Fabrice Vallet, National Coach of France, speaks to badmintoneurope. com about the 2013 European Mixed Team Championships in Ramenskoe, the development of badminton in his country France and the badminton year 2012 from a European perspective.

badmintoneurope.com: Fabrice, what are France’s chances at the 2013 European Mixed Team Championships?
Fabrice Vallet: We (France) are still a young country in the history of badminton. But despite this, we are aiming to perform on the European top level very soon.  Until today, we have not been further than a quarterfinal. Never mind what has been the format of the competition, we lost to Poland, Netherlands, Denmark and Germany in our attempt to reach the semifinal. This competition is one of the big goals of the French Badminton Association (FFBA), because we think it gives a good idea of the badminton improvement inside a country.

For this year we have set the goal of reaching the quarterfinals once again and then giving a strong challenge to Germany who we could meet at this stage. Germany are familiar with this kind of event but our players are ready to raise their mental strength to fulfill the challenge. But we have to be careful in our group matches as we will face wih Ireland, Finland and Israel strong opponents.

Who do you think will win the tournament?
I would love to say France, because I do hope that in the very near future we will be able to do so, but the main favourite for me remains Denmark. Despite the retirement of Peter Gade, they still have a very powerful team in all events and moreover, they could rest their players as they have several options every time.

England, Russia and Germany if they achieve to kill the "Bleus", are always able to create upsets on a good day. But if I compare the situation to the past, all the teams have to focus from the group stages as the average European level is increasing a lot.

How have you rated the 2012 badminton year for France?
Our biggest goal in 2012 was the Olympic Games. We were able to qualify two players for London. Brice (Leverdez) and Hongyan (Pi) - but only Hongyan reached the the 16, where she lost to Yip of Hong Kong. We were aiming to produce at least the same results than in 2008 (quarterfinal in WS and last 16 in MS) so we are a bit disappointed with London, even if our players gave all what they had.  I am sure we will learn a lot from this failure and come back stronger in 2016.

That was a bit the same situation at the 2012 European Championships in Karlskrona where we left the competition without any medals and only one quarterfinal in the men's doubles event. We are putting a lot of hope in our young generation (U19 and U22) and they are showing in some competitions that they are very promising.  They will come soon to the top level, giving a lot of competition to our top players and creating some positive rivalry.

And now from a European perspective…
2012 has been a good year for Europe as we could see good performances in London. Europe left London with three medals which is a pretty good result. On the individual level, the top pair on the world rankings is from Europe (Mathias Boe and Carsten Mogensen). Furthermore Juliane (Schenk) and Tine (Baun) did pretty well in the women’s singles, beating occasionally the top Chinese.  The new generation of men’s singles looks very promising too - and the Danes are able to compete with the top pairs in the women’s and the mixed doubles events.

Of course, it is resting a lot on Denmark but we can see some very strong players rising and soon being able to perform on a high level. Part of our job as European coaches is to find the balance between developing badminton in our country and being able to work together to share experiences and knowledge.

Do you think the standard of badminton in Europe has increased in recent years?
I would like to say yes, but I am not sure of this. Europe is struggling to climb on world podium and even this year's U19 BWF World Championship showed a big Asian domination. The competition inside Europe is tougher than it used to be in the past because the average level has grown up on the top of the pyramid. There are less and less players of Europe in the top 10. We need to react quickly and strongly. We need to create some hard competition between European players in order to prepare them to challenge Asian players.

Your country has a lot of members. We can see at the Memberships statistics that there is a big increase in recent years. Can you reveal to us what France have been doing to achieve that success?
Absolutely! The French Badminton Association still keeps on increasing number of players. We are now 170000 affiliated members and I could explain this on several ways.

Becoming an Olympic sport has changed a lot of things for us as we had more support from ministry, local government as well  as more interest from the media. But more than this, in all our regions we have hundreds of volunteer’s people who are giving a huge time to take care of their clubs. They are working hard to create badminton schools, tournaments, to welcome and motivate players. We have now 1800 clubs all over the country and all these clubs have to refuse people every year because their sports halls are full. This means we still have a lot of potential to use.

With the major exposition due to our recent international results and the big boost of badminton in schools, French badminton can find a lot of ways to develop.

Photo by BadmintonPhoto.