy.
Why am I pedaling?
Why am I a cyclist?
Because I believe that nothing is ever truly serious, that nothing in life has an absolute meaning, that no destiny orders and commands our lives.
It's up to us, humans, to make sense of it, without pretense, without giving it too much importance.
In sport, at least, the dimension of the game is guaranteed.
The mask is assumed.
Q.
Do you think that concepts such as competitiveness, the need to always be first, life lived in the bubble of a team, life as a challenge to the mountains, to rivals, to nature or to your own limits, can they find a philosophical correlation?
A.
Of course.
Philosophy can be present everywhere.
Sport, and its imperatives, can from that point of view be seen as a philosophical object.
All the themes that he evokes in his question make me immediately think of Nietzsche, the German author who developed the concepts of being superhuman, of eternal return, of will to power ... There are many notions of his that refer to the world of sport!
In my final master's thesis in philosophy I tried to show how Nietzsche's philosophy was more in line with what I lived within me as a high-level athlete than the currently dominant ideology in sport, inherited from Pierre de Coubertin, the inventor of modern Games.
This said: "the important thing is to participate."
Nietzsche, however, wrote through his hero Zarathustra, who is not difficult to compare with a great climber who spends the day going up and down his mountain: "I do not advise you peace, but victory."
And I, as an athlete, find myself much closer to this appointment than to De Coubertin.
Q.
Do you think possible, then, the formulation of a kind of
cycloophy
?
R.
And so much.
Socrates on a bicycle is
still a sketch of what this
cycloophy
could be
through the adventures of these philosophical cyclists who are preparing to compete in the Tour de France.
This narrative trick allows me to evoke the philosophy of Socrates, Plato, Nietzsche, Sartre… in a less austere and distant way than what could be a traditional treatise on philosophy.
And a cycloophy, going back to what I said before, should insist on the notion of play in an almost metaphysical sense.
P.
Why has
Socrates
written
on a bicycle
?
A.
My ambition was twofold.
On the one hand, that of speaking about philosophy for a wide public, very little used to reading, the public of athletes.
Here I generalize because I know many regular readers in the cycling peloton.
And, on the other hand, I also wanted to show an audience of intellectuals the richness of the world of sport and the people who inhabit it.
And thinking about how to bring both universes together, the bias of humor and the idea of this
cyclophic
fantasy prevailed logically and quickly
.
Q.
Did you suffer from a kind of inner need to express yourself intellectually perhaps because the sweat of a cyclist was not enough to tell the world who you are?
R.
Honestly, I do not think of writing as a liberation, as a breath of the spirit in the midst of all the physical boiling that cycling implies.
I write because I like to write.
It is a pleasure, not a necessity.
I could spend my life just cycling without ever feeling saturated.
But why would he forbid me to write if it doesn't affect my performance?
Q. You will
also want readers to find the philosophy narrated as a sports battle entertaining ...
R.
The notion of pleasure is obviously paramount.
When I was studying at the university I met many times with people who sought to adopt a pose of wisdom with a speech that only initiates could understand.
That is not my definition of philosophy.
He always philosophizes about everything and everyone.
Thus, with that will, this book has come out, more a novel than a philosophical essay.