At the moment, the far right and sport are a bit like a (bad) summer hit in the middle of winter. The random reading of your smartphone does the irreparable thing by launching the title. Your sharp reflexes allow you to cut the music in seconds. But the damage is done, you can’t get the melody out of your head. As if to illustrate this image, a few months ago, the far-right weekly Current Values dubbed Jean Dujardin and the captain of the XV of France Antoine Dupont, supposed to embody the values of “France rugby”.
The heady music of the far right continued to spit out a few notes, but on another terrain: Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), a sport mixing several combat techniques, where fighters face each other in cages. Not content with having been rejected by a rugby player and an actor, other activists tried to appropriate the success of one of the best French people in the discipline: Benoît Saint-Denis.
Nicknamed “God of War”, in reference to his past as a soldier in the special forces, BSD, aged 28, is a white athlete, devout Catholic. As recalled Release, the small identity group Argos, an ultra-right collective born from the ashes of Génération Identitaire, saw it as a godsend. Their activists wanted to appropriate the image of the fighter by launching a competition game on last November, on the eve of a French fight in New York. “We are fed up,” his wife Laura denounced in the left-wing daily.
“We don’t want to calculate that, and at the same time, we must not let it happen”
Nearly two months later, the anger has not subsided in the BSD clan. “When you become a public figure, there’s always recovery. We have zero contact with these people. We don’t want to calculate that, and at the same time, we must not let ourselves get carried away,” confides to 20 minutes Daniel Woirin, the coach of the French champion.
The outrage is also mixed with resignation. “The recovery attempt also happened to Matthieu Leto Duclos, another one of my fighters. He is not as well known, so it did not take on the same proportions, says the seasoned coach, who has worked in Brazil and the United States. We want to stay in our combat bubble, but it’s complicated to manage all that. »
Popularity of MMA in France, affirmation of a certain masculinity… The attempts of the far right in this sport can be explained for several reasons, explains Jérôme Beauchez, professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Strasbourg. “Physical confrontation and combat skill have always been, in these environments, a distinctive and necessary property to assert a certain form of masculinity,” says the researcher, author of The imprint of the fist: boxing, the gym and their men (EHESS editions). When you have fighting and dominant figures among those they identify as white, it can serve as a rallying totem. »
Especially since the two fighters from “Team Woirin” are not the only white French fighters to have suffered a phishing attempt. Last year, Paul Denis Navero, rising hope in the discipline, took part in several fights at the YFC, an amateur league, notably against French fighters of Chechen origin. Argos*, who finds that the young man “ embodies our civilizational and combative ideal », encourages him in a tweet, considering him “targeted by Muslim immigrants”.
With these attempts at political recovery, “we are completely moving away from sport”
Unwelcome support and a slew of racist comments under his fight videos
which pushed the 21-year-old athlete to an update on Instagram last August. “I’m here for the sport, I’m here to share my development with you, to give you my passion for MMA. I don’t care who’s in front of me, whether it’s a Renoi, a Rebeu, whatever their origin or religion, we’re here for the love of sport. I see on TikTok that there is starting to be hatred developing, I don’t want to be communitarian, I don’t want to be the ambassador of the far right. »
Today coach of the Snake Team, Cyrille Diabaté has several decades of experience in this sport, which was legalized in France barely four years ago. “Sadly accustomed” to the racism suffered rather than to political recovery, the former world champion takes a step back and sketches an analysis. “I have the impression that the extremes want to recover a symbol of the alpha male by targeting our practice. They want to play on the fantasy of bare-knuckle [combats à mains nues] and clandestine fighting. We are completely moving away from sport,” laments the former UFC fighter.
Beyond the wishes and violent acts of the “fighting” extreme right, notably documented by Streetpress, Diabaté affirms: “In the vast majority of MMA rooms in France, there is no politics, just training. We leave ideology in the locker room. »
The locker room, in fact, another “fighter” mentioned it. Winner of his compatriot Turpal Younousov on December 15, the Frenchman Axel Sola took advantage of the post-fight interview to clarify his situation, claiming to disapprove of “all racist comments” towards his opponent.
“For me, Turpal is a compatriot of Chechen origin. I would never have reached the level I have today if I had not been lucky enough to have these people as compatriots, assured the 26-year-old from Nice. I am very happy that we welcomed people from this community, that they are French. » A statement received with a round of applause. Enough to cover, for a few moments, the little music of the extreme right.
* The far-right collective responded to our contact on social networks, but not to our questions.