At the end of a winter far from the standards they had accustomed, the Blues and their coaches have reached "the breaking point", and Vincent Vittoz and Patrick Favre announced Friday that they would leave at the end of the season.

"Today, it is clear that we are no longer in tune with our athletes. We feel that they are not able to hear some of our speeches," Vittoz told the handful of French journalists present in Oslo, for the last stage of the Biathlon World Cup. "We were ready to continue, clearly. But today, there is a break in this discourse, "added the ex-founder, visibly moved.

Vittoz and Favre took the reins of the men's group five years ago, after the 2018 Olympic Games, and chose to leave for a new Olympiad after the 2022 Olympic Games, the most successful in the history of French biathlon, thanks in particular to the five medals amassed by Quentin Fillon Maillet (two gold and three silver).

"We feel that there is no longer this trust"

But, at the end of a very bland post-Olympic season -unlike that of Les Bleues, in the wake of Julia Simon-, "QFM", Emilien Jacquelin and the others are no longer on the same wavelength as their coaches. "We had a lot of ideas (to bounce back) but they don't fit (with theirs). Training is based a lot on confidence, today we feel that this confidence is lacking, said Favre. Forcing things is not a good thing. »

Throughout the winter, the results were not there. To the point that the Blues risk ending the season on Sunday without any individual victory, which has not happened for 26 years (1996/97).

Already, for the first time in 14 years, just before the great Martin Fourcade era, they did not stand on any individual podium at the Worlds in Oberhof (Germany) in February. They were nevertheless crowned relay world champions ahead of Johannes Boe's Norway.

"Quentin misread"

"We will have to think together about what we need to develop as a team, staff and athletes, not to repeat a season like this," said Jacquelin. Fillon Maillet, for his part, repeated throughout the winter his desire for "novelty". So that, in the end, this divorce is not so much a surprise.

To explain the sad winter of his troops, Vittoz puts forward "a negative spiral" and "above all, the bankruptcy of our two leaders". "Quentin (Fillon Maillet), he never wanted to hear the warning messages (saying that) it would not be a year like any other. He wanted to show everyone who told him that it was going to be a more difficult year than he would get to him, because it's a machine. He made a little misreading, he develops. We tried to warn him. Our fault may be that we have not had enough impact. »



As for Jacquelin, who ended his season early after Oberhof, he is "a depressed athlete for a year and a half, whom we accompanied, we did more than was possible, we put all our energy, maybe too much at times, maybe we tried too hard to bring him back to the right path, Vittoz explains. We may not have been the right answers either, but we maintained it as much as we could. »

Les Bleus have only five individual World Cup podiums since the beginning of the season: only one for QFM, three for Jacquelin, and one for the young Eric Perrot.

  • Sport
  • Biathlon
  • Quentin Fillon Maillet
  • Emilien Jacquelin