Where do French successes in team sports come from?

Thirty years ago, the French men’s handball team was going to play its first world championship final. It was March 20, 1993 in Stockholm. The Blues released their record despite losing to Russia (19-28). At the start of 2023, the distant successors to the Barjots, the nickname given to the heroes of the Swedish campaign, kick off the World Cup on January 11 in Poland. The French men’s team, with six titles and five podiums in fifteen consecutive participations, has become the benchmark. In the same 1993, the clubs of Limoges in basketball and Marseille in football became European champions. French sport has discovered, admiring the individual winners, from Anquetil to Pérec and from Longo to Noah, the collective victories.

Football, basketball, handball, volleyball, women and men ended up breaking the glass ceiling in selections as in clubs, in continental, world and Olympic competitions. Only XV’s from France, multiple tournament winners, chase world dedication, even if women’s rugby seven won Olympic silver in Tokyo. The opportunity returns this year, at home, to the Galician players. The “silver” basketball players in Tokyo will do the same at the end of August with the World Cup.

Was the intensity of the Olympic performances in joint sports at the Tokyo Games in the summer of 2021 (1) a definitive indication of the rise of France? The movement has been going on for a long time. From the Grand Slam of rugby players in Galilee, the first for twelve winters, to the world final of Blues Deschamps in Doha, passing through the basketball players silver in Euro and the bronze of rugby tricolor in New York. New Zealand World Cup, the sports company extended the demonstration to 2022, only to talk about most of the media.

General training success

The 2022 ranking of the nation’s greatest sporting indicator (2), in which France finished the year in second place, as in 2018, behind the United States, but ahead of China and Great Britain, is a quantitative answer. Other required parameters. “Sport needs an example of victory,” analyzes Guillaume Gilles, handball coach, nicknamed both as a player and coach. “If you show that it is possible, we follow you in the back. Then there is the transmission of earning. At hand, we have this culture. It is clear that handball was a school sport on the court thirty years ago. Our elders were obsessed with wanting to drive the discipline out of its rut. Locomotive She was the France team. She was the bomber. She shook success out of the club’s hands. In other disciplines as well.

Gill points out another feature: “The associative system remains the fundamental basis of our mathematical movements. We have this unique tool, it must be preserved. Everything that is carried out from a young age in the field by teachers to allow access to practice, variety and education in differences, cooperation and confrontation at the same time , is the best possible school for life.leads to excellence.

Ludovic Fabregas, 26, the centerpiece of FC Barcelona, ​​gives his interpretation that he is seen from the outside by players and technicians. “What characterizes the spirit is this reserve, the production of players without stopping, as he specifies. The level of the French national team always remains high but this is also the case in the choices of youth, girls and boys. Mixing generations is a strength.”

Training “French style”, in contrast to the special models that are sometimes launched abroad, is based on a country-wide aspiration. With the National Institute of Sport, Experience and Performance (Insep), in Paris, emerging in the mid-1960s, a whole network, from the first Crips to the Poles of Last Hope, spread in France to the youngest closest. athletes. Only the United States (Colorado Springs) and Australia (Canberra) have a national status such as INSP.

Finally, the association of athletes with their careers in the blue jersey was no less paradoxical when France became the European country “exporting” its talent beyond its borders. Such is the case of French basketball players, many of whom went to the NBA’s El Dorado but are scrambling to return, sometimes against the advice of their employer, to play for Team France and in front of their own fans.

Will the improvement in triathlon co-sports continue? has. “The cake is getting bigger and everyone, the employers’ clubs and the selections, wants their share,” Guillaume Gilles clearly analyzes when discussing the options between the clubs and the selections. We may have reached the end of the system. We increase competitions and matches and reach as much as we can absorb in terms of competitions for players. We’ll have to remain reasonable. At risk of losing everything.