Jugger pioneer Marion Lieutaud: "I am not a unicorn"
by Hannah Wolff
Zur deutschen Version geht es hier.
Fully concentrated: Marion Lieutaud gives it her all for her team Rigor Mortis.
Photo: Torneo Internacional de España
From gymnastics to football, Marion Lieutaud has tried her fair share of different sports. That said, there is nothing she loves more than jugger. The sport which involves mixed-gender teams using weaponlike instruments (Pompfen) to make way for each team's runner has usually been dominated by men in the deciding games. Lieutaud was determined to change that.
With her team Rigor Mortis, she has won the German championship multiple times now. On and off pitch she has shown that women can and do take on leadership roles in mixed sports. In the German championship final she was the only team member not to be switched out and as the assistant coach she pushed Rigor Mortis to new limits. To this day, she preserved her critical eye.
In the MUS interview, Lieutaud also speaks about the problems that Jugger has. Casual sexism and unequal opportunities between men and women are topics she cares about. Furthermore, she explains how she got to be one of the best jugger players worldwide and why other women can reach that level too.
Magazin des unpopulären Sports (MUS): Jugger is the sport of your dreams. What fascinates you about jugger?
Marion Lieutaud: It’s a couple of things actually. Athletically speaking, it is a very complete sport, which I really enjoy. It feels like you are using every part of your body.
But to be honest, the main thing for me was, it was just the first sport I have ever played where women were just as good as men. I’ve always done a lot of sports and have a basic athletic background. But with most sports, like football, you don’t start from a level ground. Additionally, there is this rampant understanding that even though you might be very good for a woman, you are not going to be very good compared to men. Whereas in jugger, it is totally different. When I started playing, I was training very intensely very quickly and then I was as good as or better than the guys. They did not just have an advantage physically or otherwise. That was definitely a big thing for me.
MUS: How long have you been playing jugger for? How has your career evolved?
Lieutaud: I started playing in 2013. I lived in Dublin at the time. One day, I was playing football with a group of guys in the park and one of them told me that I needed to try this other sport because I would love it. So I started training with Setanta (editor’s note: the jugger team in Dublin). I played two years for them before I moved back to France with my boyfriend at the time. We lived in Straßbourg and joined the nearest team, which happened to be Karlsruhe. It was only a one-and-a-half-hour drive away.
MUS: Only…
Lieutaud: Yeah. Laughs. We were quite determined. So, we played with the Tackle tigers for three years and became really kind of core of the team. Then, I moved to London because I got a PhD Scholarship there. At the same time another Jugger player from Ireland, Emily, moved there and we started a team there. It is a small developing team. We go to one tournament a year. I wish I could put more time and energy into it, but I am juggling jugger and my PhD, so I need to focus on the basics. I make sure we train regularly.
Also, at the same time, I got a PhD research exchange with Berlin. So, I negotiated that I should really be in Berlin for the summer, which allowed me to be in Germany for the jugger season. So, I started playing for Rigor Mortis in 2017.
MUS: You have engaged in many different sports throughout your life. Have you profited from any of the sports when it comes to jugger?
Marion Lieutaud dodges the attack of the chain.
Foto: Torneo Internacional de España
Lieutaud: I was definitely able to take something away from soccer. You see it when you train people, as well. People that have played team sports with a ball are better when it comes to pitch awareness. So I am sure that has helped at some level. Gymnastics was helpful in that I fall very well. I have to roll and dive a lot when I play shield. I never get injured. And it has probably trained my balance and coordination.
I never really did any martial arts. Fencing would have been quite useful in jugger. But it also has its cons. It can lead to tunnel vision on the duel. You lose awareness of the rest of the pitch. But I didn’t have that kind of background.
MUS: You just said that you liked jugger because women can be just as good as men. How has that changed in recent years?
Lieutaud: If anything, I think it’s a bit better now. There were always good female players and women have been a part of the community since the very beginning. But when I started, there weren’t a lot of women consistently playing at the top level. I watched a lot of film material at the time and in maybe one video of a final, there was a woman. Once you got to the semifinals, it was pretty much all men. Whereas now you have women playing very consistently in the finals. I don’t think in the last two years in Germany, there was a single final without a woman on the pitch in all the tournaments that were played. Most importantly, it is not only me. There are three or four women distributed between the top teams, that are very consistent top players. That wasn’t the case before.
In retrospect the sport has evolved in terms of the gear, which supported this change. The gear used to be a lot heavier. And the sport used to be a lot more about powering through with your pompfen than about quick precise hits the way it is now.
Nevertheless, there is a gender gap, in the sense that women are a minority in the sport and they are still underrepresented at the top level. This is less true in Germany but very true in Spain, where I don’t think any of the top teams have a woman playing for them.
MUS: Fortunately, this is different in Germany...
Lieutaud: Yes. In Germany, there is no question anymore that women can be top players and that this has nothing to do with people indulging them or being nicer to them. It has been established now, and that wasn’t the case when I started. Back then it was more like an abstract thing. It is theoretically possible, but hadn’t been proven yet.
MUS: You are still one of the few women who play finals? Why is that?
Lieutaud: There are many dimensions to that. The societal thing is that women are a minority in sports in general and they are an even smaller minority when it comes to team sports or martial arts. So you have a smaller pool of women that you can recruit from to play a sport like jugger. Then as a result you have an even smaller pool of women who are going to be interested in playing this kind of sport and are also going to be very athletic, which realistically you need to be at the top level. The season routine is two trainings per week, tournaments every weekend and you need to do some kind of compensation exercise to keep yourself in check. To play at the top level it requires quite a lot of physicality and commitment. For most people that requires that they have done a lot of sports their entire life and socially speaking women are not brought up to do that the way men are.
MUS: Do physical reasons also play a role?
Lieutaud: Yes. There is also an anatomical aspect. Even if you are really athletic as a woman, on average you are going to be slower than a really athletic man. Being fast is an advantage in jugger. It is not a decisive advantage. Having good pitch awareness is gonna more than compensate for it. But it is an advantage. A lot of guys compensate for the fact that they do not have very great pitch awareness by running very fast. But if you are a woman and you are not very fast, you do not have that option. So there is a biological aspect. I don’t think it plays out in other dimensions than speed, because nowadays strength is not super useful in jugger anymore.
MUS: You said that there is also a social aspect. Socially, women are not as tuned into sports as men. Can you explain that in more detail?
Hit: Marion Lieutaud wins the duel.
Foto: Cezary Pluska
Lieutaud: Yes, there is a community aspect: sexism. There is a point to be made that women are chronically underestimated and not taken as seriously. This is a classic story of patriarchy. Essentially to be a top player you have to be quite assertive. Part of jugger is about giving calls very clearly and being assertive of your calls. When you hit a person, you have to give them that call and you assess together what happened in your duel. And I think women are socialized to be less assertive. There is a lot of women who have come to me and asked me for advice on how to improve in jugger and I usually say: You have to be assertive about your calls.
There are two dimensions to that. On the one hand, women tend to be overly kind and accept the other person’s judgement too easily even if they saw it differently and I am quite guilty of that as well. And in combination with that there is a form a sexism that jugger is not protected from. There is a tendency that men think that they have probably beaten the woman in front of them. It is not heavy. It is not outright sexism, but if there is a doubt and the woman is not a famous player, men give themselves the benefit of the doubt and claim to have hit the woman first. So it kind of goes both ways, where women are going to be underestimated and they are going to be less likely to make a fuss.
MUS: How did you deal with this issue yourself?
Lieutaud: It was a problem in the beginning. When I started playing at the top level, I got really frustrated, especially because of the combination of playing shield and being a woman. With the shield people are not going to see their hits on me and have to trust me and there are many instances where they might think they made a hit, but I just about blocked it. I got really frustrated, especially with some top level players who never accepted my blocks. I did three things to deal with that. One, I kept playing instead of letting frustration take over and stop. Two, I took those people aside and talked to them, which worked well. And three, I accepted that people might think that I am arrogant and not like me for a while. It is unfair because the same level of assertiveness in a guy is totally fine, but for women it is not acceptable. I got a bit of heat at that time. It took a couple of years, but once people accepted me to be a top player, it was not a problem anymore.
MUS: You have gone through all those stages and made it to the top. Do you feel like a role model to other women in jugger?
Lieutaud: I guess I am a role model. At least, people have told me that I was. But I don’t feel like one. I don’t know what that means exactly. Nevertheless, I try to live up to it. In 2019 we had a sexual abuse problem in the community. And then, I really thought, I have to be engaged with it. I cannot be the most visible woman in the community and wash my hands off this. Who else is as secure and as concerned? I had to use that kind of position. So yes, I try to live up to it, but I never quite know what to do about it.
MUS: Do you think that many women will actually take you as a role model, emulate you, and at some point in the future you will no longer be seen as an exception?
Lieutaud: Many people, women in particular, will frame my kind of trajectory as exceptionalism. They will say that I had incredible talent. I push back against that. This is not what it is. I had some advantages, because of the sort of sports background that I had. But then I trained really, really hard. And then there is a chance factor. I really try to make a point that my rise as a woman to the top of a mixed-gender sport is not magic. I am not a magical being with unusual powers that can therefore achieve things that normal people can not. I am not a unicorn. My trajectory is completely reproducible.
MUS: What can the sport do to be played gender-integrated even on a competitive level?
Lieutaud: Again, this is a multi-level answer. An obvious thing is that there are forms of sexism that are not specific to the community. They exist in society in general and thus in the jugger community just as in any other sports community. This plays a part in how intensely women engage in the sport, how far they go, how long they keep playing and whether they believe that they might be players at the top level.
We can adjust training and tailor it so it is better tailored to women, instead of being default masculine. Right now, we are rewarding a male form of athleticism. One basic example is that in most amateur sports coaches will make you do push-ups and for most sports it is entirely irrelevant. For jugger for example, push-ups will only help you with your core strength and they are not at all the most efficient way to train that. It is a form of exercise entirely tailored to men, who have been doing push-ups throughout their adolescence and have the necessary shoulder muscles for it. It is designed to reward men and there is no reason to do them in most trainings, and at the same time it makes most women feel like shit.
MUS: Just giving up push-ups probably won't bring about much change. What else needs to change?
Lieutaud: There are particular obstacles that women face, that we can tackle in training. We need to take note of the fact that women need more training to be confident on the pitch and to be assertive. And this is not because women are naturally shy. It is socialization. When it comes down to it, we have to acknowledge it. And then we have to train it.
Another aspect that the community needs to tackle if we want to seriously promote gender equality is the issue of sexual harassment, and in particular sexual abuse. Just like in any community there is quite a bit of low-key sexual harassment that happens quite a lot. Especially if you are a woman, especially if you are single or you are pretty. And it is a community where women are a minority, everyone is quite young and many people are single. It can be quite overwhelming as a woman and it is something that you have to negotiate quite a lot. I had this conversation with a younger female player not long ago who asked me how I would navigate these situations but I did not have a good answer. Mostly, I was almost never single. And then I got a reputation very quickly of having a temper and I suppose guys were more worried about me kicking a fuss if they crossed a line. But even then, I faced sexual harassment.
World Cup Final: Marion Lieutaud on the shield fends off the attack and has a clear path to make a hit.
Foto: Jugger Shots
MUS: The jugger community is considered pretty inclusive. So ultimately that's not true?
Lieutaud: The jugger community can be a bit triumphant about the fact that they are so inclusive, completely ignoring and smothering the actual lived experience of women in the sport. Guys hug you a little too long after matches and you get a ton of attention that you do not particularly want. And that is a thing that clubs have to take a lot more seriously. In Rigor Mortis we created a position as an awareness person to be the first point of contact. Ideally, we would like that person to be properly trained. We are trying to see whether we can create a committee at the German league level, so if a club cannot or will not deal with an issue properly, it could go to that committee. But even with no sexual misconduct, right now many women feel like most of the attention they are going to get in the sport is as a woman and not as a player.
MUS: What was your most emotional moment or your greatest success in jugger?
Lieutaud: The moment that always comes to mind is the first time I won the German league with Rigor Mortis. Max, the Rigor captain, and I were together at that point and neither of us had ever won the German league. It was our shared dream. We were working so hard at the time to get Rigor back to a super strong team. We were talking tactics every week. It was so intense. And then we won. That was an insane moment. A week after that there was the world cup (2018) and it was a massive match. There was a live stream, so my family was watching it. When I finished the match, I checked my phone and I had about 70 messages, because my brothers and my parents had been watching it live and sending messages as they went. There was also quite a crowd.
I think for me it was just a bit of a liberation. I played every single run of that final and I think I was the only player to do so, at least in Rigor. After that I had this thought: Now, nobody can ever tell me that I do not deserve to be where I am in jugger. I had this insecurity the whole time, even in Rigor because I was with the captain of Rigor at the time. Even before we won, it would have been absurd of people to say that I wasn’t a great player but I still had this fear in me that some people somehow could think and say that I had gotten it easier. But after that, I was just like: That’s it! Nobody can tell me that anymore. It is just not possible to presume that Rigor would let me play every run of the final just because they were being nice to me. It was massively emotional. And it has given me a kind of sense of serenity in sports in general that I did not have before and I am really grateful for that moment.
The Interview was conducted by Hannah Wolff
Text collaboration: Luis Teschner