London

The conundrum for global sports is that no nation has profited more from multiethnicity than the French team that won soccer’s World Cup in 1998 — and none seems more alarmed today by racial issues than France.

At the heart of the defense for that triumph, and for close to 100 performances, Laurent Blanc stood shoulder to shoulder with Lilian Thuram, who was born in Guadeloupe, and Marcel Desailly, from Ghana. Their job was to hold the line, to win the ball, and to get it to the man acknowledged as the master creator of his generation, Zinédine Zidane, the French-born son of Algerian parents.

The crowds that spent the night celebrating from the Champs-Élysées to the Place de la Bastille in Paris that night in 1998 have never been bettered in my 40 years of covering sports. Whatever their race, people danced through a euphoria that was beyond sports, beyond politics and certainly beyond the poisonous denunciation from far-right politicians that the squad of “Black, Blanc, Beur” — black, white, Arab — should not represent France.

How unthinkable that today the country is divided over accusations that Blanc, in his short time as national team coach, is perceived as a racist.