CHANTILLY, France — It’s a beautiful day for football – real football, with touchdowns and quarterbacks and long, spiraling passes – and so the players lace up their cleats and lope onto the fresh-mowed grass.
In the crowd along the sideline – it consists entirely of one Mom and one baby – is a traveler who has come north an hour by railway from Paris to witness the newest Olympic sport of all, not included this year but destined for a global explosion of popularity in 2028 when the Games come to Los Angeles – especially since half the players on the gridiron will be women.
This is flag football in France in its final hours of pre-Olympic obscurity: no fans, no stadiums, no television, no million-Euro contracts; in fact, no contracts at all.
“We’ll give YOU money to come,” jibes Tom Perillat, the manager of the French national teams.
That will change when the National Football League, which lobbied for the addition of women’s and men’s flag football to the already bloated lineup for the Games of the XXXIV Olympiad along with cricket, baseball, softball, lacrosse sixes, and squash, starts spiraling some serious cash around.
The game is fast-paced, the field is only 50 yards long, the five players on each side are un-helmeted and recognizable, and there is no such thing as a disgusting tush-push or a boring three yards and a cloud of dust.
Except for the fact that there also is no blocking, no tackling, no linemen, no punting, no kickoffs, no extra points, no field goals and no sponsors, it could be the NFL.
“The thing that I love,” says star receiver Elisa de Santis, who is the (unpaid) Tyreek Hill of French flag, “is when the quarterback throws a pass and I go for it and the defensive back goes for it and I catch the ball. That is the greatest feeling of all.”
The setting for today’s practice session for France’s men’s and women’s teams in advance of the world championship in Finland later this month is an otherwise deserted municipal park in Chantilly, which is famous for lacemaking, horse racing, and a handsome 16th-century Château.
Chantilly also boasts the magnificent Hôtel Grand Condé, where Allied generals blueprinted the slaughter of millions of their own sons on the Somme while reposing bibulously at a location that was said to be “a respectable distance from the front and close to Paris.”
(To a reporter who has come many times to the hallowed landscape of the Great War’s carnage and sacrifice, the statues and cenotaphs of Chantilly hint at proximity to the worst killing ground that the world has ever known. From here, the roads branch north and northwest toward Albert and Arras, Douai and Vimy and Beaumont Hamel. Lest we forget.)
“When I was a girl, it was my dream to be in the Olympics,” says de Santis, the French national team captain, who will be 40 when they light the torch in Tinseltown. “But my sport was not in the Olympics. And now it is.”
During the regular season here, the French women and men exert themselves with local teams that include Perillat’s Paris Juggernautes, de Santis’s Molossian Bulldogs, the Alfortville Citizens, the Villebon Quarks, the Savigny Myrmidons, and les Homies of Rosny-sous-Bois in the Paris suburbs, which might just be the best team name in the world.
“A Homie,” the team’s web site explains, “is a way of calling a group of friends from the same neighbourhood in American slang. It perfectly describes the ambiance of our club.”
“What wins in this sport is speed and agility,” says Perillat, a New Orleans-born player for the Paris Juggernautes who also manages the men’s and women’s national teams. “The question on the men’s side is, in L.A., how many players on the U.S. team will be NFL players as opposed to real flag players?”
“Um, like, ALL of them?” I suggest. “If the NFL wants to sell this sport to the world with Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce, you are going to be playing against Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce.”
“Maybe France could use Victor Wembanyama at wide receiver,” I propose. Wembanyama is the seven-foot, four-inch, Paris-born skyscraper of the San Antonio Spurs.
“If he just stands at the goal line, they couldn’t defend him without a stepladder,” I predict.
“That’s not a bad idea,” Perillat um-hums.
“Calling all @NFL guys let’s bring one home,” the aforementioned Hill posted on X when flag’s Olympic inclusion was announced. So there seems to be little doubt that the Los Angeles Olympics will feature an NFL Dream Team (and perhaps a CFL fivesome) to go along with the NBA’s. If Major League Baseball can swallow a two-week hiatus in the middle of the season, you might see Shohei Ohtani, Elly De La Cruz, and Aaron Judge there, too.
Until then, the amateur ideal on which the ancient Olympic Games were revivified by the noblemen of Europe still burns in the flag footballers of France. Four years from now, they may be as wealthy as a Jared or a Jalen or a Justin, but for now, Adeline and Marina, Lucie and Clémentine, Elisa and Louisa can only hope that their GoFundMe appeals will bring in enough dough to fly them to Helsinki.
On a gridiron in Chantilly, it’s a beautiful day for football, and for Olympic dreams that are soon to come true.
“We’re gonna get killed,” Tom Perillat says. “But we get to play against Mahomes!”