“I am going to walk on the road, and probably no one cares.”
Alex Lanier had just become a world champion, the first Frenchman to win the men’s singles title at the BWF World Championships. A few hours earlier, Thom Gicquel and Delphine Delrue had become France’s first badminton world champions, winning the mixed doubles title.
Two gold medals on the same day in New Delhi. A moment that should have changed the way a country looked at badminton.
Lanier was not entirely convinced.
“There will be nobody waiting for us, I think,” Gicquel said when asked what kind of reception he expected at the airport back home.
There was humour in both answers, but also a truth about where French badminton sits in the sporting landscape. France is a country that has produced football World Cup winners, Grand Tour cyclists, Olympic champions and some of rugby’s greatest teams. Badminton, despite having a substantial playing base, has never occupied that sort of space in the national imagination.
And yet, in the space of a few hours at the Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium, France produced two world champions. It prompted a congratulatory tweet from French President Emmanuel Macron.
THE LONG BUILD
The French badminton revolution not happen by accident. Nor did it happen in the last two years.
The story of French badminton is not about a federation suddenly finding the right coach, or a talented generation appearing from nowhere. It is about a system that has been built, altered and refined for decades, largely without the attention that comes with sporting success.
Ask Cyrille Gombrowicz, the French federation’s technical director, when the process began and he does not hesitate.
“1980.”
That was when France established its first national centre dedicated to performance. Before that, it was essentially a club sport. The first centre was followed by two other national centres for young players and then nine regional centres for younger athletes. The federation now works with around 60 clubs around the country and has developed a large coaching pool, including roughly 100 to 120 coaches involved in high-level work.
France did not wake up this week and decide it wanted to compete with China, Japan or Korea, or even European powerhoues, Denmark. It spent years building the pathway that might one day allow its players to stand alongside them. Today, that investment is visible in a generation led by Lanier and the Popov brothers, Christo and Toma Junior, who have pushed France into the upper reaches of men’s singles while also making their mark in doubles.
“The system started the job 20 years ago, and now the fruits are coming,” Kestutis Navickas, Lanier’s singles coach, said.
Gombrowicz puts the beginning further back, to 1980. The difference in the dates is less important than the common understanding. Nobody in the French camp sees Delhi as an overnight transformation.
There is a reason Navickas can speak about the system with such certainty. He has watched it produce the player sitting beside him.
When he started working with Lanier, the Frenchman was 15. Six years later, he is a world champion. In between came the less glamorous work that rarely makes a podium photograph: developing his technique, tactics, physicality and mental approach, changing habits, learning how to train and learning how to recover.
“For me as a coach, the mental part, the way you approach a training process, the way you approach to the practice, the way you approach the habits in the training, the way you polish the skills and how you implement that mentally, physically, tactically… I would say we just focus on four elements’ synchronisation,” Navickas told IndiaToday.in.
It sounds simple. It is anything but.
Lanier is 21, immensely gifted and now a world champion, but Navickas still describes him as “very coachable”. The work has increasingly been about breaking habits rather than teaching him something fundamental about badminton. The French team has worked on his diet, recovery and the way he takes care of his body before and after training.
Even his much-discussed physicality has been subjected to constant reassessment.
Lanier himself knows that his strength is one of his weapons. He says he has worked hard on his physique from a young age and has always enjoyed pushing himself in training. His parents were sailors and his father is naturally strong, but Lanier is quick to credit the work that has gone into developing that physical advantage.
SOPHISTICATED SPORTS SCIENCE
Navickas, however, explains the next stage.
Recently, they reduced Lanier’s gym sessions. Not because they wanted him to become weaker, but because they wanted him to become lighter, faster and more durable over a tournament. The objective was not to maximise his physicality in isolation, but to find the physical profile that allowed him to play match after match and remain effective.
That is where the French system’s increasingly sophisticated use of sports science comes in.
Gombrowicz speaks about the federation’s work with performance director Thierry Soler and the emphasis on data, training loads, match plans and even deciding how many tournaments a player should play during a season. The important part, however, is not simply that the French team collects information. It is that the coaches are being taught how to use it.
Navickas offers the more practical explanation.
“It’s data, it’s an expertise, it’s an experience, it’s a subjective opinion,” he says.
The decision, then, is not handed over to a machine. Data sits alongside the coach’s experience and judgement, and the team discusses the information before deciding what to change.
That philosophy was visible in Delhi. French players competed with tracking devices attached to their uniforms, another piece of a high-performance environment in which movement, workload and physical demands can be monitored. For a sport that is often still spoken about in terms of instinct and skill, the French are increasingly interested in understanding what happens to the athlete between one tournament and the next.
Thom Gicquel sees sports science in much the same way.
“It’s helping to plan and to be smart during the year,” he said. “It’s not something that helps you for just the day.”
That distinction matters. The French system is trying to make an athlete sustainable instead of eyeing immediate results.
BUILDING BELIEF
Gicquel and Delrue are perhaps the clearest example of that long-term thinking.
Their world title was not the product of a partnership thrown together because two good players happened to be available. They started playing together around the age of 17, when they entered the national centre. Delrue remembers the federation deliberately wanting a young pair that could remain together for a long period. They won good results early and were kept together.
10 years later, they are world champions.
The journey was not seamless. For the first two to four years, Gicquel admits, they barely spoke to each other.
They eventually learned to communicate, with help from their coaches and mental coaching. Their badminton improved alongside their relationship. They started with a shared idea of how they wanted to play, fast and attacking, and gradually developed the ability to handle different styles.
There is a wider point here. France is not simply producing athletes. It is trying to build partnerships and careers with enough patience for development to happen.
When Gicquel and Delrue won bronze at the 2025 World Championships in Paris, Gombrowicz saw it as a landmark. France had previously won a World Championships medal through Pi Hongyan in 2009, but she had arrived from China as an established player. The bronze won by Gicquel and Delrue was different. It was the first World Championships medal produced by the French system itself.
One year later, that bronze is gold.
“It’s amazing,” Gicquel said.
“Like 10 years ago, no French player could have thought about that.”
The change in belief did not come with one breakthrough. It came in increments.
Gicquel remembers winning a Super 100 when they were around 19. That was the first point at which the possibility of earning a living from badminton became real. Then came the first win over a top-five pair, Yuta Watanabe and Arisa Higashino. Each success narrowed the perceived gap between France and the traditional powers.
“You’re just making steps step-by-step, and you’re closer and closer, and at the end, you believe it,” Gicquel said.
DEPTH CHANGES EVERYTHING
That same belief is visible in the men’s singles.
Christo Popov and Toma Junior Popov have pushed France into territory that would have seemed improbable not long ago. Christo has established himself in the top 5 of men’s singles badminton with a BWF World Tour Finals title last year. He won the Japan Open this year. He also competes in doubles with his brother. Lanier has now joined the elite after a remarkable run of results.
There is a healthy competition between them, Delrue says. Every week, somebody is achieving something.
“We try to bring France at the top of every tournament,” she said. “To be the first is a bit more pressure because a lot are coming.”
A country with one exceptional player can have a champion. A country with several players pushing each other starts to have a system.
Their Thomas Cup success earlier this year was a statement.
France reached the final of the world men’s team championship for the first time, beating India 3-0 in the semi-final. Christo Popov beat Ayush Shetty, Lanier defeated Kidambi Srikanth and Toma Junior Popov beat HS Prannoy.
For an Indian badminton audience, that result needs little explanation. It was not one player carrying a team. France had three singles players good enough to beat India’s three singles players in a Thomas Cup semi-final.
France eventually lost 3-1 to China in the final, but the silver in Horsens was historic. It was France’s first Thomas Cup medal.
Lanier felt that collective force on Sunday.
After Gicquel and Delrue won the first gold, he said, the atmosphere inside the French team changed. He did not feel that his singles final was only about himself. It was about the staff, the players and the country. He wanted to give them “a double smile” and make history again.
The support around the players is part of that change. In Delhi, France arrived with a full performance group, including strength and conditioning coach Carlos Rubio, mixed doubles coach Tinna Helgadottir Ludvigsen, Navickas and Gombrowicz. The world champions were not operating as isolated individuals who happened to share a flag. They were the visible end of a large support structure.
There is also significant public backing behind that structure, although Gombrowicz is careful to describe it as a mixed model rather than a purely government-run operation. The French government supports high-level sport, while the federation also provides resources.
At the grassroots, the numbers are substantial. Navickas says France now has around 250,000 licensed badminton members. The sport is not as prominent in France as it is in India, but its playing base provides the system with something essential: a large pool from which talent can emerge.
Lanier is a good illustration.
He was identified early because he was already better than many children his age. But identifying talent was only the first step. He played at a club in Normandy, close to the sea, moved to the regional centre in Caen for two years and then went to the national centre at INSEP, where he could train alongside France’s best players. His family also played an important role during his early development.
Club. Region. National centre. Elite environment.
The pathway is the story.
ONLY THE BEGINNING
And it is a pathway that France knows is still incomplete.
Gombrowicz is under no illusion that two World Championships titles have suddenly turned France into a badminton superpower. At present, he says, the country is genuinely competitive in only two events, men’s singles and mixed doubles. China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia have depth across the disciplines that France does not yet possess.
The next ambition is therefore not simply to produce another world champion. It is to have more players inside the world’s top 30 and to become competitive in more events.
“This is a first step now,” Gombrowicz said.
“But we have another ambition. An ambition to go higher.”
That is why the two gold medals in Delhi should not be viewed as an arrival.
They are proof of concept.
The French federation began building its performance structure in 1980, when badminton was still essentially a club sport. 46 years later, two French pairs and players are standing on the top step of a World Championships podium. Along the way came regional centres, national centres, coach education, government support, sports science, data, long-term partnerships and a culture in which athletes are expected to keep learning even after they become elite.
Lanier is perhaps the perfect embodiment of that philosophy. At three, he says, he was not dreaming of becoming a World Champion. He was playing badminton because he enjoyed it, sharing the court with friends and family. It became more serious later, particularly after he met Christo Popov, whom he describes as more professional than he was at the time.
His view of the sport remains strikingly uncomplicated.
“Badminton should be something that you share first, something that you enjoy first,” he said.
“It’s still a game.”
That is where the French story began too, in clubs and among people who simply played the game. The difference is that, over four decades, France built a system around those players and kept improving it.
Now the world has noticed.
Whether France will become a true badminton powerhouse remains to be seen. Gombrowicz himself says there is much more work to do. But the days when a French player could scarcely imagine standing on top of a World Championships podium are gone.
As for Lanier’s prediction that he will walk down a French road and nobody will care, perhaps he is right. For now.
But if the French system continues to produce players who believe they can beat the best, the airport crowds may eventually have to learn their names.
– Ends
