Olympic Games 2024: Florent Manaudou deplores that France is “not a sports country”

2023-11-21 23:15:00

With the Olympics only a few months away, this is a little hard to hear. Guest on France 2 on Saturday November 11, Florent Manaudou was clear: “I will make enemies, but we are not at all a sports country.” Words which are reminiscent of those of another great French champion, Kevin Mayer.

Emmanuel Macron announced it: he is aiming for the top 5 nations for the Games. For Florent Manaudou, who is nevertheless a lover of competition, this underlines the president’s lack of realism regarding French policy towards sport. Already, according to him, “to prepare for the Olympic Games, you have to do it 10-12 years in advance.” However, France only “put things in place two years ago”.

And there is still a lot to do, starting from a very young age. “They reduced PE lessons from 4 to 2 hours. We cannot say that we want to be the best nation by putting in these resources. It is not possible.”, he regretted , taking English-speaking countries as a model in terms of infrastructure and resources put into sport. “My old roommate went to Australia. For the same job, he earns five times as much and he trains people who are less talented,” he says.

Because we have talents, but we don’t train them to win. In 2021, this was also the opinion of Kevin Mayer, double decathlon world champion: “In France, it’s borderline degrading to be strong in sport. […] Everything that is done in France to encourage people to do sport is done for health, which is very good, but nothing encourages us to put ourselves forward through sport.” Figarohe confided: “At school, the culture of winning in sport is simply non-existent. Public opinion criticizes certain French athletes who do not give their all to the Games, but they have never been taught to do so. The problem is in sports education. We must make children understand that they can exist through sport.”

All we have to do now is wait for the 2024 results to find out what France is made of. “We’re going to win medals,” assured Manaudou, lucid, competitive, and candidate to be the standard bearer of the French delegation.