⛳🏀📺0️⃣3️⃣4️⃣Sébastien Audoux
Meet Sébastien Audoux, a veteran broadcast journalist who with Canal + helped translate via golf and basketball.
Born and raised in the Yvelines, 40 miles from Paris, during the 1970s and 1980s, Audoux always wanted to be a reporter. He realized early-on that while he was sporty, he was not good enough to be a professional athlete. “The next-best thing was to cover professional athletes,” he recalled of what drove his journalistic passion. Audoux attended journalism school and cut his teeth providing broadcast commentary on extreme sports shows and other international sporting events for French audiences.
Sébastien’s Story
At heart, Audoux was a basketball fan, and his first work was on the basketball side for AB Sports and EuroSport.
“I have a passion for American sports. I watched so many hours of the NBA, so I knew quite a lot [about American basketball culture] and I felt that it was such a good way to get closer to the way that Americans saw French basketball.”
But Audoux’s big break was in golf, ultimately the sport he most significantly shaped for French audiences through his broadcast coverage. It was a break purely thanks to happenstance. “They wanted people whose English was good enough to do translation of the English-language script. Not being as bad as most French in English was one of the best things for my career,” he joked. That’s how Audoux began covering the PGA tour and other golfing events, including a long tenure with Canal + where, as Editor-in-Chief of Golf+, he guided its growth.
The Sports Diplomacy Connection
Covering golf provided Audoux with a unique window into learning about and experiencing the United States, its culture, and its sports.
His first visit to the United States was for work, to cover the Masters in 2006, a very different introduction to the country than many other tourists. “I went to Augusta, which is not like going to New York or Los Angeles; it’s quite different. But I knew so much about the tournament. I knew so much about Georgia, I knew so much about American culture.” Thanks to the time he spent covering the game, he did not experience moments of cultural surprise.
It also helped that covering golf was vastly different than basketball:
“Doing a basketball game, you’re going to go to the arena: it’s a three hour event and then you go back home or go to your hotel room. Golf is like an entire week of very long days. You have to make friends with people, talk to people, spend a lot of time with very different people coming from all over the United States…It’s much more intimate”
Audoux broadcasting for Golf+. Photo: Sébastien Audoux.
Those long days covering golf with U.S. counterparts were custom-made for Audoux to develop lasting friendships with Americans from a variety of backgrounds and political leanings. Journalists from Texas, South Carolina, New Jersey, California, media members who represented the diversity of American culture who he would otherwise probably not encounter.
“You meet them at five o'clock in the morning, you're still there at eight o'clock at night. It's a different experience. You have to talk more, become closer to them.”
Golf enabled him to to visit different parts of the United States, too, including Minnesota, Wisconsin, and South Carolina. “I went to all those places that I would never, ever see if not for golf,” he said.
Audoux also communicated, represented, and negotiated about France and the French to the Americans he met. Among the questions he was asked was, why the French hate Americans. “That was very surprising to me because I felt like it's quite the opposite,” he laughed. “Most people love American culture, even though we have a strong culture in France.”
Other questions he routinely fielded from U.S. golf media pertained to basketball, a frequent sport of discussion. He was asked whether there was a French league, what the game back home looked like, and more. Audoux always amazed colleagues with his knowledge of U.S. professional and college basketball. “That was helpful in getting closer to people,” he said of how basketball served to facilitate relationships.
He also engaged in discussions and exchanges about politics, particularly presidential politics as both sides sought to better understand events, what Americans thought of France, and what French thought of the United States.
“If you have those conversations during a basketball game, it's going to last five minutes. In golf, sometimes we have to wait for hours or there's weather delays and you don't have to do anything but wait. Sometimes it's three, four hours and then you talk. I made friends with a lot of people with golf and I'm so glad for that.”
Audoux pointed to sports’ ability to serve as a universal passion, and a prism through which to have more in-depth discussions, to learn about each other at a deeper level:
“I think those [political] conversations without sports being the first step would've been hard, but suddenly everything was easy. After an hour of discussion around basketball, suddenly it was perfectly normal. Because you get closer to people, like family, you can get deeper in the conversation. In a way those types of conversations can have an impact. If you multiply that by a hundred French going to the United States for the NBA finals, covering the Super Bowl, the Americans coming to France for the Olympics and so on. Suddenly that's a lot of people getting to know each other better.”
Follow Sébastien on Twitter (@SébastienAudoux) and LinkedIn.
Mapping the Connection
From Paris, France to Augusta, Georgia
Further Reading/Resources
[E] Interview with the author, June XX, 2023
[F] “Swing: USPGA: un Majeur historique,” L’Équipe, May 15, 2023
[F] “Swing: Woods vers la fin?” L’Équipe, April 12, 2023
[E] “Content Generation: Challenge Accepted,” SIS Masters Podcast, September 22, 2022.
How to Cite This Entry
Krasnoff, Lindsay Sarah. “Voices: Sébastien Audoux,” FranceAndUS, https://www.franceussports.com/voices/034sbastien-audoux. (date of consultation).