Steven Da Costa, Olympic karate champion at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, benefits from a professional integration agreement with the SNCF. ALEXANDER NEMENOV / AFP
“We live for sport, but, for the most part, sport does not make us live”, warned in 2015 about forty top athletes, including fencer Astrid Guyart, biathlete Martin Fourcade and pole vaulter Renaud Lavillenie. The same year, a law strengthening their status was passed, including including coverage in the event of a sporting accident.
Nearly ten years later, the National Sports Agency (ANS), responsible for supporting high-level athletes, has ” engaged » that none of the more than eight hundred athletes of the French delegation at the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games (JOP) “is below the poverty line”, assures Maguy Nestoret Ontanon, adviser to the socio-professional cell of the ANS. They were 40% in this case at the Rio Games in 2016.
One year before the Games, what is the situation of high-level athletes in France? What income do they receive? What are the difficulties that are not yet taken into account in these extraordinary courses?
Highly variable pay levels
A widespread idea equates all top athletes with professionals. This is however not the case. Professionals are those who benefit from a fixed employment contract, with a club or a federation, which guarantees them a regular income. This is especially the case in team sports (football, rugby, handball, etc.) or in cycling, with fixed-term contracts ranging from one to five sports seasons.
Remuneration makes the big difference, between footballers from Paris Saint-Germain (1 million euros per month of salary on average) or rugby players from the Top 14 (300,000 euros monthly) and less publicized sports, where certain contracts are so low that athletes have to combine their sporting activity with another job.
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Thus, Mathilde Pétriaux, goalkeeper of the French field hockey team, had for a time to provide ten hours a week of home help for an elderly person, in addition to her training (twenty hours), his journeys to competitions (ten to fifteen hours) and his correspondence business studies (eight hours). “It was getting exhausting; I therefore made the decision to stop this job and took out a student loan of 20,000 euros to devote myself fully to my preparation for the Olympic Games. [de Paris 2024]while waiting to find sponsors”, she explains to Monde.
A concentrated effort on medal winners at the Olympics
Professional status does not exist in all sports. In athletics, swimming or judo, even the best athletes most often remain amateurs, for lack of a regular contract. If they can earn income from their medals or from sponsorship contracts, they are generally more precarious than the professionals.
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