The Destiny of Ali Mimoun, a book in two parts. Part 1.

Race for Kenya, completed a dozen years ago, my backers agreed to fund a project on one of my athletics heroes, Emil Zatopek. Unfortunately, the company went bust shortly afterward, and Zatopek died in 2000.

Nevertheless, I decided to go ahead, and the first task was, inevitably, to interview the still vibrant Alain Mimoun, Zatopek’s great rival throughout their careers. So in late 2001, we went to film an interview at the house on the eastern edge of Paris where Mimoun still lives, at the time of this writing, with his wife of some 55-plus years, Germaine.

The Zatopek project never materialized, but I had the idea to write up the Mimoun interview, putting it into the sort of perspective that is rarely attempted in a piece about a sporting hero. But the story that Mimoun had told, or rather embroidered for me, called for something different.

I wrote the majority of the piece in 2002, and when Mimoun starred in the IAAF World Athletics Championships in the Stade de France in 2003, I added the prologue.

There is little place in the Anglophone publishing world for a monograph on a man little known or even remembered outside France and Algeria; similarly, a piece of close to 12,000 words was unlikely to have found a magazine home.

So I kept it and occasionally tinkered with it. And when I recently found myself at home in London for the lengthiest period (without traveling) in close to 30 years, I had time to think about publishing it myself.

At one point in my account, I mention that there is no major biographical work on Mimoun. However, when I was contacted in 2005 following publication of The Perfect Distance, my book on Seb Coe and Steve Ovett, by French documentary film maker Benjamin Rassat, we met later that year, and one of the subjects of our conversation was Mimoun. It turned out that Ben had had the idea of making a film on him, which he eventually did. It is called La Légende d’ Alain Mimoun and was broadcast widely on Francophone television in 2010.

[a short book has had a lengthy gestation. Following my documentary

During the television transmission of the men’s marathon at the World Athletics Championships in Paris in midsummer 2003, viewers saw an elderly but spritely man, dressed in gray flannels and a dark-blue blazer with a VIP accreditation flapping around his neck, running a lap of the track in Stade de France. When he finished, the crowd awaiting the arrival of the marathoners gave him a standing ovation, to which he responded fulsomely, going to trackside and signing autographs and kissing cheeks and children’s heads.

None of the foreign TV commentators I spoke to later had had a clue as to the old-timer’s identity; thus, their viewers would have remained in the dark. A few of the older, more perceptive viewers might have guessed who it was; even fewer might have recognized him since he hadn’t changed that much in the intervening five decades. In contrast, French viewers of all ages would have known him, the more so since he had spent the previous 30 minutes keeping the commentators of FR2/3 in stitches while regaling the téléspectateurs with versions of some of the following…

On October 17, 1961, the French security forces took summary revenge on Algerians living in Paris. It was the height of the War of Independence in Algeria, and the French Army was being harassed and bombed out of the country during one of the last colonial confrontations between Europe and Africa. The Front de la Libération Nationale in Algiers had made a call for a peaceful demonstration through Paris to protest the racist curfew imposed by the prefect of police, Maurice Papon. Thirty thousand people, many of them families, took to the streets.

But the police fired on the marchers, and 15,000 people were arrested. They were herded through streets, corralled on Metro platforms, and held in stadia and police cells around the capital. They were abused, beaten, and tortured. Some were executed and the bodies thrown into the Seine. Papon’s actions were defended by the president of the Fifth Republic, Charles de Gaulle. The 300 deaths are an estimate since only now, 50 years later, are questions being aired in France about the events of that night. In the interim, the incident had been as “forgotten” as the Chilean desaparecidos of the Pinochet era.

A few months after that massacre, de Gaulle, the wartime Resistance hero and legendary patriot, paid a visit to the Institut National du Sport in the Bois de Vincennes, on the eastern edge of Paris. Thrust into the front line to greet him was a man half his size and then almost as famous, a man who is still described as France’s greatest Olympian—the “Athlete of the Century.”

Alain Mimoun was Algerian born and bred; his original name was Ali. Confronted by “Big Charlie,” as de Gaulle was unceremoniously known to his few

critics, Mimoun drew himself up to his full height, just about up to Big Charlie’s jaw, and threw his best military salute. “Mon Général,” he intoned fiercely, “Alain Mimoun! Born in Algeria but forever French.”

Alain Mimoun is the most successful athlete in French history. He won an Olympic gold medal and three silvers and holds the record for the most national titles and for the highest number of selections for the national athletics squad. He was also awarded France’s highest honor, the Légion d’Honneur, for his bravery during the Second World War. Little surprise then that he should be voted the “French Athlete of the 20th Century” by Athlétisme magazine.

Yet even allowing for the restrictive nature of amateur athletics in the 1950s, how could Mimoun have returned from his crowning glory, winning the Olympic gold medal in the marathon at the Melbourne Olympics, and gone back to sharing two rooms without water or sanitation with his wife and newly born child in a rundown Paris suburb?

Perhaps it is the same reason that, in a career spanning 50 years and with numerous streets, parks, stadiums, squares, and sports centers around France named after him, there has never been a substantial biographical work produced on Mimoun.

The reason and its inevitable corollary were suggested recently (and separately) to me by a leading journalist on Libération, one of France’s most serious journals, and by an Algerian national athletics coach: “To the French, Mimoun is Algerian. To the Algerians, Mimoun is French.”

A great marathon runner is born

The colonial experience has profoundly marked the last 300 years of world history. Its 21 st-century aftermath, economic migration and political asylum, continues to create social problems in host nations. This is exacerbated in France by the unwillingness of successive governments to address the issues arising from colonialism.

Yet the vigor that immigration can bring to a country cannot be overlooked. Of the two other most famous French athletes of the last half-century, Michel Jazy is the son of an immigrant Polish miner and Marie-José Péréc is from Guadeloupe. Leading athletes from many other nations across the world have similar background stories. The will to belong often manifests itself in excellence, sporting or otherwise.

As long as he could remember, Alain Mimoun had wanted to be French. In fact, he wanted to be French even more than he wanted to beat Emil Zatopek, and he couldn’t say more than that. In any case, Emil was practically unbeatable. What’s more, Emil was his friend.

Mimoun had shed blood for France. That was the ultimate bond, the contract, the vouchsafe, better than any birthright. Ironically, it was in the beating of Emil Zatopek that Alain Mimoun would come closest to his life’s ambition.

A Zatopek (right) visits Mimoun in his Parisian home.

Ali Mimoun Ould Kacha was born of Berber stock in El Telagh in the Province of Oran, French Algeria on January 1, 1921. (I would venture that this is almost certainly not his true birthdate. Even nowadays, in rural communities in what we call third-world countries, January 1 is often given as a birth date for any child born in that year.)

Ali was a lively, intelligent child, and although his parents were poor peasants, he attended a local school, where he prospered both physically and academically. He recalls poring over maps of France and of his Corsican teachers instilling a love for La Mére Patrie in him, and, as he slyly admits, “I was in love with one of the woman teachers.” But as he grew up, he came to recognize that the legend above the school entrance, Liberté, egalité, fraternité, did not quite have the same resonance for him as it did for the children of the colons, the French immigrants—the armed forces, farming and business personnel.

Algeria had belonged to France since 1830, and the country had been widely colonized. France had a huge economic stake in Algeria, including the oil fields in the Sahara, and there were over a million colons and pieds-noirs (black feet)— Europeans born in Algeria—working and farming the land. According to what would become French colonial philosophy stretching even to those possessions like Polynesia, on the other side of the world, Algeria was an integral part of France.

What rankles most with Mimoun from that period of his young life is that when he was 10 years old, he was the only child not to get a grant for a secondary scholarship. “I was the only one rejected by the Academy, yet I had my school

© Gilbert lundt/TempSport/Corbis

certificate, with ‘good’ written across it. But all the colons’ sons got a grant, even the ones who’d only been there a year or so, from Italy, Spain, from anywhere.”

Seventy years later, this slight still enrages Mimoun as he recalls it, sitting forward with color rising in his face, in the quiet back garden of the white pavilion, which he and wife, Germaine, built east of Paris in Champigny-Sur-Marne in the late 1950s. But what the young Ali lacked in privilege, he made up in charm and determination.

He was a handsome youth, and that may have been an additional factor in his first employer, the owner of a hardware store and his wife, a childless couple, inviting him to dine with them most evenings. “I was just 15, but I was put in charge of boys two and three years older than me. The boss was a good sort, a Frenchman, from France. He came one day and said, ‘You’re not getting enough to eat for the amount of work you’re doing. Come and eat with us.’ I told him he’d have to ask my mother first. But she was happy. I ate at table with him and his wife. Not even the Spanish maid did that. I ate as if I was their own son.”

But the young Ali had already decided that his future was elsewhere. The maps and pictures of France had excited his imagination. Coupled with the desire to overcome the humiliation of rejection by the education board, the idea became what he calls his “destiny,” a word that figures large in all his conversation. “Even as a kid, I said that’s where I belong. Over there! I saw villages with tiled roofs and cows in the fields, and I told my mother I don’t belong here, this isn’t my country.

“Don’t get me wrong, I never rejected Algeria, it’s my birthplace, the land. But Gaul was my country, that’s what they taught us at school, ‘Gaul is our country; our ancestors are the Gaulois.’ That’s why I couldn’t wait for my 18th birthday, so I could join up. I told my employer the same as I told my mother. This isn’t my country. Yes, I was born here, but my country is the other side of the Mediterranean. He couldn’t understand that. But I could. I didn’t accept colonialism, I was ahead of the times. I didn’t want to spend my life with the colons.”

If the convert is more Catholic than the pope, so it was with many of the colonized. They would adopt the country of their colonizers and embrace the culture with the passion of an inflamed lover. Equally, many of them would reject it just as quickly. Frantz Fanon was a contemporary of Mimoun. Born in Martinique in 1925, Fanon was a pupil of Aimé César, one of the 20th century’s first champions of black awareness, a movement characterised as “Négritude.” Fanon, like Mimoun, volunteered for the French armed forces for the Second World War. He was captured and spent the final years of the war in jail in Germany.

Later, Fanon studied psychology in Lyon before writing the seminal “end-ofcolonialism” studies Les Damnés de la Terre, L’An V de la Révolution Algérienne, and Pour La Révolution Africaine. Fanon enraged the French middle classes when, as head of psychiatry at the hospital in Blida-Joinville, in Algeria, he embraced the revolution and joined the Front de la Libération Nationale (FLN). He was

expelled from Algeria by the French but set up shop in neighboring Tunisia, where he edited the FLN newspaper, E/ Moudjahid. He was appointed ambassador to Ghana by the provisional FLN government but died of leukemia, aged 36, in 1961, the year of Papon’s Parisian massacres.

As a young intellectual in Martinique, Fanon had described himself as “more French than the French.” But writing in Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), he recalled stepping onto French soil and discovering, with a sudden and irreversible shock, that he was, in French eyes, nothing more than a “black man,” a “nigger.”

Fanon saw clearly that the colonial relationship is not a dialectical one; it is not a two-way street. It is not a relationship at all but a one-way projection. For Fanon, the black man (or the Arab, who is equally “other’’) has no independent existence. Though Mimoun is a bright, intelligent man who still has all his faculties at 80-plus years of age, he is no intellectual. Yet he understood Fanon’s conclusion intrinsically with his own refusal to accept colonialism. But whereas Fanon rejected all aspects of colonialism, beginning with the language of the oppressor and ending with a demand for the violent overthrow of the colonizers, Mimoun would travel to the end of the road of “more French than the French.” His love affair with La Mére Patrie would last a lifetime and provide the motor for his ambition—not only to be accepted but to colonize the colonizers.