Sports Minister Roxana Maracineanu brought together representatives of professional leagues and the sports movement to discuss the coronavirus, Tuesday March 3, 2020. - Philippe LOPEZ / AFP

  • France announced Tuesday a fourth death linked to the new coronavirus and the authorities are preparing for a further intensification of the epidemic which has exceeded 200 cases.
  • The actors of the world of sport seek to coordinate to savor whether the competitions should be canceled or not, or be held behind closed doors.
  • Sports Minister Roxana Maracineanu gathered representatives from the professional leagues and the sports movement on Tuesday morning to discuss these issues.

How to continue to organize sports competitions while participating in the national effort against the spread of coronavirus? It is to answer this question that the Minister of Sports Roxana Maracineanu invited Tuesday morning the representatives of the professional leagues and the sports movement. For a good hour and a half, they discussed the practices to adopt in the decision-making circuit and drew up a map of upcoming events to have visibility on the location of the athletes.

“We want to maintain a dialogue with all the players, explains Karim Herida, the director of cabinet of Maracineanu. France, like other countries, has not taken the decision to massively cancel all events. We want to do it on a case-by-case basis, but that requires a lot of coordination. So we are sticking for the moment to the two measures announced by the Ministry of Health on Saturday: the cancellation of the events of more than 5,000 people in confined spaces and that of outdoor gatherings deemed to be at risk.

PSG-Dortmund maintained for the moment but the closed door is "a hypothesis" via @ 20minutesSport https://t.co/C4kWwHAFCZ

- 20 Minutes Sport (@ 20minutesSport) March 3, 2020

As it stands, Ligue 1 and Top 14 games, for example, are not subject to any particular restrictions. The Paris-Nice race, which will take place from March 8 to 15, either. But these are only recommendations. "The decisions are in the hands of the prefects," said the minister. The goal is that our expertise can feed the meetings at the local level in which will be decided whether or not to hold events. "

"Do not overreact"

This means that, concretely, even if the ministry ensures that there is no reason to cancel Paris-Nice, a prefect can do everything to decide that it is too risky and that he does not want to see the race go through its department. Or a mayor by his commune.

Present at the meeting, the president of the Football League Nathalie Boy de la Tour welcomed the fact that a postponement of the matches was not on the agenda. The pre-match protocol put in place last weekend, with players, coaches and referees asked not to shake hands, is renewed until further notice. “Canceling the games would add to the panic, I think. Not all regions are victims of significant contamination, ”said Noël Le Graët, president of the FFF, on the sidelines of the UEFA Congress in which he is participating in Amsterdam.

Soon stage 3?

By the way, the European body also met this Tuesday to discuss the virus and called "not to overreact". This seems to be the watchword of decision-makers for the time being. But all of this is precarious. France, currently in stage 2 of health alert, could switch to level 3 in the coming days. The aim would then no longer be to curb the spread of the virus but to limit the epidemic wave. All the measures applied today in risk areas would be generalized throughout the territory: drastic restrictions on the movement of people, confinement, closings of public establishments, etc.

Sport would of course not be spared. It would change everything. "We know that the state of the virus is evolving, and so are our measures," says Roxana Maracineanu. In the meantime, a new meeting is scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, this time at the headquarters of the French National Olympic and Sports Committee (CNOSF), with all the presidents of federations, the national technical directors and the organizers of sporting events, such as ASO, which manages (among others) Paris-Roubaix or the Tour de France.

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  • League 1
  • Soccer
  • Sport
  • Ministry of Sports
  • coronavirus
  • Roxana Maracineanu