By Gabriel Stargardter
PARIS (Reuters) – A French strategy to boost its medal count after years of sporting underachievement has begun to pay dividends at the Paris Olympics as rapturous home crowds propel its athletes up the medals table, although keeping up the pace may prove hard.
One week into the Paris Games, France has won eight golds and 28 medals in total. Since Atlanta in 1996, France has averaged 37 medals per Olympics, a Reuters calculation shows.
France’s early improvement is the fruit of a seven-year plan that it hopes will position it as a long-term Olympics heavyweight.
It is based on promoting excellence in sports clubs and federations and zeroing in on medal hopes, as well as bringing families closer to the action, providing more performance support teams and capitalising on home advantage – as the wild acclaim for superstar swimmer Leon Marchand shows.
“The bet is off to a good start and perhaps even beyond our greatest hopes, but we remain focused on what comes next and are very clear about the difficulty,” Claude Onesta, a successful former handball coach and the architect of France’s high-performance sports strategy, said in radio interview on Friday.
In 2017, the year Paris was awarded the 2024 Olympics, French sports officials concluded that the country’s national sporting excellence plan needed a reboot, said Yann Cucherat, a former gymnast turned sports official who will lead high performance at France’s National Sports Agency after the Games.
France’s strategy had not changed since one unveiled for the 1960 Olympics in Rome, and French officials had watched with a mixture of admiration and envy as the British strategy for the 2012 Games in London paid off handsomely, with 29 gold medals for Britain, Cucherat said.
“In high-performance sports, if you’re stagnating, you’re regressing,” Cucherat told Reuters.
France came seventh with 11 golds in 2012, remained in the same spot in Rio de Janeiro with 10 golds but slipped to eighth in Tokyo in 2021 despite winning the same tally.
In 2019, France created the National Sports Agency with the Paris Games five years later as its north star, Cucherat said. Under the control of Onesta, the agency’s “Blue Ambition” plan outlined a pathway to success in Paris.
French officials studied the British 2012 model, but chose not to copy it. Onesta told Le Figaro that British officials sought to inculcate sporting excellence in schools, while France sought to lift up levels in clubs across the country.
“We wanted to do it in a French way,” Cucherat said.
HOME ADVANTAGE
French officials began by identifying federations that had fallen behind, seeking to improve their standards. Then, they cherry-picked young athletes who could be future Olympic medallists, finding ways to bolster their chances of success.
However, Marchand, France’s breakout star of the Games who has won three gold medals at the Games and is vying for two more, is an exception, Cucherat said. The son of successful French swimmers, he is trained by U.S. coach Bob Bowman.
“Beyond his genius, (Marchand) has around him an environment conducive to performance,” Onesta told RMC radio.
The Marchand-mania that has gripped France is one of the key components of French success, with home-town advantage identified by sports officials as a key factor that could contribute to winning medals.
Onesta and his team instigated various other methods to improve French athletes’ chances. They offered four tickets to their family members so they could watch them at the Games, made the training experience as close as possible to the Olympics venues and transformed a school near the Olympics Village into the French high-performance house, staffed with physios, osteopaths and other support staff.
“Little by little, we improved the support of the athletes, improved the work tools, improved the quality and the skills development of the coaches,” Onesta said. “All these little details added together end up making a difference.”
Cucherat said the French government bankrolled these efforts, with smaller amounts coming from a sports betting tax, TV rights and the private sector.
French officials have been cagey about how many medals they hope to win in Paris, but Cucherat said anywhere from 50 to 60 in total would be “a lovely thing”.
Nielson’s Gracenote, which analyses results of global sports tournaments, forecast before the Games that France would finish fourth on the medals table with 28 golds and 59 total medals.
Keeping up the early pace in Paris may prove a challenge.
France typically does well in events that are now ending, including judo and fencing. Athletics, which is just getting started, tends to provide slimmer pickings.
Still, Cucherat said the work done in preparation for Paris 2024 should hold French sport in good stead.
“Paris 2024 is an accelerant for us so we can remain in the top five of Olympic medal-winners going forward,” he said.
(Reporting by Gabriel Stargardter; Additional reporting by Blandine Henault; Editing by Alison Williams)
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