Tel Aviv (AFP)

He rides a bike in the Emirates, recruits Chris Froome for the Tour de France and ensures the presence of Israel in F1: the billionaire Sylvan Adams plays the sport card to change the image of the conflict that sticks to Israel and promote its normalization with the Arab world.

He arrives at the interview in tight fitting clothes, on a competition bike, rounded sunglasses veiling his azure eyes. For the AFP camera, he goes on a few laps on the wooden tracks of his velodrome with international standards in Tel Aviv, the only one in the Middle East, in front of three of his dumbfounded attachés.

Born in Quebec, the real estate tycoon made his aliyah (Jewish emigration to Israel) five years ago, learned Hebrew and established himself as an effective agent of the pro-Israel "soft power" he wanted. change the picture.

Forget the conflict, the war: Sylvan Adams, for his part, prefers to talk about the economy, start-ups, democracy, tolerance, and boost the rating of the country from his homecoming.

Lionel Messi in Tel Aviv last November, it's him. The Giro d'Italia in Jerusalem in 2018 is him. And when the Williams team announced in January the arrival of the Franco-Israeli Roy Nissany as a test pilot, Adams advertised himself as the president of the Roy Nissany Formula One management group.

Nissany's car will display the Israeli flag and the logo of the Adams Start-Up Nation. "I have certain responsibilities in terms of sponsorship" of F1, he said.

Adams has just added to his record the arrival in 2021 of Chris Froome in "Israël-Start-Up Nation", the first Israeli team in the peloton, with the stated objective of winning the Tour de France.

"I'm trying to speak to a very large audience. I'm not trying to convince one person at a time because it takes too long and I'm too old for that," says the businessman, citing as an example the "billion" viewers in 2018 for the stages of the Tour of Italy (Giro) organized in the Holy Land.

Sport to build bridges between nations? The idea can cause a stir, but in the case of Sylvan Adams there seems to be a strategy in tune with that of the Hebrew State which seeks in particular to forge links with the Gulf monarchies.

When Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, presents the economic side of his project to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which provides billions of dollars in investments in the Palestinian territories, in Bahrain in June 2019, Sylvan Adams is among the businessmen invited.

- Empire real estate -

However, nothing seemed to predestine him to play in the big leagues.

His father, Marcel, fled the Nazi labor camps in Romania to join Palestine, then under British mandate, which he quickly left for France and then Quebec, at the turn of the 1950s.

"His last name was Abramovich, a Romanian name for Abraham's son. Long distance calls were expensive at the time and his boss, Mr. Busenbaum, heard him spell his name letter by letter AB ... ", he says.

"A Mr. Busenbaum therefore asked an Abramovich to change his name ...". And the Abramovich family became Adams, a shorter name to pronounce or spell on the phone where Marcel spent part of his days with merchants.

Today, Sylvan Adams reigns at the head of the family real estate empire, Iberville, which owns a hundred buildings in Canada and the United States and was in the crosshairs of Quebec justice a few years ago for taxes not paid in the region of 100 million Canadian dollars (65 million euros).

And one winter day, five years ago, he said, "I came home and said to my wife, How about moving to Israel? She said to me: + j always thought we'd end our lives there, let's go + ".

After a week in Tel Aviv, the tycoon printed a new business card with the title evocative of the ambitions he harbored: "self-proclaimed ambassador of the State of Israel".

© 2020 AFP