CAE PERFORMANCE - emil zatopek in comic strips

First, the students read the novel "Courir" by Jean Echenoz (2008), a contemporary French writer famous for writing biographical fiction or imaginary lives (musician Maurice Ravel, inventor Nikola Tesla). By comparing this novel with historical documents and sports articles, they understand that the author respects biographical reality but leaves room for imagination, retaining only a few salient episodes from the sportsman's career, certain traits and a few anecdotes. They also understand that the author's main concern is to show the taste and sense of effort of the man who was nicknamed "the Czech locomotive". The students are then divided into groups of 3 or 4 : they study one of the 20 chapters of the book more specifically and have to transpose it into the form of a comic strip. The instruction is to analyse how the sporting myth is constructed in 3 phases : the champion who won medals, the hero and the genius who showed creativity in his training, enabling him to master his sport but also to invent it. Each comic strip has to link the ordinary, the repetitive (training, races, victories or failures) and the extraordinary (extraordinary feats, etc.).

All the comic strips are assembled to create a collective comic strip entitled "Zatopek, from reality to myth", based on the novel by Echenoz.