4 min readMay 4, 2026 11:08 PM IST
Until March 2025, France had never had a male shuttler in the top 10. One year later, Christo Popov, Alex Lanier and Toma Popov Junior had taken down some of the best in the world to reach the Thomas Cup final.
The transformation didn’t happen overnight. It happened one coach at a time.
“The biggest difference right now is that our best players are working with a lot of coaches,” says Toma Popov Senior, father and coach of the Popov brothers. “Earlier, there used to be one coach for 20 players. Now we have every player working with an individual coach.”
One coach. One player. That is the whole French system in six words. Everything else — the sports science, the AI, the family training centres, the INSEP programmes — is an expression of the same idea. Not a collective. A collection of individuals, each given exactly what they need, built to play as one.
It was the foundation of a breakout 2025 — the year French badminton announced itself to the world. Lanier became the first French shuttler to enter the top 10 and win a Super 750 tournament, taking the Japan Open. Christo won the World Tour Finals. Three French men now sit in the top 20. On Saturday in Horsens, France reached the Thomas Cup final.
The science behind the surge
The individual coaching model was the structure. Sports science was the engine.
“We have expanded our horizon on sports science. It is a great tool,” says Popov Senior. “The analysis of every player has to be minute — as microscopic as it can get. We analyse how our players move, we have a team that keeps assessing their muscles and tendons with every move. Sometimes it is also important to evaluate how much stress you are putting in during training.”
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France went further than standard sports science. The coaches at INSEP — the Institut National du Sport, de l’Expertise et de la Performance, where Lanier trains under former Lithuanian international Kęstutis Navickas — were early adopters of artificial intelligence, using AI tools to personalise training programmes for individual players.
“The plans at INSEP and the way we are training has resulted in our players having better neuromuscular gains — better countermovement jumps and sprints,” Navickas said on The Average Not Average podcast.
While the Popov brothers train at their family-run centre in Fos-sur-Mer in southern France, the INSEP pathway produced a different but complementary model. Two systems. One principle.
The father who learned from his mistakes
Toma Popov Senior played international badminton in a different era. His son believes the gap between those eras is precisely what makes him effective.
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“While he was coaching me and from his playing days, my father has learnt a lot. That has definitely helped Christo in becoming a top ten player. I think that’s the natural way forward — where we learn from our past mistakes and improve in future,” says Popov Junior.
The father-son arrangement at Fos-sur-Mer is one of the more unusual in world badminton. It has produced one of the more unusual results — a player in the world’s top five whose entire development has been managed within the family. Individual attention taken to its logical extreme.
Bigger than singles
France’s rise in men’s singles has grabbed the headlines, but the system was already proving itself elsewhere. Thom Gicquel and Delphine Delrue became the first French shuttlers to enter the world top 10 in any category — proof, before the singles breakthrough, that individual attention at scale could work across the board.
“The reason behind that is the system — so many coaches, a dedicated sports science facility,” Delrue told The Indian Express at the India Open. “The performances have improved over the years.”
From one coach for 20 players to one coach per player. From no top-10 men’s singles presence to three in the top 20. From Thomas Cup also-rans to finalists.
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The system, it turns out, was the answer. France just had to build it first.
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
