“Damn it! We have to deal with Johnny (French rock and pop idol Johnny Halliday) again! They did this to us before, with Dika Mem’s long shot. Don’t you think that DJs tend to suppress the competition?” In the stands, a handball aesthete who was attending the game for the umpteenth time – we didn’t dare ask – had had enough of the omnipresent soundtrack that could be heard whenever the game seemed to slow down a bit. That took the wind out of our sails and we interrupted the game by singing Johnny’s What I likewhich seemed to have become the new national anthem since the beginning of sporting events.

For our incorruptible sports fan, Leslie Dufaux was the woman who had to be stopped – a hero to everyone else in the audience, singing at the top of their lungs like us. Everything was her fault: the lights running across the purple ceilings of the Grand Palais; the “mapping” (a technique for projecting images onto large areas) of Monet’s water lilies on the pool at Paris’s La Défense arena; the posts at rugby matches that glowed green when a try was scored, red when it was missed. All of that carefully crafted scenography perfected over the past two years – and of course the ever-present music – was thanks to her and her team.

“Our job is to synchronize people, to channel their energies, to create a place and a moment of togetherness,” said the head of the “sports presentation,” as it is called in the Olympic lexicon. This refers to the cocoon of events in which the competition takes place. And let’s be honest, you might think you are intolerant of anthems, pop music and trendy tunes – but they work.

She ran towards us, her hair dishevelled even though it was straight, but she had a smile on her face. Monday night had been long – there had been a dress rehearsal for the closing ceremony at the Stade de France, but they had to wait until the end of the athletics competitions for that. This evening, however, the evening dragged on because of the celebrations over Armand Duplantis’ victory in the pole vault, breaking his own world record. “And then, after the rehearsal, we stayed forever because we were happy with what we had done,” she said jokingly. Since then, work nights have come and gone, each one as sleepless as the first.

‘Community’

Dufaux discovered the world of the 2006 Olympic Games in Turin, Italy. After gaining her first experience as a producer for the television channel TF1, Star Academy After her time on the music talent show, she worked for Eurosport. At the time of the Winter Olympics this year, which were held in the Italian Alps, the pay-TV sports channel wanted to set up an entertainment format and reach a more female audience. “It was a geographically complicated city and a unity emerged. I said to myself: ‘This is great, these big events that manage to bring all these people together in a kind of community. I want that adrenaline!'”

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