Jean-Philippe Leclaire holds up the front page of L'Équipe. It’s a photo of Swedish pole vaulter Armand ‘Mondo’ Duplantis on his way to a world record at the Olympics. The headline reads: ‘Le Record Du Mondo’.
“That’s bingo!” says the deputy editor-in-chief of the famed French sports newspaper. Read More: Gold medal hero Rhys McClenaghan on his sure-sighted mentality Read More: Rhadisat Adeleke opens up on heartbreak of Olympic 400m finish “When people who can’t speak French and they get the headline. That’s the bingo.
” It’s Thursday afternoon in the south Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt and Leclaire is preparing for the daily editorial conference. Portraits of sporting greats like Alain Prost, Eddy Merckx and Michel Platini line the walls of the corridor. Production staff are already piecing together the paper and placing completed pages on the wall.
So how does the world’s greatest sports-only newspaper cover the biggest sporting event in the world? “It’s the biggest event we ever had to cover in the history of L'Équipe,” says Leclaire. “We have been waiting for it for 100 years, so we had time to prepare. We had a whole century to prepare for it,” he adds, laughing.
“The only comparison is the 1998 football World Cup. But I think it’s bigger than that. “With these Games, we woke up on the first day — it was raining, there was a sabotage on the national rails, so we thought, ‘Oh, what kind of hell are we going to go t.