PARIS — The French invented the modern Olympic Games and the French invented the word “mascot” so how come, people have been asking here, the mascot of France’s first Summer Olympics in a hundred years looks so much like a certain erogenous zone of the female anatomy?
“We thought about that from the start,” says the man who led the design team for the mascots – and the whole pinkish-and-purplish Art Deco template of these Games — and who ran the prototype past his six-year-old daughter in Paris, but not his 102-year-old grandmother in Toronto.
“If it helps some men to learn where the clitoris is,” Joachim Roncin said, “then that’s a good thing.”
The mascot isn’t a clitoris, of course; it just plays one on TV, at least in some peoples’ imaginations. To others, it is a bird with a floppy coxcomb and arms coming out of its stomach. Or it’s just a triangular blob.
But the truth is that les Phryges, as the sexless, smiling, ubiquitous, ridiculous things are called, are neither animal nor vegetable – they are, in fact, a hat – a bug-eyed version of the so-called Phrygian caps that were worn as a symbol of liberté during the French Revolution, 58 Olympiads ago. They may never stop smiling but to their creator, they are as serious as a guillotine.
“It’s not a matter of how it LOOKS,” insists Roncin, whose Ukrainian maternal grandparents came to Canada after the Second World War. “it’s a matter of what it SAYS. The purpose beats the design.
“If you have a story with a deep meaning behind it and someone says, ‘Well I don’t like the shape,’ or ‘Well, it looks like a clitoris,’ that’s fine, but the meaning is unbeatable. It is about freedom. It is about making a revolution through sport.”
“We made a call for tenders and we had several options,” Roncin explains. “We looked at everything that has been done before. We didn’t want to have human figures, small boys and small girls. We thought of the gargoyles of Notre-Dame, but Disney had already done that with Quasimodo and we knew we would suffer by comparison.
“The Phrygian hat was exactly what we wanted to say, but I had never worked with plush toys before in three dimensions and the first people who we showed it to said it looked like a samosa.
“My little girl was six at the time. She absolutely loved it, but I don’t know if she was being objective or it was just because it was Daddy.”
“What if she had hated it?” I asked the designer.
“Then I would have told her that the train had already left the station.”
For mascots of any kind – be they Hidy and Howdy from Calgary 1988 or Vancouver 2010’s Miga, Quatchi, Sumi and Mukmuk – France is the ancestral cradle. It was in 1880 that an opéra bouffe called La Mascotte premiered in Paris, introducing to the French language – and soon, in wildly popular productions in London and New York, into English – a Provençal slang term for a sort of congenitally lucky mademoiselle.
In the opera, a comely young turkey herder named Bettina is a natural-born mascotte, able to bring luck in gambling, investing, or hunting to any man who “possesses” her – as long as she remains a virgin. A prince and a commoner pursue her, warbling tender arias such as “I love you more than my turkeys . . . I love you more than my sheep.”
(An excellent book on the 19th-century French origins and the often-tragic annals of human mascots in professional baseball and boxing is entitled The Short Life of Hughie McLoon. The book chronicles the rise to fame and gangland murder of a hunchbacked batboy for the Philadelphia A’s. It truly is a fascinating story. Also, I wrote it.)
Back to Paris 2024 and the crimson little Phryges.
For Joachim Roncin, the Olympic commission came a few years after an instant of piercing clarity at a tragic hour made him a famous man. He was in a staff meeting at Stylist magazine at 11:30 in the morning of January 7, 2015, when Islamic terrorists murdered twelve people at the offices of the satirical journal Charlie Hebdo.
Ten minutes later, Roncin posted a three-word tweet that reverberated around an anguished world: Je suis Charlie.
“I was getting huge anxiety because it was potentially dangerous,” Roncin told an interviewer that spring. “If there was a focus on me and my face was everywhere, I could be the next target. But mostly it just felt strange because something horrible had happened, and I was experiencing this increasing momentum of fame.
“The subtitle of ‘Je suis Charlie’ is that Voltaire quote: ‘I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ We have the right to blaspheme in France. I have the right to say the president is a dick. I have the right to call the pope an asshole. This is a free country and if at some point you say something cannot be said there’s no democracy any more.”
So there was a back story to the man who was selected to design those silly smiling Revolutionary hats, waving to the crowds at Roland Garros with their floppy little T Rex arms and soon, when the Paralympics begin, serving as avatars of acceptance with one prosthetic leg.
“And after that,” Joachim Roncin says, “all I really want to do is walk in the forest.”