18 athletes, including 4 guides, to hope to win more than 20 medals and do better than in Pyeongchang in 2018, from where the French team left with 7 titles, 8 silver medals and 5 bronze.
By favoring quality over quantity, the French contingent intends to shine during the Paralympic Games.
A high ambition, but assumed as Benjamin Daviet confided before flying to Beijing: “
We have a great delegation, admittedly small but which is strong and which showed it at the World Championships.
A reference to the recent competition organized in Lillehammer, in which the Blues left with 19 podiums, including 10 world champion titles.
To discover
The 2022 Winter Olympics medal table
Full results of the 2022 Winter Olympics
If arithmetically, such an objective means more than one medal on average per athlete, in fact, France will be able to rely above all on a few possible medal collectors, like the biathlete Quentin Fillon-Maillet and his five podiums during of the Olympic Games two weeks ago.
With at the top of the list Marie Bochet who will try, in alpine para skiing, to sign a new quadruple, after those achieved in Sochi and Pyeongchang.
At 28, for what will be her last Games, the Frenchwoman will have to face more formidable adversity than in the past, where she dominated her rivals with her head and spatulas.
Nevertheless, downhill and giant, she still seems to have enough margin, as demonstrated by her two world titles last January.
At 21, Arthur Bauchet wants to win his first Olympic title, after his silver quadruple in Pyeongchang.
Reigning world champion in slalom and super combined, he will be a serious customer also in downhill and giant.
Even if physically, the challenge, for him who suffers from spastic paraparesis – a genetic disease resulting in particular in a weakness of the lower limbs – promises to be formidable, as he confided to the Dauphiné Libéré.
"
It's complicated at the finish because I'm going to the end of myself physically.
The disease is present at the moment but there are still two months to go and then I will be able to breathe.
I'm potentially medalist in all five disciplines so I won't miss a beat and I'm going to grit my teeth.
It went well in Norway, there is no reason for it to go badly at the Games.
In any case, I will give everything to have no regrets.
If it goes, so much the better, if it doesn't, too bad.
»
Hyacinthe Deleplace, after the Summer Games, make way for the Winter Games
Finally, still concerning alpine skiing, Hyacinthe Deleplace will discover, at the age of 32, the Paralympic Games… of winter, he who has already participated in the summer ones in 2012 in athletics.
Suffering from congenital cataract which greatly reduces his field of vision, he relies on his complementarity with his guides Valentin Giraud-Moine (in speed) and Maxime Jourdan (in technique) to hurtle down the slopes at more than 100km/h.
“
I ski by mimicry.
So the more my guide is precise, the more I will be.
I love the fact of working as a team, each using the feedback of the other.
It's a real plus for me
, ”he analyzed before flying to Beijing.
With his hat-trick in Lillehammer, Deleplace can aim for at least a podium in each of the events on his program.
French snowboarding is not lacking in assets
Another sector could be a supplier of (beautiful) medals for France, that of snowboarding with Maxime Montaggioni, world champion in banked slalom and snowboarcross, and Cécile Hernandez, also titled in snowboardcross and silver in banked slalom.
Two athletes who have passed their thirties but who have lost none of their ambition.
He, at 32, wants revenge for the fate that deprived him of the Pyeongchang Games in 2018 due to an injury in training.
She, at 37, had to fight for the right to participate in these Games after the abolition of her category.
Which means that in China, she will have to win against competitors with a lighter handicap than hers.
A challenge on its own.
Finally, in biathlon and cross-country skiing,