Petanque, a sport for all ages

“I’ll go back to studying, you can’t make a living from pétanque”. It’s practically impossible not to have come across this meme online, one of the most recurring of the last decade. If it makes you laugh, it’s because it plays perfectly on the absurd: a young boy appears who admits that making a living professionally from pétanque is very difficult. A game that, as everyone knows, is amateur and is only played by elderly people. Well, if we stick to reality, it shouldn’t amuse us in the slightest: not only are there tens of thousands of young people who play it all over the world, but there are also professionals who dedicate themselves to it, like the Aragonese Jesús Escacho, world champion and four-time European champion of the specialty.

Pétanque has been fighting against stigmatization and clichés for decades. It is undeniable that it is a game played by many elderly people, grandfathers and grandmothers, who meet in the park one morning to play for a while. But there is another radically different side from the more customary one, that of federated pétanque, with children and young people of all ages who play it and which counts on the presence of elite athletes totally dedicated to it. “In Catalonia alone, there are approximately 300 clubs that compete in leagues among themselves. Around 400 matches are played every Sunday and the best go to international competitions,” explains Jesús Perez Tortajada, president of the Catalan Pétanque Federation, an entity that has over 7,000 federated members. More than, for example, rugby, motorsport, table tennis or rowing.

French origin

But let's start at the beginning. Although the most distant origins can take us back to ancient Greek and Roman ball games, the official birth of this sport dates back to 1907 when Jules Lenoir, a gentleman from La Cité, in Provence, adapted an old local game to make it easier to play after suffering from rheumatism. Together with his friend, Ernest Pitiot, he modified the rules, creating one that was especially decisive for its definition: participants were obliged to throw the ball with their feet fixed to the ground. And from here would come the name, from the Provençal expression pieds tanqués, which we can translate as planted feet.

Three years later the new activity was a success, a prelude to an inevitable expansion throughout the world. “In Barcelona it arrived through the port,” explains Pérez Tortajada: “It was played by French visitors, who were its inventors, but here it mainly came to us through Moroccans and people from North Africa, from former French colonies. The first club set up in Catalonia was Barcelona, in 1956”. The boom of pétanque in the country began in the seventies and lasted until the nineties, especially due to tourism from the north and the installation of courts in many campsites on the Mediterranean coast. It was then that the cliché of it being a sport for the elderly began to be established.

Today it is estimated that there are tens of thousands of players in the country, but 80% of them are elderly and not federated. “It's normal that they like it a lot, because it creates a lot of community, you have a lot of capacity for improvement, and there's a certain competitive spirit. Whether it's a serious competition or not, in the end you want to win,” explains the president of the Catalan Pétanque Federation.

Young people and petanque

Does the very typical image of a group of old men and women playing in a park in the morning mean it's only for retirees? Absolutely not. “The reality is that there are two very distinct types of pétanque, the recreational and the federated, and in the latter there are quite a few young people,” says Jonathan Ferrari, president of the Club Petanca Sants, one of the leading clubs, which counts among its members a junior player who is a three-time Spanish champion, a European runner-up, and will play in a world championship this summer. “It doesn't appear on television, it doesn't appear in newspapers, but there are very physically strong people who train to be champions in very important events and dedicate many hours of their lives to it,” he explains.

The fact is that although pétanque is particularly popular in France, where it is one of the star sports, it is played in many countries: Canada, Mexico, Thailand, Denmark, Sweden, Japan, and Madagascar. Jonathan Ferrari has been playing it since he was 6 years old, due to family tradition and after many holidays in a campsite. “When I told my friends at school, they always smiled,” he recalls. “We who are involved in pétanque are aware that it has the stereotype of being a sport for the elderly. And it must be said that it is very healthy for older people and you walk up and down. But it's much more than that.” Yes, pétanque, especially the federated kind, is, among many other things, strategy, technique, tactics, precision, and moments of immense tension.

Although there are children's and junior competitions every weekend, it is still a challenge to get closer and closer to young people. “The federation's challenge must be to lower the average age,” says the president, Jesús Pérez Tortajada. For now, some dynamics need to change: “Clubs need to start having schools, just like football schools, and we need the media, especially television, to talk about it and for it to be seen more often,” clarifies Jonathan Ferrari.

The long-term goal is the same as for most minority sports: to become an Olympic sport. “If curling is, why not us?” they say. To achieve this, they will have to continue breaking clichés, because it is clear that pétanque, even if people say otherwise, is an ideal game for all ages.