The president of France’s Olympic Committee resigned unexpectedly on Thursday, the latest leadership shake up of French sports and preparations for the Summer Olympics in Paris next year.
Brigitte Henriques, a former soccer player on the French national team, was the first woman to lead Olympic sports in France. Her departure follows a period of intense infighting in French Olympic circles.
The French Olympic Committee said she announced at the start of a general assembly meeting on Thursday that she was stepping down. The committee statement did not give her reasons but said she explained them to the meeting’s attendees. She’d occupied the role since June 2021.
As head of France’s Olympic Committee, Henriques was directly involved in the massive, complex and costly preparations for the 2024 Games, sitting as a member of the board of directors of the Paris organizing committee led by its president, Tony Estanguet. As French Olympic Committee secretary, the new interim president, Guyart, was already a member of the Paris 2024 board, too.
While French sports have triumphed on the fields of play, led notably by victory in the 2018 soccer World Cup, they’ve been rocked by multiple leadership changes in the run-up to the Paris Games.
Bernard Laporte resigned as president of the French Rugby Federation in January after he was convicted of corruption and illegally acquiring assets and handed a suspended prison sentence.
Last October, Claude Atcher was fired as chief executive of the Rugby World Cup that opens in France in September, and which also will serve as a test of France’s security preparations for the Olympics. Atcher’s removal followed an investigation by French labor inspectors into his workplace conduct.
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