100 days before the start of the Beijing Olympics, persistent uncertainties related to Covid-19 weigh on the logistics of the planetary event. Athletes, now familiar with the health constraints that are looming, do not linger there. “This is my tenth Olympics, the third as a logistician, and I’ve never seen that”, regretted Rémi Sella, project manager with the DTN of the French Ski Federation (FFS), at the beginning of the month.
“For the moment we know absolutely nothing, whether it is for the transport of people, freight, dates, prices, we cannot get any information”, deplores the logistics of the FFS, responsible for sending around 210 people (athletes, coaching) and 25 tons of equipment to China in February.
The FFS (alpine, nordic skiing, freestyle, snowboard and biathlon) takes its information from the French Olympic Committee (CNOSF), which itself draws them from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) which published Monday a “playbook” detailing the conditions of stay in China.
“We have a big file with a lot of things that are uncertain, linked to the context and to China, whereas usually, at that time, we are calm and we know exactly where we are going and how we are going”, summarizes his DTN Fabien Saguez. “It’s super blurry”, abounds Nathalie Péchalat, the president of the French Federation of ice sports (FFSG) and head of mission of the French delegation in Beijing.
“We are awaiting directives from the IOC and Beijing 2022 to know under what conditions we will be able to support all our athletes”, she adds, expecting a frame “stricter than in Tokyo”. “We will try to adapt as well as possible while spreading a message of serenity to our athletes. If we lose energy with that, we are already starting very badly. We are surely the disciplines with the most adaptability of the French sport, let’s make that a force “, Saguez continues, referring to the frequent weather hazards to which skiing is subject.
And the sportsmen in all this? “They are very focused on their performance, not on that”, summarizes Péchalat. “Of course it won’t be an ordinary Olympics, but anyway, the Olympics, it’s not an event we’re used to!”, positive the 2018 Olympic vice-champion and quadruple ice dance world champion Gabriella Papadakis. We are already super happy to be able to play the Games. I think of the summer athletes who saw theirs canceled (in 2020), and who still two months before did not really know … It must have been untenable. I feel so lucky that I didn’t have to go through this. “
“I want to focus more on the performance there is to do, the work upstream, what there is to do on the ice, rather than on the rest. ‘to adapt to”, she continues.
“We will be well briefed by our team, our federation, the CNOSF”, considers his partner Guillaume Cizeron. If they, absent from the ice between January 2020 and October 2021, are not familiar with competitions at the time of the Covid, eighteen months of the pandemic mean that most athletes are now used to it.
“We had a full season with health constraints, the vaccine has arrived in the meantime, it helps to be a little more serene. I cannot control much except to pay attention on a daily basis and apply the actions related to the Covid -19, but that doesn’t worry me more than that “, explains the 2020 double world champion in alpine skiing Mathieu Faivre.
“At the Olympics that I have known (in 2014 and 2018), my family has never been there, so it won’t change much. And there were never a lot of people at the finish line, it was far, difficult to get there for the spectators “, he philosophizes about the already announced absence of fans from abroad. “Tokyo showed us an example of what to expect, but we are lucky to have audiences, appreciates Cizeron. For a spectacle sport like skating, it is very important to feel this presence. “