The anticipated confirmation on Monday at a press conference hosted by the French Federation and Toulouse that Antoine Dupont will miss this season’s Six Nations in order to switch his focus towards the French Sevens team at next year’s Olympics comes as little surprise. It also tells us much, albeit it didn’t really require much in the way of confirmation.
It tells us that the French government, and the country as a whole, were always prioritising the 2024 Paris Olympics over the 2023 Rugby World Cup. It also tells us that despite not winning the latter trophy, Dupont remains one of the headline acts in French sport and will be one of the poster boys of the games.
In addition though, and counter to the laughable proposition that sports and politics don’t mix, this huge coup for the Paris Olympics has to be viewed in a political/historical context.
The French minister for sports, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, had a particularly troubled relationship with the former president of the French Rugby Federation, Bernard Laporte, and his allies who helped France win the right to host the World Cup.
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Oudéa-Castéra called for Laporte to step down after he received a two-year suspended prison sentence last December on foot of being found guilty of corruption charges, specifically that he had shown favouritism in awarding a shirt sponsorship contract for the national side to Mohed Altrad, the billionaire owner of Top 14 champions Montpellier.
When Laporte eventually did resign in late January, the sports minister called on the remainder of the board to step down en bloc as well.
Florian Grill was subsequently elected as the FFR’s new president last June with a 58 per cent share of the vote against a Laporte ally. The head of the Greater Paris rugby committee, Grill was also one of Laporte’s most outspoken opponents and lost narrowly to him in the previous presidential election in 2020.
For Grill and the FFR to now sanction Dupont’s switch to the Sevens circuit and the Olympics, at the expense of him playing in the Six Nations, must play very well politically with the French government and Oudéa-Castéra.
It is expected that Dupont will play in the Sevens events in Vancouver, Canada on February 23-24 and in Los Angeles on March 2-3. His absence from the Six Nations will oblige Fabien Galthié to name a new captain and starting scrumhalf before their opening Six Nations match against Ireland in Marseille on Friday, February 2nd.
The Olympics allow all finalists to bring aboard up to four professional players from the 15-a-side game, and there has been talk of France also co-opting Peato Mauvaka and Damian Penaud on to their Sevens team, as they seek to win a first medal at the Games of any hue. They didn’t qualify for Tokyo four years ago after being knocked out by Ireland, but did so this time automatically as hosts.
The Olympic Sevens tournament, which takes place from July 24th to 27th in the Stade de France, is already a sell-out, but this is all about eyes on screens more than derrières on seats. At a stroke, co-opting Dupont on to the French team is a huge boon for the Olympic Sevens and it’s likely that others will be enlisted by competing teams, with former Wallabies’ hooker Michael Hooper already committed to the Australian Sevens cause.
For Dupont, the switch makes sense on a number of levels. He is by some distance the most famous rugby player in France, with an off-pitch earning potential which dwarfs his estimated €600,000 annual salary.
He is a brand ambassador for Adidas, with whom he has his own signed boot, the Predator Malice Control SG. This year, the chic French clothing company Ami Paris released a nine-piece collection with Dupont featuring a striped rugby polo shirt (which retails at €440), T-shirt, jacket, hoodie and hat. The collection is available online worldwide, and in stores exclusively in France, the United Kingdom and Japan.
He also has sponsorship deals with Peugeot, Volvic, Tissot and the France state-owned railway company SNCF. But however big the Antoine Dupont brand may be in France, his participation in the Olympics as one of its poster boys, along with the possibility of winning a medal (ideally gold of course), would see him become a global brand.
Not alone was Dupont part of a French Grand Slam-winning team in 2022, but after France’s failure to win the World Cup on home soil the chance of helping his country’s team to a medal at the Olympics is another once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
For when else is ever going to have the opportunity to play in a home Olympics?
