In September 2021, shortly after the Tokyo Summer Olympics, French President Emmanuel Macron invited the country’s medal winners to the Élysée Palace. The ceremony was officially organized to celebrate the athletes, but Macron had other plans. “The overall results of these Games are not quite at the level we expected,” he chided them. At the 2024 Paris Games, he said, “we’ll need to do much better.”
France finished the Tokyo Olympics with 33 medals, including just 10 golds, one of its worst performances in the past three decades. Three years later, the picture looks very different. On its home turf, to visual backdrops of the Eiffel Tower and other Parisian landmarks, France nearly doubled its total medal count to 64—and bagged 16 golds, its best result in more than a century.
Although the count is still a far cry from what much larger nations such as the United States and China earn—they brought home 126 and 91 medals, respectively—France returned to the ranks of the top-five gold medal winners for the first time since 1996, winning the most golds of any European country. (Britain earned the most total medals among European nations.)
France did so by redoubling its strength in sports it traditionally excels at, including fencing, judo, handball, and volleyball, while making comebacks in others where it had lost ground in recent years, such as cycling and swimming. Men’s BMX racing saw an entirely French podium, and swimming phenom Léon Marchand won an astounding four solo golds and a relay bronze. France also did well in a handful of competitions where it never excelled, such as triathlon and table tennis. In the latter, bespectacled Felix Lébrun became a national hero, claiming two bronzes in a discipline long dominated by China.
“These results were largely to be expected, considering everything that’s been done,” William Gasparini, a professor of sports sociology at the University of Strasbourg, said. “What we are seeing in France is the development of a new sports model.”
Macron has always been keen to boost France’s image on the world stage and has often stressed the need to improve the country’s Olympic results, which in the last 25 years have typically hovered at around 30 to 40 total medals. The president launched a series of initiatives with the explicit goal of allowing France to reach the ranks of the top-five gold medal winners in Paris.
In 2019, Macron’s government created a new National Sports Agency (ANS). A large chunk of its budget—over $125 million this year—is devoted to improving the salaries and preparation of a select group of around 1,000 athletes considered to have the best chances of success at the Olympics. The ANS has also implemented a “coaches’ plan” aimed at attracting the best managers, French or foreign, in each sport by offering financial incentives as well as advanced training and counseling. It also set up a $24 million “winning in France” scheme to maximize the “home advantage” of top French Olympic athletes, such as by providing them with exact replicas of the equipment used during competition and dedicated practice and relaxation facilities during the Games.
The overall aim of the new system is to take French athletes’ support systems “from prêt-à-porter to haute couture”—or from generic to custom-made, Claude Onesta, the agency’s general manager for high performance, said in an interview with newspaper Les Echos at the beginning of the Paris Olympics.
French officials have openly drawn inspiration from Britain, which, after its catastrophic 36th-place finish at the 1996 Atlanta Games, adopted a strategy that is widely credited with making it one of the most successful countries at the Olympics. It has gone from 15 total medals in Atlanta to more than 60 in every edition of the Summer Games since London 2012; in Paris, Britain claimed 65 medals, coming third in the total count and seventh in golds.
Many observers argue that the impact of France’s recent efforts on its performance in Paris should not be overestimated. After all, the ANS was founded barely five years ago.
Olympic host countries often perform above their usual standards; they have won their highest-ever number of golds as a share of total medals up for grabs in all but one of the last 10 Summer Games. Japan and Britain both came third in the gold medal counts for the Olympics they organized and bagged more gold medals than France did in Paris. France’s increased medal haul from Tokyo to Paris is impressive, but its results three years ago were also particularly disappointing.
Plus, there were almost no Russian athletes competing in Paris due to a strict vetting process put in place by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Russian athletes competing for the Russian Olympic Committee—a designation used after Russia was banned from the Games due to a doping scandal—clinched over 70 medals in Tokyo.
All the same, French officials have described the country’s results as “historic,” with Macron gloating that “all those who said that France could never make the top five” were proved wrong. Some experts question that rhetoric, pointing out that in recent decades France has regularly placed between fifth and eighth place for number of golds at the Summer Olympics. “France is already a great sporting nation,” said Patrick Clastres, a professor at the University of Lausanne who specializes in the history and geopolitics of international sports. In Paris, France “performed exactly within its usual range,” especially given Russia’s absence, he said.
A mix of public and private resources govern sports in France. Kids get a first taste of several sports at school, particularly volleyball, handball, and basketball. (Soccer, the nation’s favorite game, is not often played in school as it requires a larger field.) Public financial support has fostered the development of a dense network of private clubs and associations in both team and individual sports, while the state also accompanies young athletes through a variety of training institutions. Local authorities oversee building and maintenance of facilities such as city stadiums and swimming pools.
This level of public involvement, which is more pronounced than in Britain or the United States, started in the 1960s under French President Charles de Gaulle. He was eager to boost the country’s sporting grandeur after the 1960 Rome Olympics, when the country won a dismal five medals, with no golds among them. Rome “was an electroshock for the French government,” Gasparini said. De Gaulle’s reforms have since created a breeding ground for athletes in a wide range of sports: French federations had some 16.5 million registered members in 2023 for a population of 68 million. The number is projected to be even higher this year.
Since the 1990s, France’s international standing in sports has grown further. A “winning culture” spread among French athletes after they started to move abroad more frequently to play in the best leagues of each sport, Clastres said. The trend is still in full swing, as shown by French soccer player Kylian Mbappé, who recently transferred from Paris Saint-Germain to Real Madrid, and basketball star Victor Wembanyama, who led the national team to a silver in Paris and has spent the last year playing with the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs.
France has also boosted its sporting success by hosting a range of international tournaments on its own turf. “Since the 1998 FIFA World Cup, France has hosted the world championships of every sport, collective and individual,” Clastres said. “The Olympics were the only ones missing.”
Despite this strong sporting tradition, critics worry that old and new weaknesses are festering under the surface. The ANS’s approach, which concentrates funding on the federations and athletes with the best chances of winning international medals, has been accused of shortsightedness and inequity. One example of a discipline that suffers under this model is track and field, a hypercompetitive sport where France has historically struggled to shine and where many French athletes feel they don’t receive enough support.
The ANS has also invested hundreds of millions of dollars in sports programs for the general public, providing financial support for the construction of some 5,500 facilities across the country between 2022 and 2023. But critics say that the resources devoted to equality of access to sport across regions and social classes remain insufficient.
The sports ministry’s budget accounted for barely 0.3 percent of the government’s total in 2022. Many small clubs find themselves in financial dire straits, while local authorities often struggle to find the resources to renovate aging sports facilities. “The strategy put in place isn’t ambitious enough,” said Richard Bouigue, co-director of the Sports Observatory of the Jean-Jaurès Foundation, a progressive French think tank. “If we want to be the sporting nation that we are being promised, we need to go much further,” he said.
Like De Gaulle, Macron has grasped how sporting success can translate into soft power, and he seems eager to make the most of France’s triumphs in Paris. The president has announced a parade on the Champs-Elysées to celebrate French athletes next month—no scolding is expected this time—and he is due to unveil a slate of measures to ensure the “legacy” of the Paris Games. That may include making the Olympic cauldron a permanent addition to the capital’s skyline.
But for France to stay in the club of Olympic powerhouses, it will take much more than symbolism. The question is how much public funding future governments will be able to devote to sports and whether, amid all this gold and silver, they will remember to cultivate the country’s sporting community beyond the elite.