It has to really feel fairly bizarre. You’re in command of the largest occasion your nation’s ever organised. You will have labored on it to the exclusion, mainly, of the whole lot else in your life, for very practically a decade. And now – it’s every week away.
“It’s a really unusual feeling,” confirms Tony Estanguet, head of the 2024 Olympic Video games organising committee. “I come from this small city in south-west France. My sport is a really minor one. It’s been … fairly a trip. However right here I’m. And now, nicely, right here all of us are.”
Paris 2024 – that’s 10,500 opponents, 329 occasions, 4,500 workers, 40,000 volunteers, 10 million spectators, simply the 4bn tv viewers – kicks off this Friday with a parade “like no different” of 160 boats alongside the Seine: the primary Olympic opening ceremony ever tried exterior a stadium.
Below the eyes of greater than 45,000 police and safety officers, the nationwide groups will sail previous Notre Dame cathedral and underneath bridges together with the Pont des Arts and the Pont Neuf so far as the Eiffel Tower, watched by 300,000 spectators alongside the Seine banks and accompanied by a son-et-lumière spectacular of lights and music.
Estanguet is a softly spoken and unassuming three-times Olympic champion who gained particular person canoe slalom golds on the Sydney, Athens and London Video games – and bears greater than a passing resemblance to former England soccer coach Gareth Southgate. For him, Friday can’t come quickly sufficient. “It’s the primary large second. The second we present the world that these video games actually are going to be totally different,” he says, sipping a delicate drink in a abandoned bar throughout the sq. from the organising committee’s HQ within the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. “And we actually needed to push very, very onerous for it.”
The Olympic video games, says Estanguet, 46, are “a once-in-a-century occasion for every host nation. That’s a once-in-a-century probability to point out it off to its highest benefit – do one thing really spectacular – probably the most eye-popping sporting spectacle attainable.”
From the primary levels of the candidacy in 2015, the organising group’s watchwords had been “audacity and ambition”, he says. “Paris is an distinctive metropolis and we needed to do one thing distinctive, one thing actually totally different – make the town itself the venue. Take sport, the place we might, out of the stadium.”
Fifteen of the town’s best-known landmarks have grow to be occasion websites: fencing on the Grand Palais, archery on the Invalides, seaside volleyball on the Champ de Mars by the Eiffel Tower. There’s highway biking and marathon swimming on the Pont Alexandre III; the Place de la Concorde hosts BMX, basketball, breakdancing and skateboarding; equestrian occasions are on the Palace of Versailles.
Apart from offering nice TV, it’s a part of a bid to make the Paris Video games extra sustainable than predecessors by means of short-term venues, inexperienced initiatives, new sports activities geared toward a youthful, extra city viewers, and larger public participation – together with a “marathon for all” on the identical course because the Olympic race.
For all his obvious diffidence, ambition and audacity will not be qualities that Estanguet lacks. Born within the Pyrenean city of Pau to sports activities trainer mother and father, he got here of age as a top-flight athlete when he needed to face off towards his admired elder brother for France’s sole canoe slalom place on the Sydney Olympics.
“I’d all the time appeared as much as him; he was a task mannequin for me,” he says. “After I was small, I used to look at him from the financial institution. Later, he taught me a lot. He introduced me to the highest.” For years the brothers competed collectively as members of France’s European and world championship canoe slalom group.
On the 1996 Video games in Atlanta, Estanguet’s brother Patrice, 5 years his senior, gained bronze. However because the qualifying course of bought underneath means for the next Video games, the brothers realised they must compete towards one another for France’s spot. “It was onerous,” he says. “I’d all the time admired and revered him. However he dealt with it brilliantly. A very good 12 months earlier than, he sat me down and mentioned, ‘Look, we’ll solely get by means of that is if we go our separate methods for a bit. We’ve to protect our relationship.’”
Tony gained the French qualifiers (simply) and went on to win gold in Sydney (“for Patrice, actually, as a result of he might have accomplished it, in addition to for me”). 4 years later, in Athens, he did so once more – defeating, by 12/100ths of a second, the person who, over the course of twenty years, can be his best rival.
The Slovak slalom canoeist Michal Martikán was Estanguet’s hardest and most constant adversary, profitable two Olympic golds to the Frenchman’s three. As a lot as his relationship with Patrice, his rivalry with Martikán was “an enormous a part of my story”, Estanguet says. “He was a genius. We had been very totally different. He was smaller, actually robust, very technical, very tight. My type was extra fluid, extra supple, smoother. A rivalry like that teaches dedication. And persistence.”
He wanted each in 2008 when, having proudly carried the French group’s tricolore on the opening ceremony of the Beijing video games, Estanguet did not qualify for a last gained, inevitably, by Martikán. “It was the primary time I’d suffered such a nasty defeat at that stage,” he says.
“Whenever you lose badly on the Olympics, once you’re the defending champion, the favorite – that’s onerous to swallow. I used to be 30, I used to be competing in my third Video games. I although fairly onerous about giving up.” As a substitute, he turned to his brother.
“I simply mentioned to him, ‘I’d such as you to return and practice me, assist get me motivated once more,’” he says. “And he mentioned sure. So we had a final nice journey collectively.”
With Patrice’s assist, Estanguet was world champion in 2009 and 2010, European champion in 2011, and Olympic gold medallist in 2012. “If I’m sitting right here as we speak,” he says, “it’s as a result of I’ll have blown Beijing, however I didn’t disintegrate. I stayed calm, picked myself up, bought my confidence again.”
With two years’ of sports activities administration research already underneath his belt, Estanguet knew sports activities administration was the place he was heading when he gave up elite competitors after London. He bought himself elected to the athletes’ fee of the Worldwide Olympic Committee – the primary French sportsman to take action.
Already energetic within the Worldwide Canoe Federation and the World Anti-Doping Company, he discovered himself co-opted on to the French Nationwide Olympic Committee, the place he realized “the stuff that goes on round sports activities – the politics, the economics, the diplomacy. A steep studying curve”.
In 2016, he was appointed co-president of the French bid for the 2024 Video games, and by 2017, when Paris formally gained the proper to host the Olympics after Los Angeles agreed to defer, “I had moved into one other world altogether.
“We had been 50 on the Paris group then. Now we’re 4,000. It’s simply … large.”
So, is a stellar sporting profession good preparation for an organisational problem on the dimensions of the Olympics? Estanguet is lucid about what elite athletes can contribute – and what they’ll’t. “There’s the actual fact of acknowledging your ambition,” he says. “As an athlete, in case your purpose is to be within the prime 10, you don’t win fairly often. And that doesn’t all the time go down nicely. But it surely’s essential – if I used to be doing this job, these Video games needed to be extraordinary.”
Rigour, self-discipline and duty are key. “Understanding it’s a must to practice every single day, work onerous at what you don’t know how you can do, understanding you may’t afford to get offended when issues go incorrect. Taking duty, being positive your choices are OK since you’ve put within the work.
“In sport, nothing ever occurs such as you anticipate. There’ll all the time be a competitor you realize nothing about, climate … You take care of it. Say: so this gained’t go as deliberate, however I’ve bought options. And sometimes they’re split-second.”
Paris 2024 has had its fair proportion of surprising challenges. The Covid pandemic supplied a rumble of uncertainty for a few years; thereafter, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked an inflation price that pressured some robust sacrifices.
“Whenever you’re speaking a couple of price range of €4bn, a 15% inflation price is a really large deal,” says Estanguet. “We needed to minimize the variety of websites.”
Gymnastics and basketball, set for separate venues, merged; the capturing, initially in a short lived metropolis venue, is now on the nationwide capturing centre two hours away.
And teamwork. “Even in a person sport, you want group,” mentioned Estanguet. “Organising the Olympic video games is the largest collective effort there may be. Athletes, safety and transport individuals, politicians, unions, sponsors, police, native officers… All have to tug in the identical course, at roughly the identical pace. That’s the job.”
There have been expertise Estanguet recognised he didn’t have, and wanted. “Public talking,” he mentioned. “When it’s a must to deal with heads of state, the cash individuals, immense athletes who had been your sporting idols … I used to be not good at that. I took a whole lot of classes. Now I’m OK with it.”
And now right here we’re, lower than every week from the opening ceremony. Any worries? The French typically, and Parisians particularly, are notoriously grumpy and onerous to please, however Estanguet says he has taken coronary heart from many conversations together with his counterpart on the London Video games, the nice middle-distance champion Seb Coe.
“Up to now, the whole lot’s gone as he mentioned it could,” he says. “Just a few years when nobody was remotely . Just a few years when too many had been , needed to stay their oar in. And there have been plenty of absurd controversies. After which a last 12 months that was simply very, very onerous work.”
The aid would come, Coe advised Estanguet, “‘when your nation wins its first medals’. So I’ll be up for that.” Within the meantime, he’s joyful to have swum within the Seine with the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, on the morning of this interview. After a pricey clean-up programme and months of doubts, the river is lastly deemed clear.
“That was a terrific second, symbolically,” he says. “It sums up what we would like these Video games to be: spectacular, athletes swimming by means of one of many world’s most stunning cities. That’s magic. And invested. We’ll depart behind a river individuals can swim in. That’s magic, too.”
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