Athletics legend Perec ran to change perception of French West Indians
PARIS — France’s three-time Olympic champion Marie-Jose Perec says her motivation to succeed on the track is the ability to speak up for other French West Indians — but she needed to win “otherwise what you say goes unheard”.
The Guadeloupe-born track legend, now 55, said that she would have loved to perform in front of a home audience, saying: “It’s going to be crazy ... the young athletes do not know how lucky they are.”
Perec — who some believe might be invited to light the Olympic cauldron at the Paris Games, given her status in France — was driven by different forces when she arrived in France from the island in the West Indies.
She was determined to show the metropolitan French that their perception of West Indians was wrong.
“People said we lacked direction, that we were too laid back,” she said.
“I wanted to show them that it’s quite the reverse, that we know how to do things. I wanted to change how we were perceived.”
Perec said that, at the time, her fellow West Indians preferred to remain silent about their treatment in France.
“Back then, people did not talk about how they lived, how they were treated at work, or in shops,” she said.
“I wanted to be their voice, but to be that, I had to win because otherwise, what I said would go unheard.”
Perec certainly found her voice as she stormed to Olympic victory in the 400m in 1992 and 1996 — and she achieved what she says was her greatest triumph in the 200m in 1996 in Atlanta — an event that was not her specialty.
“I used the reputation of the Games as a tool for that goal,” she said. “I wanted to help these people by raising their heads.
“If I were to show you the messages I still receive today ... one part of the population says bravo; the West Indians and Africans thank me.”
Perec says this overwhelming desire to succeed came from her grandmother.
“When we were children, my grandmother would say: ‘ah do you see her? She is the first woman from Guadeloupe to pass her bar exams in France’,” she recalled, explaining that her grandmother was talking about Gerty Archimede, who became a lawyer in 1939.
“Granny also summoned us to listen to Muhammad Ali’s bouts on the radio.
“She said he was the savior. She was in love with big personalities.
“She sowed the seeds which gave me the hunger to become someone as well.”
‘Stronger than God’
However, there would be a bitter twist to her motivation to bring pride to the Black community.
Perec sensationally quit the 2000 Sydney Olympics before her muchanticipated 400m clash with Australia’s Cathy Freeman.
She says she fled because Australians wanted to make their own peace with their indigenous population through a Freeman victory — and Perec felt like she stood in the way of that.
“Australia wanted to reconnect with its indigenous population,” she said.
“It was the moment for the big apology, Cathy Freeman had been chosen to light the Olympic flame.
“I was the grain of sand which could not get into the machine and upset the storyline the Australians had dreamed of.”
Freeman went on to win gold in an iconic Olympic moment.
Perec, though, had been inspired at the Atlanta Games by the man whose bouts she had listened to on the radio — a clearly diminished Ali lit the Olympic cauldron.
“That still gives me goose bumps,” she recalls.
“I had been in the United States for a few months, I was beginning to speak English better and to understand the stories that (her coach) John Smith recounted about the Black Panthers, the student civil rights movement.
“We were training in Atlanta and went to visit the house of Martin Luther King.”
Perec says that, upon learning that Ali would be lighting the cauldron, she realized she could not let herself down.
“I told myself there are so many things I have to do, I must not mess them up,” she said.
“Because I was the flag bearer (for the French team), because I am Black, because we are in Atlanta. “I must make my mark on history. “The opening ceremony arrives. Muhammad Ali lights the cauldron.
“Thereupon I become stronger than God.
“Nothing could happen to me and the 400m became a formality.”