Paris (AFP)

Closed sports halls, drop in club memberships, loss of ticket offices due to closed doors: French sport suffers from re-containment and feels despised by officials who do not have "the word sport" in their vocabulary.

It is perhaps to respond to the SOS launched in recent weeks that Emmanuel Macron will receive Tuesday morning at the Elysee Palace, with the Prime Minister and several members of the government, the actors of French sport, among others the president of the Committee of organization of the Paris 2024 Olympics, Tony Estanguet.

For ten days, another French champion, ex-star of the NBA, Tony Parker, president of the basketball club of Asvel, sounded the alarm to say that if nothing is done it will be "the death of basketball ".

Here is the dilemma: to continue to play in empty rooms while losing thousands of euros, or to stop on its own, therefore without being financially helped via the partial activity in particular.

Sports whose economy relies most on ticketing are particularly hard hit, such as rugby.

To compensate for these revenue losses, reduced to nothing since the behind closed doors of the reconfinement, the Sports Ministry has been promising aid for two and a half months.

The figure of 107 million euros was "sanctuarized", he promised at the beginning of November, but the release of the sum is subject to its compatibility with European rules.

A matter of days, we assure the Minister of Sports Roxana Maracineanu.

Still, the clubs are eyeing this envelope, rugby, impatient, having already publicly availed itself of 40 million ...

Another avenue pushed by the ministry to Bercy: exemptions from contributions specific to sport.

All aid combined (loan, partial activity, etc.), nearly 4 billion euros have already gone to the sports sector, we say to the ministry, which denies having remained idle.

The 120 million euros released in September, at the time of the recovery plan, now appear insufficient.

"There are sports halls which are shutting down," explains one at Cosmos, representing employers and sports companies, describing the situation as "extremely urgent".

"Our elites just need to understand that sport is important, the word sport is not part of their vocabulary," Denis Masseglia, president of the French National Olympic and Sports Committee (CNOSF), regretted that the word is almost absent from each intervention of the executive.

- "Lack of legitimacy" -

Between the wait for measures that are slow and some form mistakes, sport feels even more unloved than usual, finding for example that culture is better treated.

"Sport suffers from a lack of legitimacy in France, which is linked to a whole story on the place of sport in society, not the same as in England for example. And there is a structuring of French sport who knows be heard less than other sectors ", decrypts Cyrille Rougier, sociologist at the center of law and economics of sport (Cdes).

"The sports field was built at a distance from the political field", he adds, which also means that it is "more distant from political decisions than other sectors", he explains to the AFP.

In the end, this returns the idea "that sport is not essential, even though the consequences of the absence of volunteering, of amateur clubs, which create social ties, can have extremely serious consequences for the good. -be collective, ”he warns.

As for amateur sport, there is great concern.

At the latest CNOSF score, the drop in memberships is around 20%.

Following the example of several deputies, the CNOSF tirelessly calls for the establishment of a "Sport Pass", aid intended for families to pay for membership or buy equipment.

Since the first confinement, several doctors have also insisted on the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle both for adults, but also for adolescents and children.

In a letter to the Minister of Sports, forty-five deputies Les Républicains asked in particular to authorize communities to reopen their sports facilities to associations.

In Poissy, the mayor of the city, Karl Olive, has already launched the movement.

"Gyms, stadiums and swimming pools reopen at the request of clubs after verification of the health protocol and obligation to have the #all anti-covid download. And it's up to them to sort it out," he explains.

© 2020 AFP