Will the Paris 2024 Olympics really encourage the French to take up sport?

Faster, higher, stronger… and sportier? This is one of the major objectives of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games: to encourage the French to leave their sofa (a little) behind to put on their sneakers. The chairman of the organizing committee for these Olympic Games, Tony Estanguet, hammers it out throughout the interview (as in West France in 2022): “We want the French to do more sport thanks to the Olympic Games.” Noble ambition, which, by the way, would suit the State well, just to lighten the public health expenses linked to a sedentary lifestyle.

This “French evil” affects 70% of women and 42% of men, according to an ANSES study published in February 2022. In 2021, the WHO already noted in a report on the physical activity of school children that France was very far behind at the global level (119th out of 146 countries). There will therefore not be too much of the Olympic and Paralympic week, which lasts until Sunday April 9, to try to make the French aware of the sporting thing.

On paper, the link between the Olympic Games and physical activity seems obvious. The beautiful stride of Usain Bolt, the furious ippons of Teddy Riner or the supersonic lengths of Laure Manaudou, this is enough to inspire a generation of children and make their parents want to move. An Ipsos poll carried out in July 2021 in around thirty countries, before the last Tokyo Games, established that 80% of those polled think that the Olympic Games arouse sporting vocations (but only 62% in France).

The London myth of two million

Take out the violins and let the beautiful speech of Sebastian Coe resonate, the former British middle-distance champion who became patron of the London Games and tells how he fell into the pot of Olympism when he was a child. Recipe for the magic potion: the exploits on the Mexico tartan of athletes John and Sheila Sherwood in 1968. “A new world opened up to me. When it came time to return to class, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. The following week, I showed up at my neighborhood athletics club.”

Hence the high quantified objectives for the 2012 Games. The double Olympic champion in the 1,500m (1980 and 1984) ensured at the time*: “I don’t care if we finish 4th or 20th in the medal table, but that these great moments in British sport inspire 10,000 more kids to get into sport.” The British government was thinking much bigger*. Nothing less than 2 million “couch potatoes” whom the authorities hoped to convert to jogging. Until the 2010 legislative elections, where the Conservatives ousted the Labor Party. “The new majority quickly realized that this goal was totally unachievable, and it disappeared from official documents”tip for franceinfo Shushu Chen, specialist in the legacy of major events.

A wise decision. While British athletes have fueled well in the medal standings, sports clubs have remained less full than pubs. Five years and a billion pounds swallowed up later, the finding is clear: the proportion of Her Gracious Majesty’s subjects who sweat their 150 minutes weekly regulation has not budged an inch, notes the government agency Sport England , quoted by the BBC*.

The quivering of curves in the months following the lighting of the flame fizzled out. “There are several factors to this failure”advances to franceinfo Vassil Girginov, professor of sports management at Brunel University in London. “First, the clubs’ inability to capitalize on the Olympic ‘momentum’. At the rowing federation, for example, they received up to a thousand phone calls a day from people asking them where the fastest club was. close. They had to refuse people on the spot. These people, they never found them.”

Same story for Sydney 2000, where only seven Olympic sports federations saw their number of licensees increase slightly in Australia after the Games. At the same time, paradoxically, nine others have seen the number of practitioners decrease, found a study by London University in 2007*.

Soft Focus Gold Medal

If there is one fact on which all the studies agree, it is the fact that organizing the Games especially reinforces the sporting practice of those who are already doing it. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to isolate the impact of the Olympic Games on these curves. In 2004, was the post-Athens Games quiver in the curve of practitioners in Greece due to the exploits of Justin Gatlin and others? Or to the surprise victory a few weeks earlier of the national football team at Euro 2004? Or even the program launched by the European Parliament to promote education through sport, trickling down the money from Brussels to promote the benefits of physical activity? “We cannot establish a direct correlation”tempers the academic Sakis Pappous, author of a study on the subject.

The proof in London. In 2012, the program called “Inspire A Generation”* (“inspire a generation”) associated with the Games, ended in failure among the poorest and most sedentary populations. In 2015, his successor, “Sporting Future”*, gives excellent results, thanks to a more targeted approach to the areas in difficulty. Like the London district of Hackney, which has climbed 13 places* in the ranking of the most active areas of the capital since 2015. “Obviously, it’s complicated to attribute the merit to the Olympic Games”we euphemize at SportLondon, the agency responsible for encouraging the practice of sport in the English capital.

Since the Sydney Games in 2000*, the IOC has made this intangible heritage in terms of public health one of its main objectives, with the support of the WHO. “Before, all we asked of the host cities was to extend the money and, possibly, to play the role of pavilion witnessing the latest technological developments”, sums up Vassil Girginov in broad strokes. For obvious reasons of acceptability by the general public, faced with the billions spent for a few weeks of competition, the cursor has been moved. “Host City Contract* imposes the establishment of a long-term plan to encourage physical activity in the country”assures the CIO to franceinfo.

Screens, “main competitor”

Curiously, the tangible proofs of an influence of the Games on the sports practice of Mr. and Mrs. Everybody are nevertheless attested, and this well before the IOC made it a prerequisite. The presence of the marathon during the first modern Games, in Athens in 1896, provoked “marathon madness”told* for example in 2012 the academic Bruce Kidd, with cities which then rushed to organize their 42 km race at the beginning of the 20th century. “Thousands of adults have taken to running, adopting better nutrition and a healthier lifestyle”he wrote. More recently, in 2016, Japanese academics noted in a survey a peak in sports practice among those who were 20 years old during the 1964 Games* in Tokyo.

A bygone era. “Today, the main competitor of sport is indoor leisure, which has been able to renew itself considerably over the past thirty years., points to franceinfo Themis Kokolakakis, sports economist at the University of Sheffield. Thank you video game consoles and VOD platforms… “The challenge for sports policies now is to manage to maintain the rate of practice within the population, especially among young people”, he continues. The Paris 2024 organizing committee has understood this well by picking up the children from school, with the famous 30 minutes of sport per day and the Olympic week intended to instill a passion for effort from an early age. – with a laborious implementation, according to the teachers’ unions.

“It is between 6 and 11 years old that the appetite for physical activity is played out”, supports Marie Barsacq, Impact and Legacy Director of the Paris Games. The latter describes a multi-stage rocket from the program introduced in primary school. “If you don’t master gestures like throwing, running, jumping… If you feel awkward, you won’t go and push the door of a club once you’re a teenager. National Education will introduce a test physical aptitude at the start of 6th grade to assess the impact of this program. This is the only quantified objective that we have set ourselves: to break the curve of sedentary lifestyle among children.