After the almost total failure of French athletes at the Budapest worlds, the French Athletics Federation (FFA) was summoned to the Ministry of Sports on Tuesday, where the discussion was “tonic” according to Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra.
Less than a year from the Paris Olympics, the French athletics team has indeed almost hit rock bottom at the World Championships in Budapest, avoiding zero points in extremis thanks to the silver medal in the 4x400m relay. male.
“We had a dense, intense, tonic meeting, with broken sticks to debrief these worlds and identify together all the avenues of optimization that we can align to improve performance for the Olympic and Paralympic Games”, has indicated the minister to the press at the end of this meeting where the National Sports Agency (ANS) was present.
“Debriefs” will be made by “all of the specialty managers then a cold debriefing with the various athletes” with a view to a gathering in Saint-Malo at the end of October, she said during an audio conference. There will also be a “traineeship in South Africa at the beginning of December”, “both a moment of training and a moment of cohesion”, she said.
The director of high performance at the French Athletics Federation (FFA), Romain Barras, described the meeting as “very challenging with specific objectives with the aim of all succeeding together”.
For his part, the president of the FFA, André Giraud, assured that “there is no problem between the ANS and the federation. We have never put so many resources into enabling our athletes to succeed”.
“Everyone knows that there were tensions between the ANS and the FFA after Tokyo, this is no longer the case today,” added the minister. “We are not going to overnight become a huge nation of athletics that we have never been in the past,” she said.
“One year from the Games, the funnels are inevitably tightening,” noted Romain Barras with AFP this weekend. The state of the results today will inevitably have an impact on the number of athletes helped by the ANS, which no longer believes in the “fantasy of six or eight medals”, he said.
