The French renewed their confidence in Emmanuel Macron for a second term, Sunday, April 24. Over the next five years, France will be at the heart of international sporting events, including hosting the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games and the 2023 Rugby World Cup.
Never has a French president covered so many sporting events of this magnitude. Behind the prestige and influence of such meetings, President Macron should not forget the major national issues, such as the thorny issue of violence in football stadiums or better integration of women in all branches of the French sports. Overview of the projects in progress and to be carried out.
Paris 2024 and France 2023: the goal of shining at home
Emmanuel Macron has made the success of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games a goal. In September 2021, when he received the French medalists who had returned from Tokyo, the President of the Republic acknowledged that the results were not “exactly what we expected”. With 33 medals gleaned, nine less than in Rio four years earlier, the French team has positioned itself below its usual standards.
“We have to do a lot more, because these are our Games, at home, we are expected”, said Emmanuel Macron, giving the objective of integrating the world top 5 at the end of the Olympic Games. For this, he promised that the State would support French athletes, insisting on the current philosophy of “focus our efforts on disciplines with high potential” of medals.
At the forefront, the National Sports Agency (ANS) has the mission of giving the necessary support – financial, structural, organizational – to sports federations to win medals in Paris. In particular, France has launched since September 2021 a vast operation to recruit foreign coaches, which has made it possible to seek skills beyond our borders when the needs of the federations required it. The requirement is also the same for 2023, since France will receive the Men’s Rugby World Cup, a year and a half after the XV of France won its first Grand Slam in twelve years. A first opportunity to shine before the Games.
Make France a global esports scene
President Macron has already shown on many occasions his attachment to the digital sector and innovation in the broad sense. As a candidate, Emmanuel Macron has, in recent days, focused on esports. “We are one of the great nations of video games, recognized throughout the world for the richness of its works, the quality of its training and the dynamism of its industry”, he estimated in an interview published on April 24 with our colleagues from The Big Whale, a site specializing in the news of new web technologies.
For the Head of State, France must take advantage of the Paris Games to position itself in esports, “another area of French excellence”. “It’s up to us to take advantage of it to make the link between the Olympiads of the two worlds by hosting the biggest sports events in the world that year: a CS:GO major, the Worlds of League of Legends and The International of Dota 2. (i.e. the three biggest competitions in the discipline). If the French trust me, we will work on it as soon as I am elected. This is also the influence of France”, he assured in this same interview.
The urgent need to pacify the stands
Violence in football stadiums has become recurrent this season. So much so that the question was raised to the highest level of the State. After an initial consultation meeting on November 23, 2021, the Ministry of the Interior established three weeks later, on December 16, a series of measures to try to stem this violence: the definitive and systematic cessation of a match in the event of a referee or player injured by a projectile, a maximum period of 30 minutes to decide the fate of the match, and the banning of plastic bottles in stadiums as of July 1, 2022.
Will these measures be enough to stem this haemorrhage? Marked by a dozen various incidents, the 2021-2022 Ligue 1 season again experienced excesses this month with an attempt intrusion of spectators on April 10 on the ground in Brest, opposite Nantes, against a background of tensions between ultras. Or on April 23, with the interruption for half an hour of the match between Saint-Etienne and Monaco due to smoke bombs and fireworks, normally prohibited in the stadium, used by the ultras to celebrate the thirty years of the Green Angels group.
A sporting France through sport at school
Emmanuel Macron had already tested the measure under his first five-year term. He decided to make it one of his proposals for his second term. The Head of State wishes to generalize the measure of thirty minutes of sport per day at school throughout the territory, for children aged 6 to 12, from the start of the 2022 school year. This measure, which comes in supplement to the hours of physical education and sports (EPS), was already included in the law on the democratization of sport voted on February 24, 2022.
This time of daily physical activity is a first step in the fight against a sedentary lifestyle, which is very present among young French people. According to the expert appraisal carried out by ANSES, published in November 2020, 66% of young people from 11 to 17 years old questioned, “present a worrying health risk”. On the ground, the measure is not unanimous, due to a school timetable that is difficult to stretch and unequal sports facilities on the territory.
Place of women in sport: after awareness, actions
After the revelations of former skater Sarah Abitbol, in January 2020, on the sexual assaults she suffered between 15 and 17 years old, the voice of women was released in the world of sport. The impact was so great that the Ministry of Sports launched a National Convention for the Prevention of Violence in Sport in 2020. This Convention, which has become an annual meeting, has made it possible to report cases of sexual assault in sport to the State level and to identify and punish the perpetrators of these acts.
More generally, the place of women in sport at all levels has been affirmed (athletes, supervisors, leaders) particularly on the issue of parity in leadership positions within sports federations. This parity, enshrined in the law on the democratization of sport in France, voted in February 2022, will come into force in 2024 at the national level, in 2028 for the regional level. But after awareness and announcements of change, President Macron’s second five-year term will be judged on action.