Blondin, who lived from 1922 until 1991, wrote feature articles for L’Équipe, the French sports newspaper.

His best-known theatre of operations was the Tour de France, the epic annual bicycle race that is an absolute monument of French sport.

But he was also a novelist, and his real subject was France itself.

He specialised in the sort of word-pictures that have become rarer and rarer - and that some might regard as superfluous - now that sports fans have grown accustomed to accessing live images of their favourite events wherever they may be, with barely a second thought.

Not every piece has stood the test of time, of course; for one thing, many of the athletes whose exploits turned them into household names in the 1950s and 1960s have faded back into relative obscurity today, certainly outside France.

But some remain wonderfully fresh.

In Tokyo for the 1964 Olympics, having seen French sprinter Claude Piquemal eliminated at the semi-final stage of the men’s 100 metres, Blondin stays on to witness not just Bob Hayes’s dominant victory in the subsequent final, but also British racewalker Ken Matthews being greeted by wife Sheila at the end of his magnificent, gold medal-winning performance.

I learnt later from the Belfast Telegraph that Sheila was able to go to Japan after Ken’s work-mates in Sutton Coldfield made a collection to pay her air fare.

The Blondin articles that resonate most clearly today are those in which he describes the people he encounters and the places he visits along the way.

At one point he speaks of the "atlas of French faces that the Tour makes us pass through".

He is at his best when capturing this "atlas of French faces" for posterity.

There is one vignette from the anthology The Irony of Sport that I wanted especially to dwell on.

This was written after Blondin attended the 1956 French Cup final at the Stade de Colombes.

For the record, the match was won by Sedan, who beat opponents Troyes 3-1.

The piece focuses on just one of the 47,258 spectators, a woman in her fifties.

Her name is given as Madame Louise, and Blondin knows her: "She works in a fish-shop, tosses shrimp with a round gesture, slices hake without procrastinating".

There she is in the crowded stand in her Sunday best, emanating the "radiant assurance of someone who is occupying their rightful place in the universe".

She appears to be encouraging both teams and Blondin is curious as to why she has come.

Admitting that she does not know whether she likes football, she explains that she used to attend games with her dead husband.

The annual Cup final was the only time each year that she refrained from accompanying him.

Now her husband is no longer there, she tells Blondin, she does come.

"These stands, these shouts, this pitch, these players who change from one year to the next bring him back to me more vividly than any meditation," she tells him.

"Colombes is our rendez-vous.

"I tell myself that he would certainly be here if he could.

"Indeed, it is the only thing I am sure of."

Blondin's conclusion: "This football which had so often distracted her husband from her, was bringing him closer today."

At this point, I imagined the reaction of various editors I have had over the years if, having been assigned to cover one of the great showpiece occasions on the national sporting calendar, I handed in my account of a conversation I had had with a widow I happened to bump into at the venue.

No doubt L’Équipe had dispatched other reporters alongside the great man to inform its readers of such banalities as the result of the match and who scored the goals.

But even so, in similar circumstances I doubt I would have avoided a rocket - and perhaps a transfer to the obituaries department.

And yet this account of a bereaved woman deriving comfort in a quiet, unselfconscious and dignified way amid the tumult of one of the biggest football matches of the year must be by a margin the most profound thing produced by the phalanx of writers on hand in Colombes that day - 27 May 1956.

It encapsulates why Blondin was a sportswriter hors ordinaire.

I will think of him - and Madame Louise - if I happen to find myself at one of the Olympic field hockey matches in Colombes next summer.