“In our time, the mental coach had absolutely no place at the games, we were used to having a chef with us, instead we preferred to eat well than to improve our mental performance. » In the mouth of Jean-François Lamour, the formula is of course somewhat caricatured, but it says a lot about the path that the two-time saber Olympic champion (1984 and 1988), standard bearer of the French delegation in Barcelona in 1992, has traveled since the end of his career.

In the summer of 2024, three psychologists will officially accompany the French delegation to the Olympic Games (JO) from July 26th to August 11th and the Paralympic Games from August 28th to September 8th. As for the mental coaches of the athletes of the French team, all or almost all of them will be based in the capital. It is unthinkable for an elite athlete to give up a tool in the service of performance, especially when aiming for the Holy Grail of an Olympic medal.

The importance of mental preparation is now recognized by the vast majority of sports associations and integrated into training programs, whether it is an individual or collective approach. The question had not been discussed among the Anglo-Saxons for a long time.

In France, it was not long ago that coaches, associations or the athletes themselves viewed with suspicion, even distrust, these new actors who had come to intervene in the sports project. In 2010, the Cercle des nageurs de Marseille became the first national swimming club to integrate a mental coach. “In the beginning we were criticized by other clubs, remembers the swimmer Camille Lacourt, five-time world champion, retired since 2017, For them, it was because we were weak when we called on him. »

Good students

Since then, the old jokers have been on the rise and the French Swimming Federation has assigned a “mental” speaker to each of its disciplines (diving, water polo, artistic swimming, racing swimming, open water swimming). The association is one of the good students, along with rugby, athletics, rowing and sailing.

By far the most progressive rugby federation in France (FFR) is now seen as a role model for French sport. The first technical managers began working on the psychological dimension in 1999. Almost 25 years later “All French teams have at least one member of their management trained in the basics of sports psychology,” confirms Mickaël Campo, head of mental preparation at the FFR, who created a sensitization diploma for coaches in 2019.

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