Olivier Minne was featured in the magazine TV 2 Weeks from July 9, 2022. The presenter of Fort Boyard (France 2) for 20 seasons has confided in the program he hosts, but also on his physical transformation which always impresses.
When it was revealed to the general public thirty-five years ago, Olivier Minne did not have the same silhouette. He didn’t have the build of an athlete. But in the 2000s, when his career has “started to wobble“, everything changed. “I walked into a tiny gym in Paris. I met a prodigious man there: Jack Savoldelli. He is a former boxer and bodybuilder who took me under his wing. Back then I was cut like a toothpick [il rit]. I started to feel connected to my body, which had never happened to me before. The approach was not for aesthetic purposes, even if I saw that the gaze of others began to change“, said the 55-year-old presenter, who is not a heart to take.
In the early 2000s, Olivier Minne actually experienced a complicated professional period. “I had been radically removed from it a year earlier. I had mourned it. I told myself that I was going to have to reinvent myself. That’s why I went to California, with a backpack and some savings that weren’t huge.“, he recalled. But he had the chance to return by “the little door” with Target. And Fort Boyard also fell at the right time in his life.
However, Olivier Minne almost never succeeded Jean-Pierre Castaldi in 2003. It was Yves Bigot, director of games, variety and entertainment on France 2 who offered him to take the reins of Fort Boyard. “But what I didn’t know at the time was that the channel and the production at the time were against it. They found that I was not the best to restart the program. But Yves believed in me“, he said. And he was right since the program is still on the air and Olivier Minne its presenter.