Non, rien de rien.
The turf, he knows. The corridors and the dressing rooms, he knows. The way the noise rolls around the stands, the winding route the coach takes into the guts of the stadium, this he knows. But the open spaces, the daunting feeling of freedom, of flying into the teeth of a gale, this part is new. It is a journey Antoine Dupont has barely begun, and yet here, it ends.
We saw him here nine months ago, nursing a black eye and a thousand regrets, a pain in his body that would subside and a pain in his soul that would not. He left Paris and took the first plane to Bali: a holiday to recharge the batteries and, more important, a place where nobody was showing the World Cup final. He didn’t want to see somebody else lifting the trophy he craved. So he mooched, and browned, and returned with a plan.
Avec mes souvenirs, j’ai allumé le feu.
But even for the greatest rugby player alive, redemption comes with its own quantum of danger. Missing the Six Nations, abandoning the team he calls home and the colleagues he adores and the game he has mastered, for a step into a windswept unknown. The glory – a gold medal in a home Olympics – is the greatest an athlete can know. But the risk is that you get your heart broken all over again.
Balayé pour toujours, je repars à zéro.
The vision is the easy part. Learning a new discipline in six months and applying it to a team that did not qualify for Tokyo: this is rugby on its hardest setting. There are new tactics and techniques to master. The rucks are different. The kick-offs are different. The physical demands – the imperative to sprint and keep sprinting, over and over – are different. No pauses for breath, no hiding places.
But this part always suited Dupont fine, a player who even in this collective endeavour has always been possessed by a fiercely protagonist spirit, a need to be decisive, “a player who comes to expose himself”, as his coach, Jérôme Daret, puts it.
The greatest athletes soon learn that their talent is an oath as much as a gift. That they have a duty to it, to themselves and to others, to keep taking himself to new places.
Non, rien de rien.
And so, on a reassuringly damp Paris evening, here he is, ready to suffer again. South Africa, his World Cup nemeses, have been vanquished in the semi-final. Fiji, meanwhile, are the sword in the stone, 17 wins from 17 games at the Olympics, a team who play rugby like it’s basketball, a game of magical offloads and whirling combinations unleashed at blur speed.
The score is 7-7 when Dupont arrives at the start of the second half. And then it happens.
Fiji kick off. Dupont collects the ball. Already the cogs are whirring, making sense of the black and white shapes dancing in his eyeline. In this position, most players simply hand the ball off, get settled, get into the game. But those players don’t win an Olympic gold on six months of practice. And so Dupont goes. He just goes. Possessed by speed, blessed by stillness, threading a perfect straight path up the left touchline. Aaron Grandidier Nkanang scores the try. But it is Dupont who has lit the flame.
Sunlight has broken over Saint‑Denis and for seven minutes Dupont is its Sun King. A great Fiji side is simply laid waste, flattened, outshone. He takes a quick tap penalty, squirms past two tacklers and forces himself over the line. In the dying seconds, with grown men already weeping in the stands, he offers the final flourish: a barrelling mini-maul, a second try, a roar of purgation.
Dupont did not need redeeming. He already had the love of a nation, the admiration of an entire sport, the Top 14 titles and the endorsement deals. But what he created here will last long after the pink and purple livery has been taken down. A new era for a new sport, a home hero for a home Olympics, a moment, a miracle.
Was it worth it, worth the sorrows and the heartaches? As he stood on the podium, La Marseillaise in his ears, a gold medal around his neck, Dupont looked for all the world like a man who regretted nothing.
