The Jura can take their hats off to Quentin Fillon Maillet. With five medals won alone at the Beijing Olympics, the native biathlete of Champagnole allows his massif to dominate the ranking of the 2022 edition of the Winter Olympics, which ends on Sunday February 20. This has not happened often, the Alps historically playing this role. Conversely, the retirement of Martin Fourcade has done a lot of harm to the Pyrenees, which does not place any native on a podium in Beijing. While the last events are over, franceinfo takes stock, by crossing a table of French medals and a geographical map of the hexagonal mountains.
Methodological point: it was necessary to draw arbitrary outlines for the five main French mountain ranges. Are counted, for the Alps, the departments of Alpes-Maritimes, Hautes-Alpes, Isère, Savoie and Haute-Savoie. For the Jura massif, the Doubs, the Jura, the Haut-Doubs and the Ain. For the Massif Central, Puy-de-Dôme, Cantal, Allier, Haute-Loire, Loire, Creuse, Corrèze, Haute-Vienne, Lozère, Aveyron, Lot and Ardeche. For the Vosges massif, the Vosges department, the Territoire de Belfort, Haute-Saône. The most contentious cases, in particular the attachment of Ain to the Jura, only marginally change the results of the tables.
If we take a step back, since the Games of 1924, the historical domination of the Alps does not suffer any challenge, with champions like Franck Piccard, Alexis Pinturault or Raphaël Poirée. Note that despite its highest point at 215 meters, Ile-de-France has won 24 medals (twelve for Paris, eight for Hauts-de-Seine – thank you Jean-Claude Killy, Philippe Candeloro and Perrine Pelen –, three for Essonne and one for Seine-Saint-Denis).
Buthe classification by discipline confirms a specificity. Biathlon, long derided as a “Jura customs sport”, benefits from a strong anchoring in the Jura massif, and this, before the “QFM” tornado which hit Beijing. France suffering from a real biathlon-dependence at the Winter Games (half of the total for 2022 was acquired at the end of the rifle), the future seems bright for the most successful massifs in this sport.