on the sidelines
Article reserved for subscribers
The subject should have been a major issue in the political discussions of this election, with the organization of the 2024 Olympics or the alerts on sedentary lifestyle linked to the Covid crisis. Badly apprehended by the candidates, the sector is once again ostracized from the campaign.
Three weeks before the first round, on March 17, the candidates Yannick Jadot, Anne Hidalgo and Fabien Roussel went to the headquarters of the French National Olympic and Sports Committee (CNOSF), self-proclaimed “house of French sport”, on the occasion of the great oral organized by the authority and the various actors of the sports movement. Three out of eight guests deigned to come. The withdrawals say a lot about the place of sport in the presidential debate.
Many themes have certainly been reduced to the bare minimum due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Still, even before the war, the debates and other episodes concerning sports policies in France can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Among them, the endless cacophony about the wearing of religious symbols in competitions, the “Hijabeuses” crystallizing the opposition, revived by the adoption at the end of February of the bill to democratize sport in France. Its content is much thinner compared to its first version.
As for the oratory contests between candidates on the subject: non-existent, or not far. “Too often”, sports is “a minor theme of the presidential campaign”, despaired at the end of February in …