Meeting with Bertrand Bodin, President of the AJBD 21-25
Life of clubs and regions / Monday December 21, 2020 / source: alljudo
Newly elected president of the AJBD 21-25, Bertrand Bodin discusses his career as a judoka and leader, as well as the future and prospects of his club.
Hello Bertrand, to begin with, can you introduce yourself and tell us about your career as a judoka and as a leader?
I started Judo at 4 years old in Besançon and I continued in Dijon from the age of 6 until today (I am 54 years old). I am a 2nd dan black belt, I was a competitor in the 80s and 90s at a national level in junior and senior, I reached the French championship. At the end of the 80s, Dijon lacking a real structure to supervise the local judokas, the Alliance Dijon Judo was born with at its head the three presidents of the three big Dijon clubs of the time, and with Jean-René Girardot . At that time I was part of a group of young judokas always ready to promote our sport and organize events, with the culmination of judo nights where we managed to fill the sports center of Dijon (about 4000 people ) only on the theme of judo. So very quickly I found myself in the supervision of this club under construction, which over time has become a beautiful structure, to help young people reach their best level. Although present and attentive, I have not always been very available, because I run a company of about twenty people in the industrial sector. About ten years ago I returned to the office of ADJ 21 at the request of Jacques Berthet, who is the president whom I am now replacing at the head of the AJBD 21-25.
How is the AJBD 21-25 club doing, sportingly and economically?
As a reminder, the AJBD 21 25 was born from the merger between Franche Comté Judo and the Dijon Judo 21 Alliance four years ago, and in four years we have been able to bring together common forces to create a group of athletes with a future. promising and a framework of great skills.
The AJBD 21-25 is a sound structure with impeccable accounts: we only spend the money we have and not the money we hope to have. Everything is budgeted at the start of the year and the forecast is always very close to reality. Being able to sit on a real financial organization allows us to build with confidence a program for our athletes: supervision, training, travel, school, university, medical and of course the competitions. Obviously we all find, especially our coaches, that the budget is not sufficient to take our young people to their best level. Despite everything we have good hopes for the sporting future because our club has been elected best club in France, these last two years, in the cadet category on the number of participants in the French championship and best club in France in the cadet category in result last year with two titles.
What is your vision for the development of the club during the next Olympiad?
Our job for the next few years, without necessarily thinking about the Olympics, is to empower our new generation, elected best in France, while continuing to work on the one to come. For the moment this is the mission that the entire office has given itself. Because decisions are taken collegially by the office and according to our budget.
A new federal team has just been elected. What are your expectations ?
The biggest expectation that I would have from the new federal team would be to protect these small structures that detect and increase talent. Because once these talents are in the light, the big teams suck them up. It is not very fair and it is very frustrating to see an athlete leave without any recognition. Rules must be put in place to allow us to work better and more calmly, and which encourage us to continue to identify and train new athletes. It is not the departure of the athlete that bothers me because he must grow and flourish, but it is this lack of recognition of the work of coaches and volunteers who give of their time to help these young people reach the high level. For the record of our structure came Benjamin Darbelet, Cyrille Maret or even Hélène Receveaux, to cite only the best known.
In addition to the national bodies, the bodies of the Ligue de Bourgogne Franche Comté have been renewed. Vis-à-vis the league, we are clearly campaigning for a greater openness to structures like ours. If, in the provinces, no one is mobilized to raise the generations of junior and senior cadets, girls and boys to the highest level, who will then be the examples for the children who enter judo clubs? What will be their motivation for our sport? We must not look for other excuses to explain the drop in the number of licensees and the concentration in Paris of all the athletes (two thirds of the 158 summoned to the December test match come from Ile de France and 3 regions are not shown). But it’s another fight to be heard by the league president.
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