Older French people will remember the shame felt by the nation when it had to wait until the very last day of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics to hear the Marseillaise played at a medal ceremony, thanks to the show jumper Pierre Jonquères d’Oriola. It had been even worse in Rome four years previously, with a mere five medals to bring home, none of them gold. We were good at organising and regulating sports. We loved creating competitions and setting up international federations. No one came close to us in that regard; but, as to the rest – fighting for titles and medals – we were resigned to our fate of admiring victors from afar. We were Monsieur Hulot. Winning was someone else’s game.
Then the miracle of Atlanta 1996 happened. The French delegation collected 15 gold medals, 37 medals in total, which placed the country sixth in the rankings, higher than at any time since the 1940s. It was not by chance. General de Gaulle had been stung by the lamentable showing of France’s representatives in Rome and Tokyo and decreed that the state – that is, himself – should intervene.
Public money flowed into sports from the mid‑1960s onwards. The altitude training centre of Saint-Romeu, in the Pyrenees, was opened in time to help French athletes to acclimatise to the conditions in Mexico City at the 1968 summer Games. Work began on the Parc des Princes in 1970. The Institut National du Football, later to be relocated in Clairefontaine, opened its doors in Vichy in 1972. What le Grand Charles wanted, he usually got. Atlanta 1996, like the 1998 World Cup, was his legacy.
One thing set France apart, however. When other countries such as the UK responded to the professionalisation of sport by pouring cash into the funding of elite athletes and coaches (and the facilities that they needed to train, doctors and physios in tow) with a view of finishing as high in the medal table as possible, la République chose to spread its wealth more widely. The sums involved were and remain colossal. French local authorities devote €12.5bn each year to sport, 12 times the contribution of their British equivalents and the contribution of the public purse to sports funding now amounts to €20bn.
The best of the best received generous awards, but the bulk of the investment went elsewhere, namely to the building of new infrastructure and the public support of almost any sporting activity imaginable, to the extent that sports that would be considered “minority” pursuits in most other countries now attract tens if not hundreds of thousands of practitioners across the Channel. Archery: 74,000 registered club members (compared to 32,000 in the UK). Fencing: 55,000 (12,800). Sailing: 270,000 (103,000). Canoe-kayak: 316,000 (90,000). Karate: 253,000 (15,000). Judo: 500,000 (30,000).
Even athletics, in which France has struggled to make more than a fleeting impression internationally: 256,000 (142,000). The contrast is even starker when team sports are considered, with the exceptions of cricket and field hockey. A talent pool of 183,000 volleyball players, 600,000 handballers and 711,000 basketballers, compared with a grand total of 15,000 registered players in all three sports in Britain, explains why France came back from Tokyo 2020 with five medals in those disciplines, including three of the six gold medals on offer. There was even the unexpected bonus of a silver medal for the French women’s rugby sevens team in Japan and, now, the hope that their male counterparts – who have just won the World Series final in Madrid – can go one better, in no small part thanks to the influence of the brilliant Antoine Dupont.
The Toulouse scrum-half’s decision to withdraw from the France Six Nations squad and switch to the sevens code is often presented as the act of a uniquely gifted rugby man desperate to exact some kind of personal revenge for the heart-wrenching defeat against South Africa in the Rugby World Cup quarter-final last year. Another way to frame it would be that Dupont feels he has a duty to heal the hurt felt by a whole nation: if it is some kind of crusade, it is not just a personal one. The French know it, and love him even more for that.
France’s revered sports figures tend to be individuals who have been part of a collective triumph: think Zinédine Zidane, think Nikola Karabatic, perhaps the greatest handball player in history, think Serge Blanco. Think Teddy Riner, already an individual gold medallist in London and Rio, who inspired France’s mixed judo team to beat Japan on their own soil three years ago. If you’re good enough to win, bravo, but if you’re good enough to make your team win, you’re a true hero.
It is a unique culture in western Europe, as well as a unique model, strangely similar to the system in Warsaw Pact countries before the collapse of the USSR – minus the ideology and the state-sponsored doping programmes. It fits in well within the long tradition of French dirigisme in place since Jean-Baptiste Colbert became Louis XIV’s first minister of state and, some would say, the first technocrate to run a European country. It chimes with the Gaullist belief in the virtues of a “mixed economy” in which the boundaries between the private and public sectors are blurred to such an extent that it can be difficult to distinguish between the two.
France, it should be remembered, had a Ministry of Planification that devised five-year plans until 2006, survived all political changes since the end of the second world war and has now mutated into France Stratégies, a little-known but still influential cog in the French administrative wheel. In this regard, the role of the state in driving French sport success conforms to what is expected from the République in almost every other aspect of public life. Should Dupont stand to the Marseillaise on 27 July, he’ll know who to thank. The spirit of the General lives on.
