2024-01-23 11:15:28
In the middle of the Olympic year, will French sport begin its revolution? This is the wish of the parliamentarians from the commission of inquiry “relating to the identification of operational failures within the French sports federations and the sports movement”. Six months before the Paris Olympic Games and after 90 hearings conducted with 193 players in the sports movement, under oath, from all walks of life – victims, federation leaders, civil servants, associations, coaches, politicians – this commission is preparing to unveil a volcanic relationship, which must serve as a working basis for the renewal of French sport, criticized for its archaism, its “omerta”, its “between itself”.
Libération was able to obtain the report in its entirety, which must be presented this Tuesday, January 23 to the Assembly, before public meetings throughout France to raise awareness among families. More than 250 pages long, it dissects point by point the “systemic” flaws that plague French sport “at all levels”. Work which implicitly draws up a very critical assessment of the mandate of Amélie Oudéa-Castéra at the head of the Sports portfolio. As soon as the first conclusions of the work were transcribed in the press on Monday, the Minister of National Education and Sports denounced a “militant” report and work “instrumentalized for political purposes”, said those around her.
She is not the only one accused. Thorough, exhaustive although too fragmentary on certain themes such as the question of trans athletes, the report outlines an uncompromising inventory of French sport, considering it corrupted by the “culture of secrecy, of lies” and “not sufficiently accustomed to making accounts”. “At some point, we have to take the bull by the horns and definitively break the silence by making federation leaders face their responsibilities,” storms the environmentalist rapporteur, Sabrina Sebaihi, to Libération. Not only because they didn’t do things, but also sometimes because they saw things, heard things and did nothing. And at some point, everyone must also be aware that when you want to testify, when you are a victim, there are lots of pitfalls on the way.”
In the same way as the battery of conclusions recorded in the report of the Ethics Committee led by Stéphane Diagana and Marie-George Buffet in December 2023, this document must serve, via 60 recommendations, as a basis for reflection with a view to future law intended to clean up French sport and its moral, financial and ethical abuses from top to bottom. In reaction, the Socialist deputies announced that they would take up on February 29 – during a day reserved for their texts in the chamber – a bill for the protection of minors in sport, already adopted in mid-June in the Senate. Here are the key takeaways.
Oudéa-Castéra pinned several times
Already in great difficulty after her comments on the education of her children in the private sector, Amélie Oudea-Castéra is not likely to see the pressure on her fall again this week. The minister is singled out in more than one way. Her remuneration when she was general director of the French Tennis Federation (FFT) from 2021 to 2022 is considered “very high, even abnormal”: 400,000 euros gross annually and 100,000 euros in target bonus. “In February 2022, the General Inspectorate of Education, Sport and Research called for a reconsideration of the level of remuneration of the ten main executives of the FFT and pointed out the absence of recruitment procedures for its main executives”, underlines Sabrina Sebaihi.
In the preamble to the document, the commission of inquiry also denounces “with the greatest firmness the difficulties it encountered in accessing a certain number of documents requested from the Ministry of Sports”. She was unable to have access to documents and information “which were essential to her in carrying out her control mission”. This is the case of the table monitoring reports of violence received by Signal-sports, the national unit set up by the ministry, “which had not been communicated to it at the time it completed the drafting of this investigation report », even though Sabrina Sebaihi would have gone to the ministry the day before the examination of the report by the members of the commission of inquiry, to “try to obtain clarifications”.
The parliamentarian calls for a “shock of control, transparency and democratic culture”, thanks to the establishment of an “independent administrative authority responsible for protecting the ethics of sport”. She would like to provide this authority with “power of financial sanctions” against federations which do not respect their “obligations and commitments”.
“State failures” highlighted
The criticism of Amélie Oudéa-Castéra’s mandate also shines through throughout the chapter devoted to the failings of the State, whose reaction to abuses is too often characterized by “inertia or a late response despite early warnings, most often after media revelations” but also “a very partial response through the designation of scapegoats”, which allows us not to “identify the entire chain of responsibilities and systemic failures”.
It is up to the State to supervise the actions of sports federations and to monitor their compliance with laws and regulations. A responsibility made possible via several levers: the supervision that it traditionally exercised over them, eliminated in 2021 in favor of a relationship based on a delegation contract; significant public support; the presence of State agents within the federations and their affiliated territorial bodies: the sports technical advisors (CTS), the armed arm of the State.
Regarding these prerogatives, the work lists significant failures. Among other reasons: “a glaring lack of resources (of the central administration as well as decentralized services, deeply weakened), a dilution of responsibilities within a tangled governance” which the creation of the National Sports Agency has complicated , and “too great a daily and structural proximity between the sports movement and state agents (the CTS), which causes a loss of bearings and a confusion of roles”. For Sabrina Sebaihi, it is an “essential component of this togetherness, characteristic of the governance of the sporting world”.
The management of VSS and discrimination under the microscope
This is the common thread of the report: the question of sexist and sexual violence (SGBV) and discrimination punctuate all the reflection made on the state of play in French sport. In terms of VSS, which has shaken the world of sport since the revelations in 2020 of the skater Sarah Abitbol, the work points to a “long silence”, a “long denial” and a “long inertia” in the sector.
Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, Minister of Sports and the Olympic and Paralympic Games, described the policy put in place on the subject since 2020 as “zero tolerance”. The commission deplores, however, “that no serious transversal and systematic work” has been carried out. was undertaken to “better understand the extent of sexual abuse and other types of physical and psychological violence in the sporting world”. And echoes this statement from Patrick Roux, ex-judoka author of a book on the subject: “For the moment we only know the tip of the iceberg.”
The MP still welcomes the creation of the Signal-Sports platform launched by the ministry in 2020. She deplores, however, that the tool is “invisibilized”, “undersized” and “very largely unknown”.
It recommends transferring the disciplinary competence of the federations in the fight against violence to an independent administrative authority. As demanded in December by former Minister of Sports Marie-George Buffet in another report, this time from the Committee for Ethics in Sport. A proposal with which Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra said she disagreed, favoring the current cell.
The CNOSF not spared…
Barely emerging from an internal crisis which left it bloodless, the house of French sport is also taking its position. Particularly on its lack of ethics: faced with the numerous scandals which have splashed the world of sport, “the CNOSF [Comité national olympique et sportif français, ndlr] has almost never taken a position likely to call into question the action of a federal leader or a federation.
The report also criticizes him for having carried out “intense lobbying against parity” between women and men, during the 2022 law on the democratization of sport. He notes that the sports movement needs a “democratic shock” coupled with a “feminization shock” which must be imposed by law, and as such would like to “fix in law the principle of real parity in all governing bodies of the sports movement.
… neither do sports federations
There is of course football, tennis too. But two sports incriminated in the document attract particular attention: judo and ice sports. For the last city, the work is based on a mission from the General Inspectorate on the federation. The Inspection was also confronted, whether at club or Federation level, with comments minimizing the violence of all kinds to which young skaters may be victims, such as: “What skater is not in love with her coach ?” Numerous failures of state executives are also highlighted in all the General Inspectorate’s reports relating to sexual and gender-based violence.
The findings are the same at the judo federation: Sabrina Sebaihi cites another report from the inspection mission devoted to the body, which confirms that “in certain cases, we did not hesitate to dismiss people denouncing facts reprehensible”. The General Inspectorate emphasizes that “the treatment of these files of sexual violence was also, until very recently, completely absent from the concerns and priorities of national technical directors”.
The FFJ is also singled out for not having “taken the decision to only bring the incriminated supervisors before the disciplinary committee once the court decision has been definitively rendered, after possible appeals”. Teachers could therefore have continued to practice for several years despite the accusations against them.
Moretton, Lapeyre, Canu: several leaders implicated
Sabrina Sebaihi finally criticizes the “casualness” of certain leaders. Targeted in particular are: Gilles Moretton, president of the French Tennis Federation (FFT); Fabien Canu, director general of the National Institute of Sport, Expertise and Performance (Insep); but also the legal director of the French Football Federation, Jean Lapeyre, for whom “it took 1 hour 30 minutes” to mention the “slightly out of code relationships” with “women” of its former president Noël Le Graët. The latter, targeted since mid-January 2023 by a judicial investigation for moral and sexual harassment, which he contests, had denounced before the commission an “undeserved media lynching”. The Paris prosecutor’s office had already opened several investigations at the beginning of January following reports from the commission on possible “false testimony” concerning 7 sports leaders before parliamentarians.
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