Paris 2024 Olympics: in amateur sports clubs, an “Olympic Games effect” already perceptible

| August 13, 2024 | Sport | No Comments

Paris 2024 Olympics: in amateur sports clubs, an "Olympic Games effect" already perceptible

Le triplé français en BMX risque de faire grimper les adhésions dans les clubs. MAXPPP – Hu Huhu

Carried by the epic stories of French athletes, from table tennis to BMX, including swimming, "the Olympics effect" is being felt in amateur sports clubs facing an increase in registration requests.

"Since this morning, I have had around ten calls. This is the equivalent of what I received for the whole month in August 2023!", rejoices Julien Bieganski, president of the club popular and sporting (CPS) of the 10th arrondissement of Paris, which claims 1 100 members, all sections combined.

Of the six disciplines on offer, volleyball and table tennis are the most popular: a situation he attributes to the gold medal won by the men's volleyball team, and “to the epic tale of the Lebrun brothers” in table tennis, who won team bronze alongside Simon Gauzy, after the youngest, Félix Lebrun, led the way by winning bronze in individual.

"For table tennis, we can easily go up to 180 members this season compared to 140 last season, and in volleyball we are 80, we will go up to 100", explains Mr. Bieganski, who plans to open seven to eight additional time slots, compared to around twenty hours per week in 2023.

A "old-fashioned" image erased

The club will also "double" its staff in September to "take charge of registrations, welcome new members", and will open a session for children from the age of three.

Concerning table tennis, "we have gone from an image of a "old-fashioned" leisure sport to a truly sought-after sport. It is a source of pride to see the image of our discipline evolve!", enthuses the man who participated in the Olympic torch relay in mid-July.

In the North, the Lille Université Club BMX and its 160 members are already fully booked for the season. “After Tokyo and Rio, we also recorded an increase in registrations ; but with this year's medal haul […], it's out of comparison with previous editions of the Games", notes its president, Raphaël Monnanteuil.

And for good reason, Joris Daudet, Sylvain André and Romain Mahieu, achieved a historic triple in BMX racing by winning gold, silver and bronze. We have to go back to 1924, a hundred years ago in Paris, to find traces of such a French hat-trick at the Summer Games, all sports combined.

“Normally, we start receiving requests for registrations, courses or discovery sessions the last week of August or the first week of September, at a rate of one or two. There, for the + leisure+ part of the club, we received twenty requests in the hours, days, following the end of the events", he rejoices.

At the VB BMX club in Verrières-le-Buisson, in Essonne (south of Paris), the president and trainer of the club, Lucas Auchecorne, 23, has seen the requests for registrations "quadruple". It was “It's sometimes difficult to compete with tennis, horse riding […] we were taken for people who ride on dirt bumps at the bottom of the garden. Now we have faces to put on our sport!", he rejoices.

“Rich man's problem"

And among the faces that marked the fortnight, that of Léon Marchand, quadruple gold medalist and one of the French heroes of these Games, could well offer even more licensees to the French Swimming Federation (FFN).

The FFN has 402,358 members in France, including competitive swimming, artistic swimming, open water swimming, diving and water polo. “There was a Marchand effect, just as there was a Laure Manaudou effect”, particularly “in the 7-13 age group”, notes Guy Lacomtal, 56, president of Olympique Paris Natation, a club in the 13th arrondissement of Paris.

But he fears that the growth in the number of members will complicate the distribution of availability slots in Parisian pools, which he already considers “saturated”, between clubs, schools, and practitioners "leisure"… "But that's a rich person's problem, we're just going to have to take measures to absorb new people! ", he puts it into perspective.

Related Posts

About The Author

magictr

Add a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

(function(d,s){d.getElementById("licnt2061").src= "https://counter.yadro.ru/hit?t44.6;r"+escape(d.referrer)+ ((typeof(s)=="undefined")?"":";s"+s.width+"*"+s.height+"*"+ (s.colorDepth?s.colorDepth:s.pixelDepth))+";u"+escape(d.URL)+ ";h"+escape(d.title.substring(0,150))+";"+Math.random()}) (document,screen)