“What assessment do you draw from the Olympics?
There is only enormous satisfaction. The goal was a medal. When I arrived in 2017, two months before the Olympic Games were awarded, I promised myself, if I served two terms, that there was no question of leaving Paris without a medal. We put everything in place to get there. We did it last week in the team event (silver medal for men)it freed everyone a little. Next, Lisa (Barbelin) who was potentially medal-worthy fulfilled his mission (individual bronze medal). This is historic for archery. But there were other results: the quarter-final for Baptiste Addis, the eighth for Thomas Chirault. These are results that we have never achieved at the Games either. The French team prepared well, arrived ready, put on a high-quality show in a magnificent environment with an extraordinary audience.
What will French archery gain from these Games?
I think there will be an impact on the licensees. This is always the case when the Olympic Games take place in Europe, because people easily follow them on television and want to do sport at the start of the school year. So archery benefits from this. We showed beautiful images, visual and sporting. The idea was to reach 100,000 licensees by the time of the Paris Games. Covid-19 slowed us down a little in our progress, so we are at 80,000 today. Will we be able to reach this 100,000 mark, which would also allow the Federation (française) to change dimension again and perhaps continue to structure and invest at a high level? I hope that we can continue to position ourselves as an important federation, that it is not just the Asian federations that are dominant, but that France can play at that level.
“Baptiste Addis will very quickly enter the top 5 in the world”
