A little before 9 a.m. on Friday January 24, Romain Parmentier parks his truck in the courtyard of the Cave aux contes, in Tresserre, a large town of 1,200 inhabitants in the Pyrénées-Orientales. In this former wine cellar transformed into a multi-purpose room, the 45-year-old man, who works for Mobil’Sport, a mobile device offering sports activities, inflates balloons, places hoops and studs on the white tiles, installs removable goals. He invites the participants to form a circle before giving the instructions for the exercises that will punctuate this one-hour session.
Anne-Marie Marchand, 70, in black jogging and white sneakers, lends herself to games of balance and motor skills, in a great burst of laughter. “I’m tired, but I feel relaxed”she notes, once the course is over, a coffee in one hand and a chouquette in the other. “Here, I work the head and the legs”testifies, delighted, in gray sportswear, Yvon Collin, who was returning to the group following a long convalescence. “In addition, everyone knows each other and it’s friendly”insists this 76-year-old former work organization consultant.
While the government, thanks to the organization of the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, has made the development of physical and sporting practice a national issue – France must be made “a sporting nation”had launched Emmanuel Macron in 2021 -, Romain Parmentier and his truck illustrate one of the difficulties of the implementation of this plan: many municipalities do not have sports infrastructures, especially in rural areas.
In Tresserre, in this case, the sports facilities were razed in favor of pavilions. For Michel Thiriet, the mayor (without label), Mobil’Sport is therefore the possibility of offering “an activity for an aging public, supervised by a professional”.
About thirty sports on the menu
The concept was born in 2015 in Ardèche. “In the Ardèche mountains, remote villages were dying, without services or sports equipment. We had the idea to create this device to make the sport come to them”explains Johann Behr, project manager at the National Federation of Sport in Rural Areas (FNSMR).
Since its foundation, the Mobil’Sport system has been emulated: seventeen itinerant trucks criss-cross several departments, including the Pyrénées-Orientales. In 2022, the van traveled nearly 30,000 kilometers in the department, bounded by the Mediterranean Sea and the Pyrenees, neither too rural nor too urban. In 2018, 32% of the population lived in 184 municipalities with fewer than 3,000 inhabitants, out of a total of 226.
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