French press review 31 July 2012

Olympic stories and a holiday mishap fill the French papers this morning...

Several newspapers here in France are reporting that François Fillon, the former prime minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, fell of a moped and broke his ankle while on holiday on the island of Capri in Italy .

An article in Le Figaro is full with references of Fillon’s love of fast cars. For instance, the town where he’s from in France, Le Mans, is home to a 24-hour car race, which Fillon avidly supports. At the time of Fillon’s accident he was staying with the president of Ferrari, Luca di Montezemolo.

But the accident didn’t happen at high speed, instead Fillon collided with the pavement, causing him to fall off and the moped fell on his foot. According to Le Figaro he was flown by helicopter to a hospital in Rome where he had surgery. He’ll fly home to France in the coming days. So that’s the end of Fillon’s holiday!

The gold medal-winning French swimmer, Yannick Agnel, graces the front pages of Le Figaro, Aujourd’hui en France and La Croix. The headline on the front of La Croix reads: Made in France .

Other Olympic news fills tens more pages of today’s French papers. A couple of stories are particularly interesting. Libération has a portrait of Laura Flessel, who was knocked out in the quarter finals of the women’s fencing yesterday. The Guadeloupian is also the French flag-bearer for this Olympics, which the paper says will be her last.

Her winning streak in the Olympics began back in 1996 in Atlanta, where she won two gold medals, but the paper says her decline began in Sydney, where she was pipped by a Hungarian fencer, then in Beijing she was disqualified in the quarter finals.

The paper says that although she was not able to revive the winning form of the 1996 Atlantic Olympics, she has always conducted herself with grace and dignity.

Another success story involving French female athletes at the London Olympics is the women’s basketball team, who beat the Australians. According to Le Monde it seemed like an impossible feat for the Blues, as the French team is known, to beat their Australian counterparts who were the silver medallists at the Beijing Olympics. But they did, even though they were 64-61 down with just five seconds left.