French athletes selected for the Paris Olympic Games will be even more pampered than usual to prepare for their events. A “performance house”, located a stone’s throw from the Olympic village, will be entirely dedicated to them with their supervision to optimize their preparation and limit constraints as much as possible.
3 mins
The French Olympic team intends to fully exploit the advantage of playing the Olympic Games “at home”. Beneficiary, like other major nations, of the first choice of buildings for the accommodation of athletes in the Olympic village, it will also have – outside the perimeter of the residences, therefore accessible to non-accredited people – its dedicated setting, the performance house .
The National Sports Agency (ANS), the organization in particular responsible for the high level tricolor, will make the Marcel-Cachin high school in Saint-Ouen a place for preparation, recovery and support for athletes. In total, 9,000 highly secure square meters, divided into several work spaces – weight training rooms, combat sports rooms, boxing rooms, fencing rooms, weightlifting rooms, archery rooms -, meeting and conviviality rooms to optimize performance and focus on specific needs.
“ We will have a parallel organization for meetings, video analyzes and specific needs, such as managing weight loss for athletes. », Explains Patrick Rosso, the national technical director of taekwondo. “ It will make a lot of things easier in the final period, which may shift towards something very positive or not. “, he specifies.
Time saving
The idea is also to be more efficient, especially for team sports teams, usually obliged to go to a training room designated by the organizers of a competition, not always close to their accommodation and only available for limited time slots. “ The available time is fifty minutes, and you may have spent 45 to come and the same to return », Explains Claude Onesta, general manager of high performance at the ANS and a man of experience after four Games as coach of French handball players.
This constraint will not exist for the two handball selections and for the 5 x 5 basketball players, who will carry out their session in another dedicated annex, the Alice-Milliat gymnasium in L’Ile-Saint-Denis, the host town of another part of the village. “ There, not only will they be able to do two hours of training if they wish, but also do additional work with athletes who will not have played the day before », notes the double Olympic champion on the Blues bench.
Legacy equipment
This house of performance, designed in close collaboration with all the federations concerned, should have already seen the light of day at the Tokyo Olympic Games if Covid-19 had not turned everything upside down.
Thanks to State funding, the ANS will be able to invest up to 4.5 million euros in the installations and materials then bequeathed as inheritance to different entities such as the French Olympic Committee, schools or even local public establishments. sports training.
Those qualified for the Games and their coaches will be able to benefit from them from July 23.
Read alsoParis 2024: does France have the means to achieve its ambitions?