In a long interview with GQ, Thierry Henry, former coach of the French Olympic team, silver medalist this summer at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, regrets that no charms are awarded to coaches and staff members.
“I get chills just thinking about it…” Thierry Henry will never forget this August 9, 2024. That afternoon, despite a defeat and a completely crazy match against Spain in the final of the football tournament of the 2024 Paris Olympics (5-3, ap.), the coach of the French Olympic team experienced one of the finest moments of his career. Completely caught up in the event, the ex-Gunner even places the Games above the triumph of the Blues during the 1998 World Cup because of the presence of his children in the stands of the Parc des Princes. The defeat quickly digested, after the final he gathered his players around him with a message to pass on to them: “Don’t be ashamed, don’t be disappointed, you have all my respect.”
“Why didn’t the coaches of Léon Marchand and Teddy Riner receive medals either?”
Then came the protocol. His players received a silver medal. But not him. “They won’t see it because I don’t have one,” he quipped in the mixed zone after listing the people he intended to go see, including his dad, after the Olympics. Three months later, Thierry Henry is no longer the coach of the Espoirs but the absence of a medal for the coach and especially the French staff is still such an incomprehensible rule for him: “I made a few little jokes in front of the journalists when I was asked where my medal was after the final because it was ‘fun’, but it hurt more for my staff than for me,” he confided to GQ. “To be honest, I find that it goes against the Olympic spirit. Why didn’t the coaches of Léon Marchand and Teddy Riner also receive medals,” he asks before to defend the cause of those who work in the shadow of athletes.
“Since the start of the competition, we kept telling ourselves ‘we’re together’, and in the end we weren’t.”
“A victory or a medal is the reward of a group with its players, but also that of their physical trainer, their assistant, their doctor and their physiotherapists, who go to bed at 4 a.m. then get up at 8 a.m. do not have the same salaries as the players and also deserve a medal Since the start of the competition, we kept telling ourselves ‘we are together’, and in the end we were not. Regrets and a little bitterness which will not, however, erase this enchanted parenthesis forever engraved in the memory of the former greatest scorer of the France team.
