He is the one who popularized track cycling in France. One of the big names in the discipline. Former triple Olympic champion, Florian Rousseau took office as a new national technical director (DTN) of the French Cycling Federation (FFC), announced this on Monday.
“My professional career has been punctuated by missions, functions, posts,” said in an interview with AFP the native of Orleans, 51, who must be officially appointed on May 1.
He succeeds Christophe Manin who was in place in place for two Olympiads and during the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris where French cycling won nine medals, including three in gold.
Florian Rousseau is first of all a legend of track cycling, one of the few French sportsmen to have won three gold medals in the Olympic Games: the kilometer in Atlanta, team speed and Keirin in Sydney. He also won ten world titles, the most prestigious, individual speed, three times between 1996 and 1998.
🇫🇷 It’s official!
The triple Olympic Olympic track cycling champion Florian Rousseau was selected for the position of national technical director, for Olympiad 2025-2028 🇫🇷 pic.twitter.com/TD02CZ4iP3
— FFC (@FFCyclisme) April 7, 2025
He then became a successful coach of the French team for ten years, before leaving the FFC to direct the mission of optimizing the performance of all Olympic and Paralympic sports, summer and winter, then to pass the High Performance Director to the French Athletics Federation.
In November 2021, he returned to the fold to take control of the Olympic cycling program for the Paris Olympics.
A little more than three years later, he is DTN, placed under the double authority, hierarchical, of the Ministry of Sports and, functional, of the President of the FFC, Michel Callot, with which he says he is “perfectly aligned”.
Sportingly, Florian Rousseau wants to “assume the ambition of being permanently at the top of world cycling sport”, especially on the track where the French sprint, a discipline that is particularly close to his heart, has appeared in recent years.
“We have a lot of velodromes in France and therefore the ingredients to develop more practice. It also involves results and champions that make you want, ”he insists.