Gil Avérous, appointed Minister of Sports, a world he knows through its associative side, is the current mayor of Châteauroux and president of the association of Cities of France (VdF), former member of the Republicans, loyal to Nicolas Sarkozy and as much Barnier as Macron compatible.
Aged 51, Gil Avérous is joining a government for the first time, after having been tipped several times in recent years to inherit a ministerial portfolio.
“A great connoisseur of local sport”
His appointment as head of the Ministry of Sports may seem like a surprisehis name having never been mentioned to occupy this function, according to the successive reshuffles during Emmanuel Macron’s two terms. But to this charge are added those of Youth and Community Life, areas with which he is familiar.
“A local elected official, Gil Avérous is both a believer and, above all, a great connoisseur of the place of sport in cities,” Jean-Philippe Acensi, President of the Agency for Education through Sport (APELS), explains to AFP.
The man who succeeds Amélie Oudéa-Castéra played a role in the organisation of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, by managing to convince the Paris-2024 Organising Committee to relocate the shooting events to Châteauroux, where he has been mayor since 2014. A town which re-elected him in 2020 with 70.06% of the vote.
Decisive to obtain the shooting tests
“Organizing the Games changed my vision of things. We see the complexity, the multitude of nations, this diversity of things that I did not know since I only shot at the local level […] “There, I discovered sport in a competitive aspect that I didn’t know about,” he declared just before the Games, to Carré Barré, a magazine published in Indre.
Having entered politics in 1995, successively a member of the RPR, the UMP and the LR, he was one of the young mayors who appeared in 2014, thanks to the “blue wave” which carried Les Républicains during the municipal elections, embodying a new generation of right-wing elected officials arguing for a “refoundation” of the party.
President of the LR mayors’ committee of France, this fifty-year-old who quietly asserts his homosexuality, is in the progressive camp, saying he is “opposed to GPA because it is the commercialization of the human body” but “for PMA, as long as it has a medical character”.
Macron-compatible and “non-sectarian”
In disagreement with Eric Ciotti, who had not called for a clear vote in the second round for Emmanuel Macron against Marine Le Pen in the 2022 presidential election, Gil Avérous did not hesitate to leave Les Républicains last December. His mentor nonetheless remains Nicolas Sarkozy, who had as his minister… Michel Barnier. An obvious connection. As for Emmanuel Macron, he praised in 2017 the “optimistic campaign” of the future president embodying “modernity”.
“He is someone who is not sectarian. He has real respect, real consideration for everyone and for those who do not think like him,” says Jean-François Debat, mayor (PS) of Bourg-en-Bresse.
“Through his work as mayor, both with (the football club) of Châteauroux, local activities and then with the Olympic Games, he is aware of the importance of sport in society,” he adds about the man who will now have to build on the legacy of successful Olympic and Paralympic Games.
“Sport is an incomparable national unifying element. An essential element of cohesion that must be the subject of a real national policy. I dream of a social sporting legacy from @Paris2024. We have everything to gain from investing in sport, from promoting values that shape an entire society,” wrote Gil Avérous on his X account, just after the Olympic Games, without yet knowing the ministerial destiny that awaited him.