The French Badminton Federation has recruited Spaniard Fernando Rivas, the coach of 2016 Olympic singles champion Carolina Marin, as senior sports performance manager, it announced on Wednesday at two and a half years from the Paris 2024 Games. The world-renowned technician will always remain the coach of Carolina Marin, also three-time world champion (2014, 2015 and 2018) and will divide his time between the two functions.
FFBad President Yohan Penel chose Fernando Rivas for “add internationally recognized badminton expertiseto the team of coaches already in place. The 44-year-old Spaniard has signed a two-and-a-half-year part-time contract with the federation, ie until the 2024 Olympics. In a press conference, he declared that he was “very motivated at the idea of making this French team progress“, a team which according to him has a lot of potential, the results in the youth categories being very interesting.
The French badminton team was disappointing at the last Olympic Games in Tokyo, with no player able to make it out of the group stages of the tournament. The idea for the national technical director is “to prepare as well as possible for Paris and to use these Games for 2028». «We are not currently able to guarantee medals in Paris among the able-bodied“, he added.
The arrival of Rivas is the latest in a series of recruitments of major foreign technicians in French sport with a view to the Olympic Games at home in 2024. After the Dutchman Jacco Verhaeren, enlisted by the French swimming federation or the German Jürgen Grobler by that of rowing, the South Korean Oh Seon-Tek, multi-medal coach of the Korean archery team at the 2000 and 2012 Olympics, for example, was appointed head coach of the team from France in early February.
