In Sporting Endeavors

 

(in which we wonder whether Philippides would have used public transport after the Battle of Marathon if given the opportunity)

Like anthropology and journalism, sport provides fertile ground for those wishing to describe places they haven’t been to. If numerous sports take place in enclosed arenas and therefore aren’t directly concerned, a substantial number of risky practices like mountaineering, sailing or motor races, aeronautical escapades or hunting in faraway countries1 necessarily lead their devotees to ask themselves whether it is worth throwing themselves into a dangerous, exhausting venture if they can instead limit their efforts to the essential and concentrate on the story.

It is well within their interests to develop skills that will allow them to speak with accuracy about a sporting performance they have refrained from making and produce a convincing line about it that includes plenty of descriptions of the places they have been to, in order to remove all doubts from those suspecting that they may have taken a shortcut or stayed at home.

In 1980, a woman by the name of Rosie Ruiz, a young American of Cuban origin, twenty-six years old, entered the annals of athletic history for two different reasons. The first one, purely sports related, was that she won the women’s division in an important athletic challenge, the Boston Marathon, also setting the third-fastest time for a woman in any marathon.2

This event is one of the oldest distance races and one of the most famous in the world. It usually takes place on the third Monday in April. It has the characteristic of not being open to all candidates but only to preselected runners who have achieved a minimum qualifying time in another official marathon, ensuring an exceptional sporting standard.

It is still easy today to peruse the images that have survived of this historical course and the triumphant arrival of Rosie Ruiz. We discover a young woman in a yellow shirt, wearing the number W50, running the last few meters of the race with a stumbling stride before collapsing into the arms of spectators who help her, half-fainting, across the line. After this, two policemen take over and support her under her arms to prevent her from collapsing entirely.

Next we see her answering a journalist’s questions. Carrying the laurel wreath that right until 1986 was the only reward given to winners of this race and holding a silver cup, Rosie Ruiz, clearly in a state of euphoria, struggles to catch her breath and only briefly responds to the questions. Asked whether anyone helped her, she replied that she trained alone and was her own coach.

Rosie Ruiz’s sporting performance was remarkable in any case because she ran the marathon in two hours, thirty-one minutes and fifty-six seconds, which was the best female time ever recorded at the Boston event and the third best time ever run by a woman in an official marathon. This fact alone made her an instant celebrity, something she was to remain.

However, it wasn’t Rosie Ruiz’s exceptional time that brought her so much fame. She mainly went down in history for having lost her title again so quickly, after being accused of not actually having run the full course.

One of the things that attracted the organizers’ attention was the exceptional time Rosie Ruiz made compared to her previous performance at the New York City Marathon. An even more revelatory indication in their eyes was the fact that the young woman recovered so rapidly after having crossed the finish line and could give no other explanation for her stunning physical condition than that she’d got up that morning brimming with energy.

Worse still, the officials sitting at various points around the race could not remember seeing the young woman pass by and wondered what mysterious, unknown path she had taken to be able to cover the distance between the start and the finish in record time.

The scandal reached greater proportions when the officials, looking into the New York Marathon—which had enabled Ruiz to qualify for the Boston event—became convinced, with witnesses to support it, that the young woman had covered part of the course by metro.

Accused of having cheated, Rosie Ruiz was disqualified from the Boston Marathon and the runner up, Jacqueline Gareau, was awarded the title. But Ruiz never admitted the fraud and continued to calmly affirm, despite all the evidence, that she had completed the legendary marathon in first place.

I personally have difficulty understanding the reasons that lead the organizers to strip Rosie Ruiz of her title. As someone who is rather insensitive to sporting disciplines and remains perplexed by the idea of anyone spending part of their life trying to run a certain distance in a minimum amount of time, it isn’t easy to understand the reproaches made to this young woman.

In terms of history, in any case, she doesn’t seem to have lacked respect for the spirit of the marathon, which consisted of finding the best way of getting from one place to another in a limited amount of time. When Philippides ran from Marathon to Athens to tell the Areopagus that the Persian army had been defeated, he chose the only method that was available to him, but it is obvious that he would have chosen a faster way if he’d had the opportunity.

In terms of sporting logic, aside from the fact that I doubt that using public transport is expressly forbidden in the marathon’s rules, it would be naive to suppose that Rosie Ruiz was an isolated case. Other similar cases have been identified—suggesting that the number of frauds is actually quite high.3 One only needs to leaf through the abundance of literature dedicated to exploits in inaccessible places with something of a critical mind to guess that some of these texts, like those of Marco Polo and Chateaubriand, were written at a fireside, and that the writers should be judged for their literary performance, not their sporting prowess.

The strangest thing about this story is that Rosie Ruiz was primarily reproached for her lack of imagination. The organizers considered it to her detriment that she was incapable of accurately describing certain parts of the route, in particular a girls’ college that all the competitors should have passed—Wellesley College—whose students traditionally cheer with rapturous enthusiasm.

It is somewhat paradoxical that part of the charge against her was Rosie Ruiz’s inability to describe the route, as if to criticize her refusal to resort to the particular kind of fiction—artistically fertile but unacceptable in sports—that is literary truth. The argument can easily be turned around because it would be just as easy to think that, if she’d really wanted to cheat, Rosie Ruiz would have gone to the trouble of gathering information on the route.

As for myself, I would have no trouble, if asked, recounting the time I took part in the Boston Marathon some years ago.

For example, I have clear memories of the start of the race in the small town of Hopkinton, the gentle descent toward Ashland and going past the clock tower, then the train depot at Framingham, before skirting Lake Cochituate on our left and hearing, around the twenty-kilometer mark, the screams of the Wellesley students in the distance, carried by the wind.

How would it be possible to forget those groups of enthusiastic female students, frantically brandishing placards bearing inscriptions as encouraging as “I love you!” or “Marry me!” in front of the magnificent campus lost amid squirrel-filled trees. I can even give you a detailed description of the young blond woman wearing a blue suit and a red scarf who took it upon herself to run alongside me for several meters, spraying my face with a bottle of water.

And I can still remember, after we’d passed the park with the kangaroos, the hills before Newton, in particular the most difficult to climb, Heartbreak Hill, which precedes the prestigious Boston College, whose gothic tower spiked with four spires irresistibly reminds all Parisian competitors of the slender silhouette of the Saint-Jacques Tower.

Finally, I remember the route’s gentle decline toward Boston after that last climb that heralds the Charles River, and how, although exhausted, my companions and I were transported by an increasing mass of spectators who were more and more enthusiastic the closer we got to the finish line, where we were taken into the care of an army of volunteers who carried us off to rest and regain our strength.

Despite appearances, Rosie Ruiz’s fraud, if ever proven; the fantastical filter Marco Polo used to describe China to his beloved; and Margaret Mead reinventing the Samoan Islands with her playful young friends have more than one thing in common.

The first thing they have in common is the fact that we are talking about what I earlier called an imaginary realm, even if in one example a city is concerned. Undoubtedly we find ourselves faced with a different scenario than that of China or the Samoan Islands since a proliferation of concrete details is set against an abstract representation of loci here, reduced to a cord stretched across a finish line. But what the experiences do have in common is the rewriting of space, or, if one prefers, its reconfiguration, allowing the subjects to find themselves in a new place, more fulfilling in terms of fantasy.

The imaginary realm invented by Rosie Ruiz, where, like Peter Pan, she is capable of overcoming the laws of nature and achieving improbable sporting exploits, is modeled on that of childhood, whose privileges she rediscovers for a while. It is a realm where everything is possible: there are no barriers, no limits; dreams can rapidly become reality. It is a place where it is conceivable, for example, to transport oneself, without difficulty and seemingly without time, from one place to another in a city that has become a purely psychological space.

It is this experience of infantile omnipotence that Rosie Ruiz acts out in an imaginary place, completely constructed around the instant she triumphantly crosses the finish line to a cheering public, experiencing a jubilation that presumably resonates with the most distant of her experiences. There is neither distance nor time between desire and its realization in this fantasy space with its dreamlike construction where the pleasure principle overrides the reality principle.

In both cases, this rewriting has an identical goal: to highlight the subject in a state of absolute pleasure. The amorous scenes with Chinese women dreamed up by Marco Polo and the multiple sexual encounters Margaret Mead imagines taking place over the entire Samoan Islands, transformed into a kind of primitive “general scene,” are condensed in this moment of unique self-celebration, its intensity multiplied by the prism of the media, in absolute narcissistic happiness.

So the example set by Rosie Ruiz shows how talk of imaginary realms cannot be understood without introducing a third notion corresponding to the unconscious life of the subject, that of the inner landscape.

Freud used this expression for a while to describe what was repressed in the mind, though finally it wasn’t retained by psychoanalytic theory. “Repression,” he wrote in his Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse (1933), “is for me an inner foreign country (inneres Ausland), just as reality, if you will allow me to use an unusual expression, is an outer foreign country (äusseres Ausland).”4Thus he evoked the image of an inner country or landscape and other related images like those of regions and provinces5 in his search for tropes that would allow him to describe unconscious reality and the words best suited to showing it and thinking about it. It is an image that is a continuation of the propositions he often used to represent the interior of the psyche as a spatial form.

If the notion of an inner landscape is fitting, it is because it expresses how the interior of the psyche is certainly of a topological order, as Freud imagined and as Lacan further intuited with his idea of topology. It can also be thought of in geographical terms, with its landscapes, its elevations, its pits and even its inhabitants, which could include those parts of ourselves that seem to lead their own lives and, at times, be ready to seize autonomy at our expense.6And it is to this fantasy image of an inner landscape that we refer to more or less consciously when we represent the insides of our minds like a region, a country or a city, open or fortified but separated from the others by frontiers that are more or less easy to cross and that assure our protection from the external world, even if we sometimes let down our barriers to certain privileged people.

The inner landscape, which might be another name for the unconscious, has both a collective and an unconscious dimension and is not isolated from the real world. On the contrary, it is behind the transformations to which we subject our representations of reality. And it is when the subject does not find peace there that he undertakes to substitute an imaginary world for the real one, whose geography is influenced by that of the inner landscape, becoming a place where he invents a realm that suits his needs.

If it isn’t possible to know Rosie Ruiz’s inner landscape with any accuracy—that is to say, her unconscious life with its spaces and its inhabitants—we can still try to gain an idea from the traces left in her transformation of the real landscape of Boston into an imaginary realm, reduced in its totalitarian fiction to a space contracted around herself and her virtual exploit.

It is an inner realm that she would have complete mastery of and where she would also have control over space and time, as each of us secretly dreams. It is a place where she would rule without sharing, adored by subjects overwhelmed by admiration, retransmitting to her in a kind of infinite refraction that glorious image that certain self-obsessed rulers have others build for them in the form of statues in all the public spaces in their countries so as to have the pleasure, when walking, of being reflected back at themselves continually.

As we can see, the reproach made to Rosie Ruiz of being incapable of accurately describing the route of the Boston Marathon can be understood in two different ways. First of all, it can be understood in the traditional way as a reproach for having tried to appropriate a title for herself that she had no right to.

But, according to a different kind of logic, it can also be understood as a reproach for not having been enough of a writer and not managing, by attaining that particular kind of truth that literature aims at, to reconfigure space in a sufficiently convincing manner for her readers and listeners to be able to accept it as their own and attempt to inhabit it in their minds.

1.    See the example the eponymous Tartarin de Tarascon sets in Alphonse Daudet’s novel.

2.    VP+

3.    One celebrated case is that of the 1906 Tour de France, in which four cyclists were disqualified for taking the train from Nancy to Dijon.

4.    Sigmund Freud, Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse [New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis] (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenburg Verlag, 1981), 50. Unfortunately, the recent Presses Universitaires de France translation has used the expressions “territoire extérieur interne” and “territoire extérieur externe.”

5.    “Superego, ego and id, these are the three empires, regions (Gebiete), provinces (Provinzen), between which we share the psychic apparatus of the individual, and now we are going to focus on their interrelationships.” Ibid., 62.

6.    Later in the text of Neue Folge, Freud constructs a complete allegory around the inner country and its different regions: “I imagine therefore a country whose terrain presents a varied configuration: there are hills, plains and lakes. The population is composed of Germans, Magyars and Slovaks performing various activities. Let us suppose the Germans, cattle-breeders, live on the hills, the Magyars, farmers and winegrowers, live on the plains, and the Slovaks, fishers and weavers, on the edge of the lakes. If this distribution was tidy and absolute, a Wilson would be delighted; geography would be easy to teach. But it is likely that when visiting the region, you would find less order and more confusion. Germans, Magyars and Slovaks sometimes live all mixed up, it is possible to have arable land on the hills and cattle on the plains.” Ibid., 63.

How to Talk About Places You've Never Been 

Pierre Bayard