Colin Abgrall 08:00, January 13, 2023
The tricolor para-tennis is in the spotlight.
Europe 1 went to the National Training Center Porte d'Auteuil, in Paris, for an immersion in the heart of a training with the first French pole of wheelchair tennis.
The goal?
Climb the ladder by 2024, in view of the Paralympic Games in Paris, and catch up with nations like Japan and the United Kingdom.
France is betting on disabled sports.
The first national wheelchair tennis center was launched on Thursday.
A structure to welcome, train and optimize the performance of its athletes.
France hopes to catch up with countries such as Japan, the United Kingdom or the Netherlands, which are very advanced in the professionalization of this Paralympic discipline.
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Europe 1 went to the National Training Center Porte d'Auteuil, in Paris.
Zoé Marras, 21, has to get used to a new intensity during training.
"When I see that in one day, I almost did my workout for the week, it's ten times more intense than my old workouts," she says, surrounded by her teammates.
The 26th player in the world is already feeling the effects.
"In two weeks, I made enormous progress," she rejoices.
"I'm 100% fulfilled here."
Tricolor objective for Paris 2024
In the short term, the objective is obvious: to win as many medals as possible at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
But the national technical director Julien Escudé also sees further and wishes to create a sector of excellence in wheelchair tennis.
"Certainly, we are going to have the Olympic Games to play at home next door, but it is really something that we want to perpetuate, to install over time, in the long term to be able to be even more numerous at the CNE. (National Training Center, editor's note) in the years to come", he confides.
It is now necessary to grow in number to hope to see the emergence within the pole of the successors of Michael Jéremiaz and Stéphane Houdet, the last two French Olympic champions in paratennis.