‘It’s a very strange feeling’: can the man who won Olympic gold bring glory to the Paris Games? | Paris Olympic Games 2024

It has to feel pretty weird. You’re in charge of the biggest event your country’s ever organised. You have worked on it to the exclusion, basically, of everything else in your life, for very nearly a decade. And now – it’s a week away.

“It’s a very strange feeling,” confirms Tony Estanguet, head of the 2024 Olympic Games organising committee. “I come from this small town in south-west France. My sport is a very minor one. It’s been … quite a ride. But here I am. And now, well, here we all are.”

Paris 2024 – that’s 10,500 competitors, 329 events, 4,500 staff, 40,000 volunteers, 10 million spectators, just the 4bn television viewers – kicks off this Friday with a parade “like no other” of 160 boats along the Seine: the first Olympic opening ceremony ever attempted outside a stadium.

Under the eyes of more than 45,000 police and security officers, the national teams will sail past Notre Dame cathedral and under bridges including the Pont des Arts and the Pont Neuf as far as the Eiffel Tower, watched by 300,000 spectators along 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 won individual canoe slalom golds at the Sydney, Athens and London Games – and bears more than a passing resemblance to former England football coach Gareth Southgate. For him, Friday can’t come soon enough. “It’s the first big moment. The moment we show the world that these games really are going to be different,” he says, sipping a soft drink in a deserted bar across the square from the organising committee’s HQ in the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis. “And we really had to push very, very hard for it.”

The Olympic games, says Estanguet, 46, are “a once-in-a-century event for each host country. That’s a once-in-a-century chance to show it off to its very best advantage – do something truly spectacular – the most eye-popping sporting spectacle possible.”

From the first stages of the candidacy in 2015, the organising team’s watchwords were “audacity and ambition”, he says. “Paris is an exceptional city and we wanted to do something exceptional, something really different – make the city itself the venue. Take sport, where we could, out of the stadium.”

Fifteen of the city’s best-known landmarks have become event sites: fencing at the Grand Palais, archery at the Invalides, beach volleyball on the Champ de Mars by the Eiffel Tower. There’s road cycling and marathon swimming at the Pont Alexandre III; the Place de la Concorde hosts BMX, basketball, breakdancing and skateboarding; equestrian events are at the Palace of Versailles.

Besides providing great TV, it’s part of a bid to make the Paris Games more sustainable than predecessors by way of temporary venues, green initiatives, new sports aimed at a younger, more urban audience, and greater public participation – including a “marathon for all” on the same course as the Olympic race.

For all his apparent diffidence, ambition and audacity are not qualities that Estanguet lacks. Born in the Pyrenean town of Pau to sports teacher parents, he came of age as a top-flight athlete when he had to face off against his admired elder brother for France’s sole canoe slalom place at the Sydney Olympics.

“I’d always looked up to him; he was a role model for me,” he says. “When I was small, I used to watch him from the bank. Later, he taught me so much. He brought me to the top.” For years the brothers competed together as members of France’s European and world championship canoe slalom team.

At the 1996 Games in Atlanta, Estanguet’s brother Patrice, five years his senior, won bronze. But as the qualifying process got under way for the following Games, the brothers realised they would have to compete against each other for France’s spot. “It was hard,” he says. “I’d always admired and respected him. But he handled it brilliantly. A good year before, he sat me down and said, ‘Look, we’ll only get through this is if we go our separate ways for a bit. We have to preserve our relationship.’”

Tony won the French qualifiers (just) and went on to win gold in Sydney (“for Patrice, really, because he could have done it, as well as for me”). Four years later, in Athens, he did so again – defeating, by 12/100ths of a second, the man who, over the course of two decades, would be his greatest rival.

The Slovak slalom canoeist Michal Martikán was Estanguet’s toughest and most consistent adversary, winning two Olympic golds to the Frenchman’s three. As much as his relationship with Patrice, his rivalry with Martikán was “a huge part of my story”, Estanguet says. “He was a genius. We were very different. He was smaller, really strong, very technical, very tight. My style was more fluid, more supple, smoother. A rivalry like that teaches determination. And patience.”

He needed both in 2008 when, having proudly carried the French team’s tricolore at the opening ceremony of the Beijing games, Estanguet failed to qualify for a final won, inevitably, by Martikán. “It was the first time I’d suffered such a bad defeat at that level,” he says.

“When you lose badly at the Olympics, when you’re the defending champion, the favourite – that’s hard to swallow. I was 30, I was competing in my third Games. I though pretty hard about giving up.” Instead, he turned to his brother.

“I just said to him, ‘I’d like you to come and train me, help get me motivated again,’” he says. “And he said yes. So we had a last great adventure together.”

With Patrice’s help, Estanguet was world champion in 2009 and 2010, European champion in 2011, and Olympic gold medallist in 2012. “If I’m sitting here today,” he says, “it’s because I may have blown Beijing, but I didn’t disintegrate. I stayed calm, picked myself up, got my confidence back.”

With two years’ of sports management studies already under his belt, Estanguet knew sports administration was where he was heading when he gave up elite competition after London. He got himself elected to the athletes’ commission of the International Olympic Committee – the first French sportsman to do so.

Already active in the International Canoe Federation and the World Anti-Doping Agency, he found himself co-opted on to the French National Olympic Committee, where he learned “the stuff that goes on around sports – the politics, the economics, the diplomacy. A steep learning curve”.

In 2016, he was appointed co-president of the French bid for the 2024 Games, and by 2017, when Paris officially won the right to host the Olympics after Los Angeles agreed to defer, “I had moved into another world altogether.

“We were 50 on the Paris team then. Now we’re 4,000. It’s just … huge.”

So, is a stellar sporting career good preparation for an organisational challenge on the scale of the Olympics? Estanguet is lucid about what elite athletes can contribute – and what they can’t. “There’s the fact of acknowledging your ambition,” he says. “As an athlete, if your aim is to be in the top 10, you don’t win very often. And that doesn’t always go down well. But it’s crucial – if I was doing this job, these Games had to be extraordinary.”

Rigour, discipline and responsibility are key. “Understanding you have to train every day, work hard at what you don’t know how to do, knowing you can’t afford to get angry when things go wrong. Taking responsibility, being sure your decisions are OK because you’ve put in the work.

“In sport, nothing ever happens like you expect. There’ll always be a competitor you know nothing about, weather … You deal with it. Say: so this won’t go as planned, but I’ve got solutions. And often they’re split-second.”

Paris 2024 has had its fair share of unexpected challenges. The Covid pandemic provided a rumble of uncertainty for a couple of years; thereafter, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sparked an inflation rate that forced some tough sacrifices.

“When you’re talking about a budget of €4bn, a 15% inflation rate is a very big deal,” says Estanguet. “We had to cut the number of sites.”

Gymnastics and basketball, set for separate venues, merged; the shooting, originally in a temporary city venue, is now at the national shooting centre two hours away.

And teamwork. “Even in an individual sport, you need a good team,” said Estanguet. “Organising the Olympic games is the biggest collective effort there is. Athletes, security and transport people, politicians, unions, sponsors, police, local officials… All have to pull in the same direction, at roughly the same speed. That’s the job.”

There were skills Estanguet recognised he did not have, and needed. “Public speaking,” he said. “When you have to address heads of state, the money people, immense athletes who were your sporting idols … I was not good at that. I took a lot of lessons. Now I’m OK with it.”

And now here we are, less than a week from the opening ceremony. Any worries? The French in general, and Parisians in particular, are notoriously grumpy and hard to please, but Estanguet says he has taken heart from many conversations with his counterpart at the London Games, the great middle-distance champion Seb Coe.

“So far, everything’s gone as he said it would,” he says. “A few years when no one was remotely interested. A few years when too many were interested, wanted to stick their oar in. And there were lots of absurd controversies. And then a final year that was just very, very hard work.”

The relief would come, Coe told Estanguet, “‘when your country wins its first medals’. So I’ll be up for that.” In the meantime, he is happy to have swum in the Seine with the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, on the morning of this interview. After a costly clean-up programme and months of doubts, the river is finally deemed clean.

“That was a great moment, symbolically,” he says. “It sums up what we want these Games to be: spectacular, athletes swimming through one of the world’s most beautiful cities. That’s magic. And invested. We’ll leave behind a river people can swim in. That’s magic, too.”