It is a significant undertaking, both for Le Coq Sportif and for Ashpool. Together they will produce the training and competition kit for French Olympians active in some 60 disciplines, as well as the official products associated with these kits and the representation outfits, worn by the athletes at the Olympic Village and the opening and closing ceremonies. Outfits that can have quite an impact.

“For me, the starting point, the motivation, is that it’s the Olympic Games, and the French team. It’s a major project!” said Ashpool. He went on to add that “we’ll need to follow a specific design brief, because not all sports can be treated the same way. I had little time to absorb as much information as possible. I had the opportunity to interact with athletes and I visited the facilities in Romilly. Putting all these elements quickly together allowed me to move on to what I call the free creativity phase, without constraints. There were two areas to consider. First, the Olympic kit for all Olympic and Paralympic athletes, i.e. the outfits they’ll wear at the Olympic Village when interacting with the media and at medal award ceremonies. A great number of garments, that must fit the different profiles of male and female athletes. Then we needed to develop the performance outfits, for sports as diverse as gymnastics, judo or track cycling. Le Coq Sportif is an expert in this field, especially in team sports, as it outfits the French rugby union team, but the whole package can range from very straightforward to highly specific items.”

Le Coq Sportif is developing these collections by tapping its links with high-level sport, which the brand began to revive just over a decade ago. Le Coq Sportif has in fact been a partner to the Tour de France, to French top-tier football club AS Saint-Étienne, to rugby union club Aviron Bayonnais, and France’s federation of athletes with disabilities. Le Coq Sportif also said it sponsors some 100 individual athletes, and has agreements with some 1,000 amateur sporting clubs.

A web of connections that enables the brand to be well aware of athletes’ expectations. After listening to competition athletes, and combining this with the know-how of the brand’s Romilly staff and with Ashpool’s creativity, ideas have started to germinate. “We need to juggle creativity and technical constraints, getting to grips with these elements. But there is plenty of room for details that give a new take on [France’s] red, white and blue, while drawing inspiration from key words provided by athletes, such as fusion, ambition, energy, adrenaline and more. And beyond these, from terms like bright, modern, disruptive and elegant. Then we worked on the idea of representing a nation with its diversity of body shapes, colours, identities and cultures. I think this is what best represents contemporary France and its athletes. In my career, I have done a lot of work on colour gradations. It’s the perfect approach for blurring a flag’s sharp colour boundaries, and introduce the idea of fusion,” said Ashpool.

The collection’s various outfits use colours differently. For the competition kits, hundreds of athletes from 33 sport federations are set to wear red and blue. The representation outfits will instead be more understated, produced in ecru cotton by Le Coq Sportif’s French partners. “We wanted to strike a balance between rigour and imagination, in order to be attractive to athletes. I wanted to respect the fact that they will be there to best represent their country in a sporting competition. So we opted for ecru, for authenticity, elegance and a chic touch, and worked on details to add creativity. And the idea is that, at the Games’ ceremonies, there will be a French flag flying above them.”

For Le Coq Sportif, which generated a revenue just shy of €150 million in 2022, the Olympic and Paralympic Games are an opportunity to gain international visibility and justify its manufacturing efforts. “The Olympics

The first products of Le Coq Sportif’s Olympic Games collections will be commercialised at the end of 2023, with a planned sales surge before the start of the Games.