PARIS, Aug 02 (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.
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.
© 2024 - All Rights with The Financial Express
