The high performance manager within the ANS, Claude Onesta, clarified the contours of the various aids that will be provided to the coaches to best prepare for the next Games.
For the National Sports Agency (ANS), the equation is simple: a medal-winning athlete must be a well-trained athlete. With a view to the next Olympic Games in Paris in 2024, where the ambition of the French delegation will be strong in terms of podiums, it is therefore essential to set up an aid plan for supervisors in order to optimize the performance of each other. This is exactly the credo of a certain Claude Onesta, the high performance manager within the ANS and incidentally former coach of the French handball team from 2001 to 2016. A real specialist in the question, therefore, who knows what he is talking about when he says:If we want to influence the number of medals obtained, we must act strongly on the performance levers and the coach is one of them, fundamental. We must therefore have direct action on these people.»
Hence the desire of the ANS to provide various aids to the coaches of sportsmen and women with the profile of medalists in 2024, which were detailed to 70 of them last week during a meeting. With, as essential sinews of war, the financial aspect, on which Claude Onesta had already looked after the Tokyo Games by establishing a bonus of up to 35,000 euros for the coaches of Olympic medalists. But that’s not all. Benefiting from a budget extension of 10 million euros since the last Olympic Games, the ANS would also like to set up “additional remuneration of up to 1500 euros gross per monthAccording to Onesta, quoted by the daily L’Équipe. A significant financial contribution in certain Olympic disciplines which do not roll on gold, far from it.
Greater support
The other aid will be less quantifiable, but just as important since it consists of providing coaches with increased resources, both technically, materially, psychologically, medically… In other words, the ANS wants facilitate the work of coaches when a problem, of any order, arises by allowing them to be put quickly and simply in contact with a specialist. In the same vein, the ANS also wants to increase exchanges between technicians from different disciplines, with a desire to create a kind of virtuous circle of performance where the experiences of some can serve others, even if the sport totally different. Ditto with the establishment of an increased partnership between professional clubs and athletes practicing an individual discipline, as was for example already the case with Renaud Lavillenie and the Stade Clermontois. The goal is that the former make part of their infrastructure available to the latter to train in optimal conditions.
A contribution of foreign coaches
These are all points which should make the work of French or foreign coaches recently recruited more comfortable in order, also, to allow experience to be shared and avoid a form of “inbreeding“. Thus, of the 64 recruitments carried out or still scheduled for 2021 and 2022, around ten will come from abroad. As was the case, for example, in badminton with the Spaniard Fernando Rivas, the German Jürgen Grobler in rowing or the South Korean Oh Seon-Tek in archery. A transfer window which, in 2024, will have to bear fruit with a shower of medals hoped for for the French team.
