No more laughing, this day of Friday shook up French sport



From our special correspondent in Tokyo,

We laughed a little on Monday, to better decompress after spending our day counting fifth places. But there, we no longer want so much. If each day logically carries its share of disappointments in a tunnel of events like the Olympic Games, this Friday blew up the dikes. French sport has taken a big blow with the shovel, attacked with a bulldozer on its foundations: Teddy Riner and the men’s team épée. Still happy that the handball players beat Spain a little later, otherwise all that remained was to take the first flight to Paris and curl up under the bed while waiting for it to pass.

It must have fallen everywhere today, but in the space of 40 minutes, between noon and 1 p.m. in Tokyo (5 and 6 a.m. in France), the French delegation experienced a long fall into the void, without finding a branch to which one to hang up on. First the men’s sword, three-time reigning Olympic champion and still present on the podium since Atlanta, which was ejected from the quarter-finals by Japan, admittedly in full progress in this sport long neglected but which should never have been in a position to go all-in at 44-44.

“It’s painful, does not hide Yannick Borel, already released much earlier than imagined during the individual test. Of course, we feel below what is expected of us, below everything. He was speaking more of his personal case, as the last torchbearer, but his words fit well with the general state of mind.

” It’s not possible “

Then the BMX boys, all three among the favorites, brilliant in the quarter and half, and who finish 4th, 6th and 7th (out of 7) in the final. “It’s not possible”, can not help but whisper David Lappartient, former boss of the FFC and current president of the UCI, present in the stands. “I have no explanation. We were well prepared, however, but we lack the little spark ”, loose the DTN Christophe Manin, already disillusioned by the poor performance of the girls in mountain biking three days earlier. “We are talking about cycling, but the French team in general is experiencing difficulties at these Olympics,” he adds.

Hard to prove him wrong. The lightning rod is found there, since in the process, Teddy Riner falls from the quarter-finals at the Budokan. An explosion. He will save the bronze with a commendable panache, but seeing the three-time Olympic champion miss out on a big meeting is a first that we would not have believed to know one day.

Claude Onesta’s tour of the sites

Put together, that’s a lot, especially when added to other industrial accidents, like Vincent Luis in the triathlon (13th) or the Mahut-Herbert pair in tennis (1st round). Obviously, these are not Games like the others. The pandemic has disrupted preparations, emptied calendars, scattered benchmarks. But Claude Onesta, in an interview with
to Parisian the day before the opening ceremony, warned:

Whatever the level of preparation, whatever the difficulties encountered in going to competitions, it is up to the athletes and coaches to be present. We should not look for alibis or justifications for underperformance. When you go to the Games, you must first be determined to seize every opportunity. “

The boss of high performance within the National Sports Agency is everywhere during these Games, in rowing, skateboarding, mountain biking, table tennis, judo, BMX, fencing, canoeing. … He scours the sites, discusses with coaches and managers. He has seen leaders collapse, but also younger ones assert themselves. All of this will help him perfect his “Blue Ambition” program, which aims to transform the French sports system to shine in Paris in 2024. And afterwards too, as long as we do.

Even if all the defeated athletes “meet in Paris”, the former coach of Experts, like everyone else, sees the difficulties of the Blues. Impervious to numbers, for now. “I’m not here to be happy or not. I try to find fine analyzes, without concession and make decisions so that we progress, he said, always to Parisian, after seeing Pauline Ferrand-Prévôt fail mountain biking. You just have to find the best solutions to progress. The important thing is to be able to analyze and understand why some worked and others did not. “

Question of state of mind?

The resources made available to the athletes, the approach to competition, the mental conditioning in order to collect medals… There will be food for thought at the end of these Games. On the last point, in particular, we were sometimes surprised by the speeches heard from the mouths of some, “happy to be there” or “already happy to have arrived in the final” while this was not the only stated objective. . Is this state of mind enough to become an Olympic champion? We asked Tony Estanguet on Monday, after Martin Thomas’ 5th place in the canoe slalom. Only the second failed podium in the discipline since 1992.

“Yes, that may be enough,” replied the three-time gold medalist. Each athlete knows himself better than anyone and has his own strategy for mental preparation. They know under what conditions they are the best. For some, you have to set the bar very high and put a lot of pressure on yourself, for others you have to see things differently and step up as you go. There is no recipe. It’s not by saying something else [en parlant de Martin Thomas] that it would necessarily have worked better. “

In the meantime, we have to see in what state France will come out of these Games. With 13 medals when we arrive at the end of the first week, the announced goal of forty podiums took a hit – the Blues had 17 medals including five gold after a week in Rio. There is obviously a good package of events to reverse the trend, between hand, basketball, athletics, karate, pentathlon, sailing or horse riding. Provided, already, that the pillars remain in place. Please.



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