Paris (AFP)

Sixteen months after their last gathering and the Olympic qualification snatched from Berlin, the volleyball players of the France team start the League of Nations on Friday, in a health bubble in Rimini (Italy) for five weeks, transformed into a training camp for the Games.

We had left them on their cloud at the beginning of January 2020, exhausted by a tournament of an enormous density, equivalent to that of a European Championship, which delivered only one ticket for the Olympics-2020 that they brilliantly had pocketed against the Serbian European champions and the Slovenian European vice-champions.

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But since then, with the Covid-19 pandemic and the one-year postponement of the Tokyo Olympics, the band at Earvin Ngapeth has no longer had the opportunity to play or train together, the staff preferring to leave the quiet players for the summer of 2020 and facilitate their preparation in their respective clubs.

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After a grueling season (many have been affected by the Covid-19), the Blues belatedly launched their preparation in Mulhouse in mid-May and began the League of Nations on Friday, successor to the former World League which had been the point start in 2015 of the golden adventure of the most talented generation of French volleyball.

The French arrived on the Adriatic coast on Monday, and are discovering for the first time how a sanitary bubble works.

"We did not expect it to be so complicated, to hold out for five weeks without being able to leave the hotel, it will be complicated", underlined the central of the Blues Nicolas Le Goff.

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- Five weeks, fifteen matches -

This League of Nations will be the first stage of a very busy summer since at the end of the five weeks in Rimini and a week of cutoff, they will take over the management of Japan for the Games on July 4.

And only three weeks after the Olympic adventure, they will set off to reconquer Europe from September 1 to 19, with the debut of the Brazilian Bernardinho as coach.

"We changed our programming. We were supposed to start a fortnight earlier, but since they decided to switch the Nations League to five bubble weeks, we gave the players rest before and we will use this competition as a camp. training ", explains coach Laurent Tillie.

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On site, the Blues will have three hours of training per day, with a weight room available, while Rimini hosts 32 selections (16 men and 16 women) in the bubble.

They will also be able to gauge themselves against the rest of the international competition with fifteen matches on the program in just under five weeks, on a regular basis of three match days, followed by three days without a match.

With a two-match bonus if they finish this group stage in one of the top four places

In Rimini, they will face four of their five opponents in the 1st round of the Games: Brazil, the United States, Russia and Argentina, while Tunisia is not present in northern Italy.

© 2021 AFP