The object of the competition is simple. Who can spear the most hanging rings on their lance in the fastest time? Each rider gets three runs.

Le Tournoi competition is fast and furious. Twelve seconds and seven rings will usually get you in the running for the trophy and a kiss on the cheek from the Tournoi queen. A run of 14.5 seconds? A rider in last year’s competition put it best, “If you do 14.5 seconds, you got to get your horse moving. If you can’t do better than that, it’s best you just put your horse back in the trailer.”

Event official Gerald Fontenot, 82, is one of the elder statesmen of Le Tournoi. Fontenot remembers when the sport was resurrected in the town in 1948.

“Le Tournoi is a French tradition,” Fontenot said. “It was brought to Ville Platte by Marcellin Garand, an officer in Napoleon’s army.”

Fontenot said the first tournoi was in 1858. Other accounts say the race was held as early as 1828, but all sources say the tradition came to end in 1889 when baseball and other forms of horse racing arrived on the scene.

Le Tournoi was resurrected as a cultural event by a group of World War II veterans in 1948. The veterans enlisted the aid of a few elderly horsemen who competed back in the nineteenth century. And that tradition continues today so the youngest rider of the 2012 competition will know the man who competed in the 1940s who knew the men who competed in the 1880s who knew the man who started the tradition in 1840. Legendary.

Fontenot raced Le Tournoi until 1979 when his son began competing.

That’s chivalry. Fathers ride until sons are old enough to carry on the family honor.  Fontenots, Trahans, LaFleurs and Vidrines are perennial challengers for Le Tournoi honors.

But competitor Shane Trahan’s father was not with him in 2010.

“My dad’s been here every year with me but he passed away last January,” Trahan said. “I’ve qualified twenty-two years in a row and I want to stay healthy enough four more years until my son is eighteen and old enough.”

The Ville Platte tradition provides a time and place where hard work is noticed and rewarded. What is a knight, after all? He is an equestrian in diligent pursuit of a noble quest. If you think about it, we have modern knights in abundance. Diligent people who do their duty, and do it to the best of their ability: that is nobility. Novelist Charles Kingsley noted, “Toil is the true knight’s pastime.” If that’s true, then a modern knight could be a truck driver, a police officer, a butcher... or a man with a horse trailer in Ville Platte.

Sam Irwin is a freelance writer who has written extensively on Cajun horse and cattle traditions. And he knows what “Honi soit qui mal y pense” means and how it relates to the Most Noble Order of the Garter. His LaNote blog may be found at LaNote.org.

Details. Details. Details.

Running of the Tournoi
Sunday, October 16 • 2 pm
Ville Platte Industrial Park
www.louisianatournoi.com

For more information contact Trina Fontenot:
(337) 363-9554 (day)
(337) 363-5142 (evening)

Ville Platte station KVPI-FM 92.5 does a live and streaming broadcast of Le Tournoi at www.oldies925.com.

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