Goals and dreams: The quest to create elite youth athletes in France, 1958--1992

France was one of the first countries to develop programs that integrated youth athletics with academics and medical supervision to produce elite athletes. Today the products of the French systems play for the best teams and leagues around the world. Many countries from Africa to Great Britain have implemented youth training structures based upon the French model. But it was not always this way.This study examines the origins, implementation, and evolution of French youth sports training programs from 1958 to 1992. The lenses of football and basketball are used to amplify how Anglo-American team sports were used by the French to reformulate French identity and influence. Yet, this work is about more than just athletics. It is the story of France during the last half of the twentieth century, how it grappled with and adjusted to the many transitions that defined the post-1945 era, and how it positioned itself in the new Cold War world.Sport, specifically at the youth level, was one of the ways in which the French tried to address and adapt to a variety of post-war changes. After 1973, sport was an antidote to the legacy of 1968: a way to reinforce authority and nationalism in an era of increasing globalization during which the youth tested the limits of the rules. Youth sports programs served to assimilate youth, especially immigrant youth, into French society.France used youth sports as an agent of modernization, to re-launch itself as a rejuvenated nation that relied upon rationalized athletic development to produce elite athletes, ideal citizens who would win international sporting events and titles. The youth sports programs were important ways for the French to regain their sense of honor and prestige domestically and abroad. At a time in which soft power was an important tool of diplomacy, such athletic successes helped to demonstrate a revived France in a way that Charles de Gaulle was unable to accomplish during the 1960s.