“Come Onboard for the Paris 2024!” – Triple Olympic Champion Estanguet
Triple Olympic champion and President of Paris 2024, Tony Estanguet, spent an afternoon on the HEC campus on April 6, exchanging with students and staff before kickstarting the 2023 Uni’Run. The well-planned visit is part of the campaign by the former slalom canoeist to bring together all the communities and organizations taking part in the Olympic and Paralympic Games next year.
If there’s one thing Tony Estanguet doesn’t need to prove it’s his tenacity and ability to bounce back. At the height of a glittering career as a canoeist, he reclaimed a gold medal at the London Olympics which he had lost – badly - four years earlier in Beijing, despite being France’s flagbearer at the Games’ opening ceremony. He thus became France’s only athlete to take three golds in three separate Olympics.
11 years later, and Estanguet is bearing another kind of flag, this time as President of the Paris 2024 Organizing Committee for the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. It makes him responsible for overseeing 878 competitions in 54 sports, involving around 15,000 athletes competing in front of 13 million live spectators…
Garnering this mantle as comfortably as he once did for his countless international gold medals, the 44-year-old visited the HEC campus on a grey April afternoon to share his vision of a Games he hopes to be the most open, responsible and spectacular in its 128-year history. “The Olympics have to be renovated, rethought,” he told the hundreds of students and staff assembled to hear Estanguet talk in the school’s Hall d’Honneur. “We are creating an event which can be both spectacular, popular and have a social impact. We are inventing anorganizational method which will be as long-lasting as possible, as sober as possible. We are exploring a way to accelerate the societal role of sports for social good.”
© Ciprian Olteanu
Sports at the Heart of HEC
The words, spoken with Estanguet’s characteristic passion and grace, underlined the athlete’s track record in sports marketing and company strategy, honed during his Master at ESSEC business school. Ever since he was elected to the IOC’s Athletes Commission in 2012, he has perfected his communications and marketing skills with a long-term objective of making the world’s second most watched sports event a “People’s Games”. Paris 2024, Estanguet hopes, will leave a legacy that enriches both the French capital and the country’s regional businesses. Parity, the environment and education will be at its heart: “This is another important reason to come to HEC,” he said in a one-on-one interview after his conference. “It’s the first time I come to the campus and what leaps out is the part sports plays in the daily lives of students coming from all over the world. It’s great to see how the school is facilitating access to a wide diversity of sports disciplines. It answers the need to preserve a big space for sports in the student curricula – for their wellbeing, health and balance.”
Ever since leaving high school, Estanguet has been able to combine his own academic career with a sports discipline which, to this day, remains amateur. “I see links between the two: when you compete in sports, you’re flirting with your own limits and discovering untapped resources. I’ve transferred these to my work nowadays. Then, there is the teamwork and international networks you develop in schools like these. These are key to professional success.”
From the moment Estanguet accepted to preside over the Games’ organization from his headquarters in Saint-Denis, he promised there would be a legacy shared by all and lasting
way beyond the event itself: “A century after they were last held in Paris, we have to demonstrate that we have rethought and renovated the Olympics, created social impact, and put in place an organizational system that is sober and environmentally durable. This model relies essentially on private financing (96%), a third of which comes from ticket sales.” But his over-riding objective is to mobilize France’s youth and accelerate the societal role of sports: “The W.H.O. has revealed that 80% of French youth do not do enough sports, putting their health at risk. This is unacceptable.”
© Daniel Brown, HEC Paris
From Virtus to Virtuous
The former triple world champion had time to study some of the sports initiatives initiated by HEC students, notably last year’s Virtus event at Roland Garros. This linked one of the Games’ 54 disciplines, tennis, with environmental and equal opportunity objectives: “It’s great to see students here engage in different ways of sensitizing people in such imaginative ways. We ourselves have to prove that we can organize the Olympics and Para-Olympics whilst halving the carbon footprint it leaves behind. We are inviting the French population at large – both in the cities and 4,000 smaller communes – to share in programs that are more inclusive and democratic.”
And Tony Estanguet concluded: “The link between Virtus and what we hope will be a virtuous Games is obvious: these Olympics aim to allow future generations to profit, too. And, for this, we have to think outside the box. I’m counting on HEC sharing a new vision of sports, where long-term sustainability and gender equality are omnipresent. The students here will be our leaders tomorrow, future managers with high responsibility. So, it’s vital to have its students and staff be part of this Paris 2024 adventure.”
As reported elsewhere, Estanguet also spent much of the day on the Jouy-en-Josas campus promoting his engagement towards the 2024 Paralympics. His participation in various workshops on disabilities and sports featured the presence of some of France's most prestigious paralympic athletes, like triple world champion Lucas Mazur, and several presidents from federations for disabled sports.
© Daniel Brown, HEC Paris