Paris (AFP)
Zinedine Zidane and 90 players in the world of sport are calling on the authorities to reopen sports halls, denouncing "unfounded decisions" and unjust "stigmatization", in a column posted on Saturday on the Journal du dimanche website.
For the past two weeks, due to the resumption of the Covid epidemic, new health restrictions have led to the closure of sports halls, gymnasiums and swimming pools, except for those under 18, in several large cities of France.
"We, professionals in the supervision of physical and sporting activity, high-level athletes and health professionals, deplore the stigmatization of places where physical activity and sport are practiced as vectors of the spread of the current pandemic", write the signatories of the platform.
Besides Zidane, several top athletes, including Stéphane Diagana, world athletics champion, Marie-Amélie Le Fur, Paralympic athlete and president of the French Paralympic committee, Alizé Cornet, tennis player, Stéphane Traineau, world champion in judo, are among the signatories of this forum, alongside several sports doctors and managers of sports halls.
Without denying the seriousness of the pandemic, the text "denounces unfounded decisions, on the health, social and economic level" and a "erroneous, anxiety-provoking message with disastrous consequences".
"In compliance with the current protocols in force, the risk of practicing a physical and sporting activity in a dedicated establishment, hall or gymnasium, has not been scientifically demonstrated. No cluster resulting from these structures has also been reported to date by the Regional Health Agencies (ARS) ", it is underlined.
Better still, "it has been formally demonstrated that in other epidemic episodes of infection, people regularly practicing physical or sporting activity (...) were less seriously affected".
Recalling that sports halls have since the end of confinement put in place "the best possible sanitary conditions", the signatories also warn about the social consequences of such closures which could lead to "a crisis with serious consequences" for the sports sector, calling for the establishment of "targeted economic support".
In France, sports halls represent an annual turnover of 2 billion euros and employ around 35,000 people.
Several legal actions have been filed in different cities in France to oppose these closures.
On Wednesday, the FNEAPL FranceActive union, which represents some 1,500 cinemas, announced in particular that it had seized the Council of State.
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