France's and Argentina's team react after France won in the men's quarter-final football match between France and Argentina during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at the Bordeaux Stadium in Bordeaux on August 2, 2024.PHILIPPE LOPEZ/Getty Images
After the end of their fractious men’s football quarter-final, the French team flooded the field for celebrations. This was champions-of-the-world-level gaiety, rather than we-just-made-a-semi-level happiness. We’re talking grown men leaping into each other’s arms and being carried around like 150-pound babies.
They did this not because French football values an Olympic medal so highly (it doesn’t), but because they’d just beaten Argentina.
The over-the-top conviviality triggered some bad feeling on the other side. It started with pushing and shoving. It continued with more pushing and shoving. Once separated, the two sides began pushing and shoving in the tunnel instead.
The headlines all say “brawl,” but there are no brawls in football. There’s pushing and shoving.
A lot of good things have happened to the French during this Olympics thus far. They’ve found a new national hero (butterfly specialist Leon Marchand). They’ve won at the niche sports they enjoy (fencing and judo). They’re among the top countries on the medal table.
But none of that is the best thing that’s happened to France at the Paris Olympics. Argentina is.
As a reformed colonial power, the French aren’t allowed the luxury of enemies. Which is not to say they don’t dislike some of their global neighbours, but that it’s not seen as good taste to talk about it. Too many colonies. They got greedy. Plus, they’re too distracted by internal political and societal divisions.
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It helps to have enemies in the Olympics. That’s what brings people together. It’s like Carl Reiner’s bit about the first national anthem in history: “Let ‘em all go to hell/Except Cave 76!”
In the best-case scenario, this is a benign sort of hatred. Canada has it better than just about anyone in this regard.
We hate the United States, and they are so oblivious to us that they don’t even realize it. Which is good because they’re a lot bigger.
More than one Canadian Olympics has been stitched together by the idea that in this or that event – usually something nobody follows or understands – we have crushed American dreams.
Would the double hockey gold at Vancouver 2010 be anywhere near as sweet if, in both instances, it wasn’t the Americans we beat? Absolutely not.
This is the best way of doing this – we hate you, but not really, and we would never say it to your face. It’s something we discuss among ourselves in private, as a country.
A year out from Paris 2024, France found itself enemyless. Russia, obviously. But it’s everybody’s antagonist. So who?
Hey, hey, mes amis – look at what these guys are doing over here.
France wasn’t feeling great about losing in the 2022 World Cup final to Argentina, but it wasn’t grudge material. They lost fair and square in one of the greatest games ever played.
Police officers separate France and Argentina fans at the end of a quarter final soccer match between France and Argentina, at Bordeaux Stadium, during the 2024 Summer Olympics, Friday, Aug. 2, 2024, in Bordeaux, France.Rebecca Blackwell/The Associated Press
But the Argentines couldn’t let it go. After a recent game, several members of the team, including one huge star, were live-streamed filming an offensive football song (they’re pretty much all offensive). The thrust of it had to do with the idea that the French team isn’t French, but comprised of African immigrants.
The players apologized – the star, Enzo Fernández, has eight French teammates on his pro side. Then the Argentine politicians got involved. They would not apologize. In fact, they wanted to insult the French a little more. They berated France, and said they weren’t interested in being lectured to by a “colonial power.”
This handed France a remarkable opportunity to create some national togetherness out of whole cloth, and they’ve taken it.
Everywhere Argentina has gone here – and in particular the football team – they’ve heard it from the French crowds.
It seemed fated that the two teams would meet at some point. Sadly, it wasn’t a final.
Ahead of Friday’s game, French striker Jean-Philippe Mateta, the son of a Congolese father and French mother, said of the insult: “All the French are touched by it.”
This is how you turn a sports rivalry into a moment capable of creating national chills.
You can’t let these rare opportunities slip. So when the whistle blew and they’d won, the French went out there to provoke a fight. Argentina did them the favour.
Rather than a brawl, what we saw was an act of international co-operation. The French got what they needed from the moment: a great front-page photo of French values and virility, triumphant. The Argentineans got what they needed too: a grudge they can nurse until the next time.
This conflict is rendered mostly inert by geography. The two countries aren’t close enough to do each other any real harm. Outside of major international competitions like the Olympics, it’s unlikely they’ll even play each other much.
It’s just settling into a useful Us versus Them situation that gives people something to focus on that isn’t how much they hate their neighbours the next town over – the sort of hate that does have repercussions.
The Olympics aspire to love, but they are born in hate. The purpose of the ancient Games was so that one city state could put a competitive heel on another. Those were Games in which the boxing sometimes entailed beating your opponent to death.
Hate at the modern Olympics gets a bad rap. It’s amazing how we’ve acclimatized ourselves to dishonourable acts like cheating – “Everybody does it” – but would be shocked and appalled if any athlete here said, “I really hate that Country X.”
A little hate, properly managed, can be a good thing. It’s been a very good thing here to France, the French and the whole idea of Frenchness.
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