Thierry Henry on love for the Olympic Games ahead of Paris 2024 – ‘It brings hope’

“It’s easy for me. Nobody is above Marie-Jose Perec. No one. 400m and 200m in Atlanta ’96. When she managed to do that, for me, it was my greatest moment ever, by a distance,” says Thierry Henry, as he recounts his favourite memory from the Olympics.

A connoisseur of Olympic history, Henry takes great pleasure in exploring the sporting legacy of the French capital. And the former Arsenal and Barcelona forward hopes the documentary will help people understand the city better, as he himself now does after taking a closer peek behind the Parisian curtain.

“What you can expect is… I learned some stuff doing it, doing the voiceovers,” Henry said. “And what I like is how resilient that town can be. People are going to see that. Through war, through some of the riots that we had back in the days, because of May ’68. You guys will not know that, I wasn’t born but I heard about it.

“But just that through sport, how always Paris has been able to go back up and breathe again and see the light at the end of the tunnel. And I think that’s very important. That’s what the Olympic Games brings, it brings hope.

“And I think that’s something that’s very important that you can see that through the documentary because we always associate Paris with style, elegance, fashion, food.

“Resilience is not always something that comes and it comes through sports also. I think that’s very important. And hopefully you can see that and it is going to be translated well in the documentary.”

After the documentary, it’s a straight line to the event next summer. The event of the century, literally, for the country.

All eyes will be on France and Henry has called on the home nation athletes to rise to the occasion and make a run at topping the medal charts on arguably sport’s grandest stage.

“What I expect, personally: medals, gold medals,” Henry says. “Winning, because it’s great to have a tournament at home and I explain it does bring joy and happiness and brings people together.

“But at the end of the day, France is a country that is supposed to have everything in order to win. Are you going to win now? Who knows? But we should be competing a bit better. So hopefully, it will happen this time.”

The biggest victory, however, is in the long-term legacy left from the Games which Henry hopes will be felt by generations of French people for years to come.

“First and foremost, for me what it was, whenever you had a big event or tournament in your country, what it does generate, and what it does bring to people first and foremost: the joy, but also the desire of wanting to practise a sport.

“After that, whatever it is, obviously, with the Olympic Games, you have a lot of choice to be able to do that, the choices are infinite. In my time, for example, you finish watching something on TV, you’re going straight to play it. So I would like that to come back.

“Also, if it can bring people to do something with it. Like not only go and play in the street, but go and join a club, whatever it is football, it can be tennis, it can be handball, it can be whatever it is, but I hope that is going to bring that back into our culture.”

Paris, la Vie Sportive, split into two 60-minute episodes, also features interviews exploring the connection of sport to Paris with some of the most distinguished sportsmen and women from different Olympic sports. These include Henry’s World Cup and Euro winning teammates Emmanuel Petit and Marcel Desailly, and tennis legends Mats Wilander, seven-time Grand Slam men’s singles champion, and the last Frenchman to win the Roland-Garros singles title, Yannick Noah plus record five-time Tour de France winner Eddy Merckx.