Paris 2024: does France have the means to integrate the top 5 medals at the Olympic Games?

It may be in Parisian hotels that France’s sporting success is being built at the 2024 Paris Games. Where, from seminar to seminar, the tools are being refined to enable the country to meet its medal objectives. Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, the Minister of Sports and the Olympic and Paralympic Games, recalled this Thursday, March 16, less than five hundred days from the opening ceremony, in front of around thirty performance managers gathered in a living room from the Mercure Hotel near Montparnasse station, in Paris: “We know ambition: it’s the top 5 nations. The English did it in London in 2012, it’s not a pipe dream. »

The task is not easy. Taking on Churchillian accents, the minister wishes this day to future Olympian athletes “sweat, meaning and soul” in their preparation by the summer of 2024. At his side, Claude Onesta agrees. For more than two years now, the former successful tricolor handball coach (double Olympic champion, triple world champion and triple European champion) has been working to reform French sport: “We are entering the home stretch, everything we do today must have an influence for Paris. »

A few years back, the one who heads high performance at the National Sports Agency (ANS) – created in 2019 – made an observation, shared by many: the French model, inherited from the 1960s, is running out of steam. Since the Atlanta Games in 1996, its best Olympic vintage, France has stagnated in the medal standings around 7^e place.

Join the top 5

The British example is in everyone’s mind. Humiliated in 1996 (36^e in the standings, only one Olympic title), the United Kingdom has undergone a revolution with the creation of the UK Sport agency, which has chosen to financially support only the elite of its champions and Disciplines big providers of medals. The first effects were felt at the Beijing Games in 2008. Since then, the United Kingdom has not left the top 5, doing even better in Rio in 2016 (2^e67 medals) than in London, four years earlier (3^e65 medals).

For its Games at home, France must not miss. The President of the Republic reminded him of this in September 2021 at the Elysée Palace when he ordered the French medalists returning from Tokyo – half-hearted Olympics (8^e33 podiums) – to enter the top 5 in the ranking in Paris in 2024.

Tricolor athletes identified as “medallable” helped as a priority, “coaches plan” launched to secure the services of the best coaches, French and foreign, recourse to systematized data analysis… From now on, everything is dictated by the obligation of success to the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. “A euro invested must be a justifiable euro”, already said Claude Onesta in the fall of 2020, when he presented his strategy blue ambition. The elitist approach is now clearly assumed.

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