I love in France but moved here from another country which is strong in athletics.
French athletes seem allergic to running hard, fast intervals on the track. Instead, they run slow paced intervals with extremely short recoveries (like 15 seconds). Basically, they are always running slow. I have to train on my own, because there's nobody else running standard track workouts. I get lots of concerned looks from coaches when they see me out of breath and tired at the end of sessions. They also spend hours on technique, drills, chatting and explanations, and then hardly do a session afterwards.
A lot of French people also don't build muscle easily.
French here ! Some elements.
1) Totally wrong, the french way of training is the exact opposite of norwegian method, ie stupidly fast VO2 workouts. I remember Jakob talked about Gressier's training (which is representative), saying he was going way too hard (like often 1000m under 2'20).
2) First, we're not good, but not that bad : in European championships in june we were 2nd behind Italy at the medal/placing table. These olympics just aren't going our way in T&F.
3) The real reasons are : - very few public/private investment in track and field (for example, in Paris, there is only TWO 400m tracks, no fake), in my hometown there is none, we always have to share tracks with footballers in the field (almost no tracks without a soccer field in the center),
- the french federation is full of boomers who take every bad decision they can,
- the main reason : no help during college, most of the athletes must do the exact same as other students to graduate, which is really difficult to conciliate with training, recuperation, etc. ; so we have really good results at the european level in U18/U20, but after high school most of talented athletes have to choose between studies and sport unfortunately, and they often choose studies beacause T&F isn't really financially safe for most (not the same in soccer for example)
They have the 3rd most medals at the olympics. Are you speaking of Track and Field? "Athletics" is a generic word for all sports here in the states.
"Athletics" is a common way to refer to the sport of track and field, and everyone else in this thread understood it.
Never heard that before. In the US and A we call track and field...track and field. Never met a single american who says they ran athletics in high school. But, alas, if thats what we say elsewhere in the world im down.
A country with a relatively big population with amazing athletes in soccer and basketball, and yet they look on pace to deliver zero medals in the Athletics competition in Paris.
The french federation is very bad.
Even the mindset is different, everybody is so afraid of « burning out » that the young talents don’t start training seriously until they’re like 22. By then, unless you have an insane amount of talent, it’s already too late to catch up with the world’s best.
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A country with a relatively big population with amazing athletes in soccer and basketball, and yet they look on pace to deliver zero medals in the Athletics competition in Paris.
Why is America so bad at (men's) Soccer?
A country with a relatively big population with amazing athletes in track and (men's) basketball, and yet they look on pace to deliver zero medals in the Soccer competition in Paris.
A country with a relatively big population with amazing athletes in soccer and basketball, and yet they look on pace to deliver zero medals in the Athletics competition in Paris.
Why is America so bad at (men's) Soccer?
A country with a relatively big population with amazing athletes in track and (men's) basketball, and yet they look on pace to deliver zero medals in the Soccer competition in Paris.
There's no money in it the USA so the best athletes do something else.
I had the exact opposite perception, I have been really impressed with the French performances so far, there seems to be a French athlete in a ton of different finals across many disciplines particularly on the women's side. For example they had finalists in every women's field event so far and had great runs in the 800 and steeple (5th and 4th respectively).
I realize this is a primarily American board but no country has the depth and talent of performance that the US has, particularly across disciplines.
It will be fascinating to see if the US depth erodes over the next 25 years as I suspect you are going to see a ton NCAA schools (particularly on the men's side) scrap their track/xc programs to comply with the House settlement along with Title IX.
I know a good number of sub-elite French runners who've immigrated to Canada (Quebec mostly). Their philosophy seems to be stuck in the 90s, ie. high intensity/low volume. Lots of super fast "easy" runs. Tough to build the aerobic base necessary for global success at a large scale with that kind of training, also seems risky for injury. Some join clubs here and move away from this type of training, so these are more general observations.
They also seem to use zone training similar to cycling as opposed to some prescribed race pace/effort. I don't know if this is "bad" but it doesn't seem to make much sense to me. In cycling HR zones/power are a more useful metric than absolute paces because of the terrain variability. This is rarely the case in running unless you're doing ultra/mountain running work. Practicing specific paces and knowing what those feel like seems to make more sense for road/track/XC.