The period of the Occupation and of government by the Etat français, based in the town of Vichy, from 1940 to 1944 still provokes strong emotions among French people. The political and social divisions between French citizens that were exposed so cruelly by the choices they were confronted with after the rapid defeat of France in 1939–40 often reflected ideological stances that had developed during the politically charged 1930s, and once France had been liberated, politics and society negotiated a difficult pathway through what the cultural historian Henry Rousso has described as a ‘Vichy syndrome’ (Rousso, 1987). Occupied by an invading army, torn between resistance and collaboration of all kinds, divided into two geographical regions by a demarcation line, France was indeed during these Vichy years in torment, and ‘torment’ is the word chosen by the historians of sport and public policy Marianne Amar and Jean-Louis Lescot to describe the situation of sport under the Occupation and at the Liberation (Amar and Lescot, 2007). During the war years there was significant disruption to the normal workings of the system of sporting activity in France, caused either simply by the absence of able-bodied men (serving in the Free French forces, or in POW camps, or undertaking compulsory labour service in Germany) or by difficulties of logistics (transport, fuel, electricity or other requirements for hosting sporting events), but the German and Vichy authorities were at pains to encourage sport as a means of suggesting a certain ‘normality’ in everyday life (Arnaud, 2002).