France
2024–25

Sixteen Medals in Five Days

France began this kit cycle by having the best week of its recent history. At the European Championships in Rome, between 7 and 12 June 2024, a team of 104 athletes won sixteen medals — four gold, five silver, seven bronze — and finished second in the table behind Italy, which had the run of a home crowd and 24 medals.

The golds came in a rush: Cyréna Samba-Mayela in the 100 metres hurdles on the 8th; Alice Finot in the 3000 metres steeplechase and Gabriel Tual in the 800 on the 9th; Alexis Miellet in the men's steeplechase on the 10th, with Djilali Bedrani second in the same race. Add Auriana Lazraq-Khlass in the heptathlon, Louise Maraval over the 400 hurdles, Yann Schrub in the 10,000, the women's 4×100 relay, and seven bronzes spread from the triple jump to the hammer to the 1500. That is a squad, not a star.

Eight weeks later the same squad went to the Stade de France.

One Medal in Paris

The Paris Olympics gave French athletics a single medal. It arrived on 10 August, the last day of track events, when Cyréna Samba-Mayela ran 12.34 in the 100 metres hurdles and finished one hundredth behind Masai Russell's 12.33. She had come through her semi-final in fourth place, 12.52, advancing on time; her French record of 12.31 belongs to Rome, not to the Olympic final.

Four days earlier the home crowd had watched the other kind of French night. Alice Finot ran the 3000 metres steeplechase in 8:58.67 — the first European woman under nine minutes, a continental record that still stands in 2026 — and finished fourth, about three seconds off the podium. She walked off the track, knelt down, and proposed to her partner with the pin she had raced with. A European record, no medal, and the picture of the Games in France.

Jimmy Gressier ran two events in Paris and left with nothing: out in the heats of the 5000, thirteenth in the 10,000 in 26:58.67 — a French record, in a race he did not come close to winning. Keep that number; it matters in fourteen months.

Two Medals in Tokyo, Both His

France took 77 athletes to the 2025 World Championships in Tokyo and finished seventeenth with two medals. Both belonged to Gressier. On 14 September he won the 10,000 metres in 28:55.77, coming past Yomif Kejelcha in the straight and taking it by six hundredths. On the last day he added bronze over 5000 metres in 12:59.33, behind Cole Hocker and Isaac Kimeli.

The 10,000 was a first that had been waiting a long time: no French athlete had ever won a world medal of any colour at the distance. It made Gressier the ninth French world champion in the history of the championships — the list runs through Marie-José Pérec in 1991 and 1995 and Kevin Mayer in 2017 and 2022 — and it was France's first outdoor global title since 2022.

The rest of the team came close without landing: Hilary Kpatcha fourth in the long jump at 6.82, Thibaut Collet fifth in the pole vault at 5.90, Sarah Madeleine seventh in the 1500 with a personal best. Meanwhile Samba-Mayela, the athlete this cycle started with, was not in Tokyo at all: a calf injury cost her most of 2025, she missed the World Indoors in Toruń in March 2026, and after returning to racing in April she withdrew from the European Championships in Birmingham. The other half of the cycle's story is an athlete who spent it in the treatment room.

From this cycle · in the archiveAdidas France Pro Elite 2024/2025 Women T-ShirtAdidas France women's T-shirt marked for the 2024/2025 allocation — the last two years of the contract adidas signed in 2022 to dress the French team through its home Games.150,00 €View piece →

Same allocation · in the archiveAdidas France Pro Elite 2024/2025 Running CapThe running cap from the same 2024/2025 issue. Team allocation, not retail: the pieces come out of the federation channel in the quantities the squad needed, which is why one or two reach an archive at a time.80,00 €View piece →

The earlier Asics years of this same rail are covered in our France 2021 season page and France 2019; the whole national arc is in our history of athletics in France.