France's rebooted medals strategy pays off with home advantage boost

PARIS : A French strategy to boost its medal count after years of sporting underachievement has begun to pay dividends at the Paris Olympics as rapturous home crowds propel its athletes up the medals table, although keeping up the pace may prove hard.

One week into the Paris Games, France has won eight golds and 27 medals in total. Since Atlanta in 1996, France has averaged 37 medals per Olympics, a Reuters calculation shows.

France's early improvement is the fruit of a seven-year plan that it hopes will position it as a long-term Olympics heavyweight. 

It is based on promoting excellence in sports clubs and federations and zeroing in on medal hopes, as well as bringing families closer to the action, providing more performance support teams and capitalising on home advantage - as the wild acclaim for superstar swimmer Leon Marchand shows.

"The bet is off to a good start and perhaps even beyond our greatest hopes, but we remain focused on what comes next and are very clear about the difficulty," Claude Onesta, a successful former handball coach and the architect of France's high-performance sports strategy, said in radio interview on Friday.

In 2017, the year Paris was awarded the 2024 Olympics, French sports officials concluded that the country's national sporting excellence plan needed a reboot, said Yann Cucherat, a former gymnast turned sports official who will lead high performance at France's National Sports Agency after the Games.

France's strategy had not changed since one unveiled for the 1960 Olympics in Rome, and French officials had watched with a mixture of admiration and envy as the British strategy for the 2012 Games in London paid off handsomely, with 29 gold medals for Britain, Cucherat said.

"In