Wanted by Bertrand Delais, the CEO of LCP, who will leave his position on June 9, after two three-year mandates, “Les Grands Entretiens” offers, with the approach of the Paris Olympic Games, a sports version, “Paroles of athletes”, since January 21.
At the helm, the highly successful Nathalie Iannetta, former “Ms. Foot” at Canal (1995-2014), worked at the Elysée (youth and sport advisor in 2014) and TF1 (“Téléfoot”), before taking charge of sports from Radio France, since 2021. This evening she welcomes pole vaulter Jean Galfione, Olympic champion in Atlanta in 1996, converted to solo sailing racing.
The credits – the last notes of We Will Rock You, by Queen – sets the tone. Without introduction, Nathalie Iannetta proceeds in order and evokes the predestined childhood of her guest, spent between a gymnast mother and a fencer father, who met during a training course in Font-Romeu (Pyrénées-Orientales) …
“Sports education was important, but not competition,” explains Jean Galfione. However, by nature, he is a competitor. Two pole vaulters will prove decisive in his career. First the Ukrainian Sergueï Bubka, first pole vaulter to pass the 6 meter mark at the Paris meeting, on July 13, 1985 – Galfione will be the first Frenchman in 1999. Then Pierre Quinon, first French Olympic champion in the specialty, in 1984 , in Los Angeles, at age 22.
Hard to evil
The latter will become the mentor, the “big brother” of Jean Galfione, ten years his junior. Until August 2011, when “he made, if I may say so, the journey in the other direction, since he threw himself out of the window, at the age of 49,” recalls the journalist. “He was an artist. Nicolas de Staël was his model,” but he was depressed, Galfione points out.
Nathalie Iannetta is more inspired to talk about the risks linked to sport: “What is scarier: crossing a 6-meter bar or a 6-meter wave? » In both cases, you have to be tough on evil. “If I liked hurting myself every day, it’s because, together, we could do anything,” replies the sportsman turned navigator.
At the Atlanta Olympics, the pole vaulter reached the Grail, like Marie-José Pérec, David Douillet, Laura Flessel… He remembers it with a group of friends: “There were around fifteen of us, among the best in the world. We knew it and we experienced it with absolute joy. »
Today, alongside his participation in the Route du rhum or the Transat Jacques-Vabre, he continues to train young people in a small athletics center, always in a good mood. As he does with his two children. Because, “if young people come to the stadium and have fun there, they will come back.”
