Competitive running is a highly individualized pursuit and about as far from a team sport as you can get. It is all about individualism, self-reliance and self-preservation and going your own way, intense competition with clear winners and losers with equal opportunity for all but with no guaranteed outcome or government quota safeguards, all things traditionally valued by "Conservatives". These fly in the face of "It takes a Village", government "safety nets", group rights/affirmative action, quotas, social promotion, grade inflation, self esteem building sans accomplishment, government aid, etc. Therefore I am not surprised that the French Socialists hate running and are demanding the renegade French President stop flaunting it in the face of his fellow Socialist Frenchmen.
On the other hand, what has always amazed me is that in America, despite all things that embody competitive distance running - the individualism, the freedom of running just about anywhere you can power yourself to on your own, not needing anyone else to rely on, not getting any help from anyone else, the intense competition, the inability to blame some other group for holding your running back, the total self reliance that it takes to succeed, the rigorous hierarchy that we all know exactly where we stand and that it is based on genetics and hard work and the advantage of youth and the fact that if we get an injury there are no government safeguards that allow us to maintain our position in the hierarchy until we mend, the fact that we can lower educational standards, but the stopwatch cannot lie, etc, I have observed the typical American distance runner is politically much farther to the left than the typical American. This is despite the fact that the essence of their obsessive pursuit could not be more Classically Liberal (which is what Conservatives used to be called until the Left hijacked the term Liberal in the 1960s). I have never understood this disconnect for if runners practiced what they preached every most races would be "Handicapped Races". For you young guys a "Handicapped Race" is a race "Liberals" would love, it is a race in which the slow runners are given a head start. These type of races are exceedingly rare.