Vive le Sport!

"Call up the editor," Charles de Gaulle instructed an aide, "and suggest that he ought to be very severe in tomorrow's editorial." Was De Gaulle demanding yet another Paris-Presse blast against U.S. foreign policy? Not that day. Having just watched the televised national rugby finals degenerate into a brawl, France's President yearned to convey his outrage to the country. He appealed to L'Equipe, the Paris-based sports daily--and got his editorial.

Mongolian Monitor. L'Equipe (meaning "team") is the world's finest sports newspaper. It devotes almost half its space to athletic events that take place outside France, offers coverage so comprehensive that it probably would not miss a pingpong championship between Inner and Outer Mongolia. The paper reports regularly on 15 major sports and faithfully follows 25 minor ones, including such little-played games as field hockey and volleyball. The only sports of any significance that L'Equipe does not cover are horse racing, which it opposes on moral grounds, plus British cricket, U.S. football and baseball, which are Greek to Gallic readers.

Above all, L'Equipe is thorough. To cover the World Cup soccer tournament, which ended last week in England (see SPORT), the paper sent over 13 reporters, three cartoonists and four photographers. When U.S. Miler Jim Ryun recently set a new world record in Berkeley, Calif., L'Equipe ran his picture on the front page under a banner headline; inside, the paper devoted the better part of a page to a description of his feat, and postrace interviews with Ryun and ex-Record Holders Michel Jazy and Roger Bannister. "I doubt," boasts L'Equipe's editor in chief, Gaston Meyer, "that any American daily covered Ryun's record any more thoroughly than we did."

Athletes & Eggheads. Meyer, 61, writes a serious front-page editorial several times a week on such subjects as chauvinism in sports and professionalism in the Olympics. He demands and gets unusually literate reportage from 60 Paris staffers, 300 provincial stringers and 100 part-time foreign correspondents. Among his staff are former athletic stars such as Marcel Hansenne, an assistant editor who finished third in the 800-meter run in the 1948 Olympics; and intellectuals such as Antoine Blondin, a novelist who won the Prix Interallie in 1959 and now writes a regular column of slangy, pun-filled and often sarcastic observations. Reporters must scrape along on salaries of $300 to $350 a month, and even top editors earn only $800 to $1,000; yet many of them quit higher-paying jobs on other papers to join L'Equipe. Why? "Because," explains Grand Prix Racing Reporter Johnny Rives, "I do the kind of reporting and writing I love to do. My articles get published pretty much as I write them, without being cut."

No Threat. After a sports-filled weekend, L'Equipe's 16-page Monday edition sells 600,000 copies, virtually all of them off the stands; the rest of the week the paper varies from ten to twelve pages, sells an average 300,000 copies. Though most French dailies charge 60, L'Equipe regularly charges 80, and last fall raised the price of its Monday edition to 100 because, says Meyer, "we were selling a can of caviar on Monday for the same price that we sold a can of sardines on other days."

Despite its higher price, L'Equipe fears no competition from expanded sports coverage in regional and national papers. "Most French newspapers are run by businessmen, not journalists," says Meyer. "They're no threat to anybody." Meyer is equally unafraid of television: "TV's sports coverage has led a great many Frenchmen who have never been to a stadium to become sports fans and buy L'Equipe regularly." Indeed, L'Equipe is one of the few French dailies with a steadily rising circulation. "Not fast enough," grumps Meyer. "It isn't quite keeping up with the national birth rate." Tant pis.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.