Recently buoyed by the silver medal at the World Team Championships, French table tennis is experiencing historic enthusiasm as the Olympic Games approach.
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That Sunday morning, Tommy barely changed his habits. After a hearty breakfast then a vigorous jog, this law student lay down in front of his computer at the stroke of noon. But this time, no One Piece episode or football video. Like many of his peers, the Ile-de-France resident connected to Twitch to follow a match… of table tennis. “If someone had told me that a few months ago…he laughs. But with the Lebrun brothers, I got into the game.” Despite the defeat of the French in the final of the World Team Championships against China, Sunday February 25 in Busan (South Korea)he vibrated as rarely for Alexis and Félix Lebrun or Simon Gauzy.
Tommys, there were 470,000 that morning, combining RMC Sport’s YouTube and Twitch channels. “We were very far away, but we felt that something was happening that we hadn’t seen for a very long time.”, illustrates Simon Gauzy. Telegenic, accessible and carried by two geniuses with well-shaped heads and arms of steel, this is the recipe for hype unprecedented in table tennis, a few months before the Paris Olympic Games.
Behind this success, there is a combination of factors. “First of all, it’s a very popular activity, everyone has already played it and therefore recognizes each other.”, says Gilles Erb, president of the French Table Tennis Federation. But despite the successive generations of schoolchildren bottle-fed at the turns or up and down during PE class, a headliner was missing. “The Lebruns boosted all thatcontinues the president. It’s a great story: they are two brothers from a family of table tennis players, who rose through the ranks very quickly.” Until reaching sixth place in the world for Félix, the youngest (17 years old). “No one has ever had these results in France, apart from Jean-Philippe Gatien (silver medalist at the 1992 Olympics)”continues Gauzy.
“I know that the media like to put the two brothers in the same basket, but there is a difference. Felix, he’s a UFO!”
Simon Gauzy, 27th in the world and member of the French teamat franceinfo: sport
Lebrun-mania goes far beyond the traditional boundaries of table tennis. The prodigies have recently signed partnerships with Carrefour or the business tourism agency VIParis. “But they are still very accessible people, they are capable of spending two hours signing autographs”, indicates Claire Chevassus, president of the Montpellier-Nîmes Alliance. It was there, in Hérault, that it all began for the two prodigies. There, too, that the craze around ping materializes the most.
The birth of a Lebrun generation
Promoted to Pro A in the wake of its golden family, the local club attracts crowds. “We could easily accommodate 1000 or 1500 people”, swears the president, ordered, for the time being, to make do with a room of 300 seats. The away matches are also sold out, even when the Lebruns are retained with the French team and therefore absent. HAS La Romagna, a small town of barely 2,000 souls in the Cholet region, the 200 general public tickets for the local team’s match against Montpellier-Nîmes were sold out in a quarter of an hour. To satisfy everyone, he It was therefore necessary to broadcast the meeting on a giant screen in an annex room.
This sudden interest creates vocations. “In terms of licenses, we are very much ahead compared to 2019, the last year before Covid”, indicates president Gilles Erb. At the last count, France had 210,000 licensees. “When I do interventions in schools to motivate young people, the clubs tell me ‘calm down, we don’t have enough space!'”, illustrates Jérôme Besset, of the Loire Haute-Loire table tennis committee.
From Pont-L’Évêque to Aix-les-Bains via Saintes, many clubs are breaking their licensing records. “80% of it is attributed to the Lebrun brothersexplains Besset. Now, kids play pen holders in schools. They hold their racket like Felix!” A success such as the French ping faces a shortage of coaches to supervise this Lebrun generation, which the clubs had not anticipated.
A craze set to last
Should we see this unsuspected craze as revenge for a sport that has long been despised? For the president of the Federation, this fight is “behind us”. Likewise, the times when we tried to banish the term “ping-pong” for a more serious “table tennis” are over. “Everyone understands the dual identity of table tennis: both its friendly and popular aspect, but also the very demanding Olympic practice”continues Gilles Erb.
Likewise, the difficulty of professional practice, with its exchanges at nearly 100 km/h, is obvious. In other words, there is a world of difference between racquet hits at the bottom of the garden and the performances of the greatest champions. Their increasing media coverage makes it possible to better measure it, and therefore to better consider their prowess. “People are becoming more and more detached from the image of camping as a sportsupports Simon Gauzy, 27th player in the world. On the contrary, it’s very mental, we know that if we’re absent for a minute, we take 5 or 6 points and that’s crippling.”
The blow is not about to die down, as the home Olympics loom. “If we are in the game and we play for the medal, it will continue to increase attractiveness and exposure”, hopes Gilles Erb. Especially since new challenges present themselves to the Federation. “We have a very good pool, but we only have five players in the top 100, that’s not enoughnuance Gauzy, climbed to 8th place in the world in 2018. We could get closer to Japan and South Korea, knowing that China is currently unreachable.”
This is the paradox of the discipline: even if its head, not yet an adult, is at the dawn of its career, it has every interest in diversifying its champions so as not to be dependent on them. In the world of French ping, no one has forgotten that the previous golden age, embodied by Jean-Philippe Gatien in the 1990s, was followed by a long decline for lack of new players.