Olympic contenders: Lisa Barbelin | Les Huit à Paris 2024

This article series, Les Huit à Paris, spotlights eight of the biggest contenders for the individual titles at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

It must be tough being the ’elder stateswomen’ of a team at the age of only 24.

But Lisa Barbelin is leading a home team in Paris where the other two archers, Amélie Cordeau and Caroline Lopez, are just 18 and 20 years old.

It’s the second Olympic Games for the left-hander from Moselle…

…in a venue being managed by the last left-hander to win an Olympics, French superstar Sébastien Flute, in front of a crowd that will be consistently reminded that the last victory for France was delivered by Flute some 32 yeas ago.

In Paris, Lisa will carry the hopes of a nation – whether she likes it or not. 

Quick stats

• Name: Lisa Barbelin, France
• Age: 24
• World ranking: 11
• Olympic caps: 1 (Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games)
• Instagram: @lisa.barbelin.oly

Why it might happen

France is one of the more middle-successful archery nations… and if you include the medals from the early Olympics (1900-1920), they’d be fourth all-time.

Modern… not so much. 

Seb Flute won individual gold at Barcelona 1992, causing a huge spike in the sport’s popularity, and then Jean-Charles Valladont took silver at Rio 2016, sandwiching a bronze for the recurve women’s team at Beijing 2008. Podiums have been present, if not consistent.

But the potential is clear.

And much of the expectation has fallen on the shoulders of Lisa Barbelin, currently ranked 10th in the world and runner-up at the Olympic test event last year in Paris.

“I never experienced something like that,” she said afterwards. “Everybody was cheering, so many people were here to watch beautiful archery… I feel I have all the cards in my hand for Paris”.

Barbelin, being young, blonde, media-savvy, emotional and intelligent (she is studying chemistry at the Sorbonne in Paris) has become a very public face of the Equipe de France. She feeds off emotion in the arena.

If she can translate that into a podium place, then the sky really is the limit. 

Why it might not

A gold medal would be an extraordinary achievement – no European woman has ever won the individual title in the modern, post-1972 era.

Her average arrow, at 9.1, is not up there with the very best Asian archers, and we haven’t seen a major outdoor win from her since the pandemic-interfered year in 2021.

It’s been good, but maybe not world-beating – although her bronze medal at the 2024 European Championships suggests, once again, that she’s capable of making the business end of tournaments.

The real danger is her running into a tough opponent in the round of 16.

A home crowd – of 8000 people – might produce magic. And Barbelin is the kind of archer that could use that magic. Perhaps the archer facing her will be utterly outnumbered. It matters…

…probably even worth a few points.

Did you know? 

France’s best Olympic archery result came all the way back at Antwerp 1920, when the competition format was very different indeed.

Uniquely, at those Games, the rounds were variations of ‘popinjay’ archery, involving trying to knock wooden bird-shaped targets off poles high above the ground.

(It’s still practised in parts of Belgium today).

France’s Julien Brule took five medals home – individual gold and silver, two team silvers, and a team bronze. However, there are just 30 participants from three countries in the official results – all men. Hosts Belgium accounted for 14 archers, while France and the Netherlands each had eight.

It was a long way from modern archery – but it's still on the books, even if we don’t count these podiums in the modern all-time medal tables.