In 2017, after obtaining the Olympic Games by France, the objective of three million additional sports practitioners was posted.

Alas, the pandemic put sport in the closet for several months.

And since the start of the school year, clubs or gyms have been trying to catch up with their former members by wearing shorts.

On Monday, an interministerial committee on the Olympic Games will be held in Seine-Saint-Denis under the leadership of Prime Minister Jean Castex for a progress report, in particular on "the quality of the post-Olympic legacy".

Besides the hard heritage, a few swimming pools in Seine-Saint-Denis but also buildings transformed into housing or urban improvements, there is "the intangible heritage".

"In our country, we have real room for improvement in order to make better use of what sport can provide in terms of health, education, social ties, we have this real challenge of succeeding in finding passageways to put more sport for all French people in all generations, "recently explained Tony Estanguet, the boss of the Paris-2024 organizing committee, in front of an audience of Sciences Po students.

The idea is to take advantage of these first summer Olympics organized in France since 1924 to "make France a sporting nation", as the President of the Republic Emmanuel Macron insisted several months ago.

Fight sedentary lifestyle

There are about 34 million practitioners, adding both clubs (18 million) and Sunday joggers, swimmers or climbers.

According to Injep (National Institute for Youth and Popular Education), between 2000 and 2018, 3 million additional licenses were obtained, a sign of the democratization of sport.

But inequalities persist in practices, among young girls, people in precarious situations or with a health problem.

President Emmanuel Macron and the boss of the Paris-2024 organization Tony Estanguet address the staff of the Paris Games in Saint-Denis, outside Paris, October 14, 2021 Francois Mori POOL / AFP / Archives

On the school side, the Ministry of Education and Sports and the organizing committee of the Olympic Games-2024 launched the program "30 minutes of physical activity per day" in primary schools, an experiment which is intended to be generalized and benefited. at the start of the school year at 3,000 primary schools, explained Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer in September.

The initiative bristles some PE teachers, such as the Snep-FSU union which speaks of "wriggling" and demands to spend four hours of EPS per week from elementary to the second degree.

A massive argument in favor of more sport: the sedentary lifestyle that affects adults and teenagers and its ravages on health.

- "Underexploited sport"

Author of a report published this summer on sedentary lifestyle, with the macronist Marie Tamarelle-Verhaeghe, the Génération.s deputy Régis Juanico, calls for physical and sports activity in 2022 to be a "great national cause".

A sign for him that sport is not always considered, he believes that during the pandemic, sports players had to "fight at every stage, it was an ordeal".

"When we had the Olympics (in 2017), the public authorities should have decided on a lifelong physical activity plan," he regrets.

There are positive decisions, such as the recently announced plan for 5,000 local sports facilities, but "on the go" according to him, because 2024 is approaching.

A column recently published in Le Monde and signed by the researcher in the geopolitics of sport Carole Gomez and David Bloug, former director general of the NGO Play International, recalls that a WHO study in 2019 ranked France at the 119th out of 146 in terms of physical activity for young people.

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For them, "sport is underexploited as a solution to our social problems, particularly in terms of education and living together".

"Making France a sporting nation cannot be decreed. This can be explained, first, then proved and implemented daily, at the local level, at the heart of associations, clubs and districts, as in the past. strategic discussions within international sporting bodies ", they argue.

“We have to see where we come from!”, We often retort behind the scenes of the government, convinced that the Olympics-2024 will ultimately make it possible to change the situation and that there is already something better.

© 2021 AFP