Canterbury writer’s unconventional route into sports journalism in Paris

When Ian Borthwick arrives, drenched by an unfortunate burst of rain, the staff are dressing tables for the impending lunch rush. The setting, a bar near Châtelet in central Paris called Le Sous Bock, is
decorated floor-to-ceiling with photos of famous rugby players and iconic moments, as well as balls, books and other memorabilia.

As he takes off his oilskin, Borthwick asks the first waiter he sees if Fred is in. “Il me connaît [he knows who I am],” he says. Several minutes pass and a burly-looking man – perhaps a former front-rower – named Fred appears. Both men kiss each side of each other’s faces and exchange pleasantries before Borthwick asks Fred whether he has any spare croissants.

The previous evening, a Namibian player’s head had collided with French captain Antoine Dupont’s face in their Rugby World Cup pool match in Marseille. What we now know is a fractured cheek was at the time a mystery. “As soon as I saw it, I thought, that doesn’t look good,” Borthwick tells me. “He’s not the sort to milk it … maybe an eye socket, his jaw … maybe a cheekbone. Hard to say.”

The biggest news in rugby at that moment – the injury to the tournament host country’s star player – was personal for Borthwick. He had organised and attended a pre-tournament dinner at the Dupont pig farm in the tiny French village of Castelnau-Magnoac with former All Blacks Carlos Spencer and Matua Parkinson for their Sky TV show, Lost in France.

For my part, I came across Borthwick at my Paris-based job as a journalist for French television station France 24. My editor wanted someone to write about the All Blacks and France rugby rivalry before the World Cup opener. As the token New Zealander in the office, the job went to me. “You should get in touch with Ian Borthwick,” a colleague told me. “He’s the guy.”

Driving passion

Borthwick’s lifelong love for rugby probably was inevitable. He grew up in Canterbury and, like Graham Henry, Andrew Mehrtens and Daniel Carter, was talented enough to play for the Christchurch Boys’ High First XV. His interest in languages, however, was a matter of chance. It may have had something to do with a dictionary his uncle bought him that he would stay up at night to read. In any case, Borthwick eventually graduated from the University of Auckland with a master’s in French.

One thing you learn from talking to people who follow sports as closely as Borthwick does is that their breed is exceptional with dates – each memorable event is framed by a memorable fixture. The first time Borthwick stepped foot in France, for instance, coincided with the 1977 All Blacks tour. To secure a visa, he promptly landed a job as chauffeur for the New Zealand High Commission in Paris driving diplomats from A to B. Then, despite never having studied bookkeeping, he got a job as the consulate’s accountant.

“It sounds incredible these days but I just went to England and bought some accounting books, read up and they gave me the job,” Borthwick says. He continued this work, integrating himself into French society well into the early 1980s.

This was the only time rugby did not dominate Borthwick’s life. Being in France and seeing the way people spoke about New Zealand after the 1981 Springbok tour spurred Borthwick to turn his attention elsewhere. “Seen from the outside, it was a retrograde step for New Zealand as a multinational society to be continuing to collude with the apartheid regime,” he says, chewing on a pain au chocolat. “It gave New Zealand a very poor image.”

After growing bored with accounting, he returned to New Zealand in 1984 – again just as Les Bleus were getting ready to tour. A friend suggested he go for a position as the team’s interpreter, a job that involved living intimately with the French team as they travelled around the country. In one of the final acts of his premiership, Robert Muldoon invited the French rugby team to Parliament to welcome them to Aotearoa. It was Borthwick’s role to translate the speech in real time. “Not only did I find out that I was quite good at it, it was like falling into my element,” he says.

And, despite earning the same daily pittance as the non-professional players (“What we called beer and stamp money”) the job bore fruit.

“At the end of the tour, one of the French journos came up to me and said, ‘You’ve got the reflexes of a journalist. If you ever come back to France, give me a call.’ So I did. I went back to Paris.”

It’s hard to imagine now, but back then, getting information from New Zealand to France was no small feat. Borthwick’s solution lay in visiting the New Zealand, South African and Australian embassies in Paris and reading the newspapers they imported for expats. He would take notes on whatever was happening, write up some copy in French and sell it. “Sometimes the newspapers were six weeks old, but there was stuff in them that no one knew about,” Borthwick says.

He started out writing for Midi Olympique, a weekly French newspaper specialising in rugby that he calls the “bible”. After earning his stripes there, he spent the rest of the 80s and early 90s making a comfortable living freelancing for French household names like Libération and Le Monde, eventually landing a job as “Grand Reporter” for France’s premiere sports newspaper, L’Équipe, a position he held for 15 years. Somewhere along the way, he met his wife, Geneviève. They celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary this year.

In a career spanning 40 years, Borthwick has covered more than 500 test matches. No one has had a closer seat to the France-New Zealand rugby rivalry. He was in Nantes in 1986 when Buck Shelford almost lost a testicle; at Eden Park in 1987 when David Kirk lifted the Webb Ellis Cup for the first time; in Twickenham in 1999 when France ran in 33 unanswered points and sent us home.

He is disappointed that the two countries will not meet in the final after France’s quarter-final loss to South Africa. The notion that rugby’s centre of gravity is heading north was dealt a blow by New Zealand ousting world No 1 Ireland and France’s exit. “Not yet, at least,” Borthwick says. But, he adds, France’s Top 14 is the best domestic competition in the world and is attracting a lot of talent, so the long-term trends probably favour France. He also thinks the way the country treats the sport is different from how it used to be. The turning point came at the Stade de France in 2021, he says, when France convincingly beat New Zealand 40-25 with a flair characteristic of the way the All Blacks have dominated the game for the past 40 years. “There was a passion from the public that I had never felt at Stade de France. Starting from La Marseillaise, all throughout the match, the public response was electric.”

Golden times

Though he didn’t know it at the time, Borthwick inhabited the golden era of print journalism, when people bought newspapers fat with classified advertising and the revenue from those pages funded reporters to travel where the stories were.

Flying Fijian winger Rupeni Caucaunibuca made headlines in 2007 for going awol just as he was supposed to start pre-season training at his club, Agen. With no way of contacting him or anyone who knew him, the editors of L’Équipe sent Borthwick with a photographer to find him. After flying Paris-Bangkok, Bangkok-Auckland, Auckland-Suva and Suva-Savusavu at short notice and business-class, Borthwick arrived with a vague idea of where Caucaunibuca might be and started asking around. They eventually found him in what Borthwick calls a “collection of huts” in the middle of the bush. Turns out, Caucaunibuca’s wife was having a difficult pregnancy and he didn’t want to leave her. The journalist and the photographer stayed the night. A few days later, the front page of L’Équipe read: “THEY FOUND RUPENI”.

It is difficult for Borthwick to pick a genuine highlight among so many, but the 1995 World Cup final stands out. He was working for the French television station TF1, reporting pitchside when South Africa won 15-12 against the All Blacks only two years after being let back into international rugby. “Seeing Mandela coming out wearing Francois Pienaar’s Springbok jersey with all those big South Africans crying, that was fantastic.”

Unheard-of achievement

Ask anyone who has moved to a new country and they will likely tell you it’s the most challenging thing they’ve ever done. To do it in a country that doesn’t speak your native language, and get a job in a literary occupation is a serious achievement. What Borthwick has done is almost unheard of. In 1988, he won a prize for the best sports article of the year. His books, always about the All Blacks and always in French, have been well received. He won the French Sports Book of the Year in 2006 for France/ All Blacks, 100 ans de rencontres [100 years of encounters], which goes through all the major matches between the two sides.

Richard Escot, the leading rugby journalist at L’Équipe since 1985, took notice of Borthwick after he wrote a story about what was said in the changing room before New Zealand beat France in the 1987 World Cup final. No one in France had that kind of access – “It made him famous.”

Escot says he’s never heard of anybody from a non-francophone background having as much success in the French press as Borthwick. “He can write perfectly in French, much better than a lot of the natives,” Escot says. “The word I would use to describe him is ‘unique’.”

In 2012, Borthwick, one of the older and more expensive reporters, was pushed out of L’Équipe in a restructuring. For a while, he worked for Paris’s Racing 92 Rugby Club as their press attaché, during which he was handed the responsibility of teaching the foreign players French. Joe Rokocoko and Daniel Carter have both had Borthwick as a French teacher. Irish captain Johnny Sexton, apparently a standout student, still calls Borthwick “Prof”.

Rays of sunshine

When I met him, he was more relaxed than he would have liked to have been. In what would ordinarily be a hectic time, he is doing bits and bobs, commentating for French television and radio stations. “Well-paid freelance sports journalism doesn’t exist any more.” Information has gone from being so scarce that it cost a fortune to procure to so abundant that no one is willing to pay for it. The days of getting flown to Fiji are over, he says. “My craft, the craft of writing, is lost.”

In Le Sous Bock, as he’s showing me one of his books, there’s an old black-and-white photograph of a game between France and the All Blacks at Lancaster Park in Christ- church. The crowd is standing up and singing the national anthem. “1961,” he says. “I’m in there, somewhere. That’s my first ever All Blacks game,” he says, pointing to the bottom left corner of the photo. “As it happens, this is the Christchurch Boys’ High School brass band and it’s being led by my uncle. The one who bought me the dictionary.”

That game is where it all started. “There was something about it. The French had this blue and white and red. Compared to the All Blacks, which was this imposing black, they were like a ray of sunshine. I was 8 years old, but I was shouting for Les Bleus.”

The mythology surrounding the All Blacks, which may well be in crescendo, was perhaps always the most powerful in France. The French are still as fascinated by the haka as they were mesmerised by Jonah Lomu. It’s why there is a successful French clothing brand called Eden Park and why one of my French colleagues has a Māori tattoo on his forearm despite never having stepped foot in Aotearoa. It is also why Borthwick has been so successful selling his books.

But maybe he’s not just a beneficiary; maybe he’s also a progenitor. Somehow, it’s hard to imagine it all without a young Kiwi running around Paris, embassy to embassy, looking for scoops in six-week-old sports sections.