Narration for a film by Hubert Aquin, but it is too short to give Barthes the room he needs: the text would fit on perhaps ten ordinary pages (here it is padded out with stock photography and white space), and covers bull fighting, motor racing, cycling and ice hockey, which is too much, so the writing rarely gets much beyond the sort of poetical bullshit the BBC gives you before the Rugby World Cup begins. There are occasional suggestive moments ("sport is the entire trajectory separating a combat from a riot"), but it's pretty thin stuff at the side of "The Tour de France as Epic" (in The Eiffel Tower and other Mythologies). ( )