2023-09-07 09:23:27
The last summer before the Paris Olympics was to serve as a dress rehearsal for French sport in several disciplines. However, in basketball, athletics, fencing or cycling, the French have alternated between fiascos and disappointments. What to call into question the objectives of medals in 2024?
Published on: 09/07/2023 – 11:23
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Swimming, the tree that hides the forest? French sport has had a disappointing summer one year before the Paris Olympics where the top 5 in the medal ranking is the announced objective. But lackluster performances in basketball, athletics, fencing or cycling temper expectations. Even if the French Olympic movement wants to be reassuring.
“Clearly, what we have just experienced is not very good. Now it is in a year that we will have to be ready, there let’s say that this can serve as a warning at no cost”, summarizes a framework of the movement French Olympic.
The most violent shock came from Indonesia. The French basketball team, Olympic vice-champion at the Tokyo Olympics, left with great ambitions for the world championships in Jakarta. Result ? A historic slap in the face with two defeats for its first two matches and an express elimination.
This slap followed that received by the Blues during the world athletics. If the weakness of the harvest of medals was expected, France having for several years left the club of the flagship nations of athletics, its magnitude was less so. The French team escaped zero points in extremis, snatching a silver medal on the last day of competition in the men’s 4x400m relay.
“We are not going to make a revolution in twelve months”
“Yes but in athletics, we knew it, France has been rowing for a long time”, underlines this framework. The Minister of Sports, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, marked the occasion by summoning the federal leaders in the process, but no electroshock can create a miracle in a discipline in deep crisis for years, crisis masked episodically by the performances of the decathlete Kevin Mayer, outgoing world champion, forced to retire in Budapest.
“We are not going to make a revolution in twelve months, but we have great champions and we must do better,” said President Emmanuel Macron, in an interview with the daily L’Équipe published on Wednesday evening.
If France managed to deceive until the 2016 Olympics in Rio with six medals, its fall seems since endless in the sport king of the Games. But athletics is far from the only bad student in the class.
At the world fencing championships in Milan in July, France won six medals and only one title, against four last year, during the previous world championships. In Glasgow, at the cycling worlds, the track did not win a single title against three in France at the end of 2022.
A worrying trend, inevitably scrutinized by the boss of high performance within the National Sports Agency (ANS) Claude Onesta, who observes sport by sport the chances of medals for the Olympics.
“There is a lot of excitement at the moment, we don’t feel any serenity, and it’s starting to show. The Olympics at home create pressure. Everyone can see that we left too late and that ‘it will be difficult to fulfill the contract set by the president,’ asserts a source close to the Olympic movement.
Is the stated objective of finishing in the top 5 set by the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, at the next Olympic Games moving away?
“There is no point in being ready too soon”
“There is no point in being ready too early, you have to be ready at zero hour”, tempers the president of the French Olympic Committee (CNOSF) David Lappartient to AFP. “Sometimes in a certain number of sports , there can be coincidences, combinations of circumstances but in others you should not believe in miracles either”, considers the Breton councilor also president of the International Cycling Union (UCI).
“But we also saw disciplines this summer where we were fully operational, BMX, men’s mountain biking [sic, c’est le VTT femmes qui a signé un doublé historique avec Pauline Ferrand-Prevost et Loana Lecomte], swimming. So I would say it’s more nuanced,” he said.
During the swimming worlds in Fukuoka, Japan at the end of July, France won six medals, four in gold, including three for the world nugget Léon Marchand, a performance to be highlighted two years after the Olympic Games in Tokyo, where the Blues had no hung only one medal. A thinning which fails to make forget the clouds of the summer.
“Today everyone is focused on the task and aware of the issues. We will have to fight like crazy to reach the top 5”, predicts the president of the DTN association, Ludovic Royé.
With AFP
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