Tony Parker, president of the ASvel club (© Tim Douet)

In a column published Tuesday, April 12, fifty personalities from the world of sport urging to block Marine Le Pen in the second round by voting for Emmanuel Macron. Among them, we find the former basketball player and president of Asvel and two players from Olympique Lyonnais.

About ten days before the second round of the presidential election which will see Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen oppose, Sunday April 24, a certain number of personalities from the sports world have decided to speak out to block the candidate of ‘far right. In a column published on Tuesday April 12, in The Parisian but also on France Info, these French sportsmen who are respondents to Emmanuel Macron.

The “values ​​of Olympism” on your mind

Alongside rugby player Antoine Dupont, boxer Tony Yoka and ex-swimmer Laure Manaudou, former basketball player and president of Asvel Tony Parker and Olympique Lyonnais players Eugénie Le Sommer and Amandine Henry untangle “fully aware of the difficulties that many French people are going through”but make sure you have “the belief that voting for a party that endangers Republican values ​​would be the worst medicine”.

These emblematic athletes of yesterday or today refuse to see France governed by the far-right candidate at a time when it is to host the Olympic Games in 2024, explaining: “The sport in which we believe, that of the values ​​of Olympism, is made of friendship and respect; it is the place of diversity. He rejects all discrimination.. “In these uncertain times, it is a rallying point. (…) It is because we believe in this sport, fraternal and inclusive, that we are committed to preventing our nation from placing at its head a president who embodies the very opposite, the stigmatization of the other, withdrawal, nationalism“, they will follow.

Bardet, Lemaître, Braisaz-Bouchet, the region very present

Among the signatories of this platform we also find the names of several athletes from the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region: the Auvergnat Romain Bardet (cycling), the boxer from Bourgoin-Jallieu Brahim Asloum, the former bump skier Haut- Savoyard Edgard Grospiron, Saint-Priest-en-Jarez penthalete Élodie Clouvel, Albertville biathlete Justine Braisaz-Bouchet, Chambéry skier Marie Bochet, Aindinois Christophe Lemaitre (athletics) and native rugby player Jessy Trémoulière of Beaumont in the. Alongside them we can also mention the tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, whose tennis academy is in the process of emerging from the ground in Décines-Charpieu, on the outskirts of Lyon, a stone’s throw from the future Asvel basketball hall. and the OL stadium.