Watch the record debut of the French with already 16 medals on the third day

Never in the history of the modern Summer Olympics has France won so many medals in three days of competition.

A majestic start, with already 16 medals for France. At the end of a record Monday, July 29 during these Paris 2024 Olympic Games, the French delegation rises to the second place in the overall ranking. For the Blues, such a result on the third day of the competition has never been seen since 1896 and the first edition of the Summer Olympic Games of the modern era.

To visualize the progression of the tricolor medals, it is necessary to compare it with the most recent editions. Franceinfo offers you a count of French victories since the beginning of the competitions, all metals combined, since Barcelona 1992. The infographic below, which we will update over the course of the competitions, allows us to see that the good French results of Paris 2024 are better than the good start of Atlanta, in 1996.

Led by Antoine Dupont, the French rugby 7s team showed the way by being the first to win. Judo is still playing its role as a reliable sport in this area with five medals already won by Shirine Boukli, Luka Mkheidze, Amandine Buchard, Sarah-Léonie Cysique and Joan-Benjamin Gaba. The Tricolores were also able to count on swimming with the highly anticipated Léon Marchand. Nicolas Gestin in canoeing and Manon Brunet-Apithy in sabre added two gold medals to the French haul on Monday.

In the rest of the competition, the objective will be to beat the record of 43 medals dating back to the Beijing Games in 2008 (a total raised after the disqualification of opponents). For comparison, France only had four medals after three days of competition at these Olympic Games in China.

Methodology: The data used to create this infographic comes from the Olympedia.org website. Only competitions since Barcelona 1992 were analyzed, in order to compare the results of Paris 2024 with Olympics with a comparable number of events. We counted all the medals, but it is only the gold medals that take precedence for the general ranking.