For decades, French players have sought to model themselves on the physique of that icon of Pétanque – the OBUT Man. OBUT Man’s torso is round, rather like a boule. According to myth, this shape gives players better balance when they point and shoot. It also provides a pleasing aesthetic alliteration: the boule, the round, the OBUT Man – me!
THE FRENCH INVENTED PÉTANQUE and they dominate the sport at the international level. The major French tournaments — the Mondial la Marseillaise à Pétanque, the Mondial de Millau, and the French National Championships — are far more difficult to win than is the International Federation’s World Championship, because the density of world class players in [...]
LE MONDIAL DE MILLAU takes place annually, in the mid-August heat of the Aveyron, in France. It is the single most important gathering of the world’s top Pétanque players. In the World Championships, there are no more than a dozen national teams that could consistently defeat the best 250 teams at Millau. Unlike the Marseillaise, [...]
The History
PÉTANQUE DESCENDS FROM one of the oldest games in human history, the archetype of which involves throwing or rolling an object as close as possible to a marker. Pétanque belongs to a family of ball games that developed in the Mediterranean, today called boules in French and bacci in Italian. In 1907 or 1910 [...]
I AM WRITING this letter from the Isle aux Nattes, a tiny island a few hundred meters across the lagoon from the Isle Sainte Marie, which is off the Eastern Coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. The two islands are surrounded by a coral reef against which the waves break with a constant roar. [...]