Sports & Skills: interview with Mehdi Bensafi

Mehdi Bensafi, Sport Manager in charge of the Taekwondo and Para Taekwondo competition for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games and President of the NECC (National ESport Club & Community) association in Vaux-en Velin (France), is working with WorldSkills Lyon 2024 as part of our Sports & Skills programme. Prior to this, Mehdi was an Olympic coach for the French Taekwondo Federation, then Deputy National Technical Director in charge of innovation, research and development within the federation.   

You are currently involved in the Sports & Skills programme of WorldSkills Lyon 2024, which aims to develop lasting links between sports and skills competitions. Did you know about the WorldSkills movement before joining the Programme?     

I knew WorldSkills from a distance, I had only heard about it. I knew that skills competitions existed because of the media coverage they can get, but I didn’t know that they existed in the form of an International Competition which is very similar to the Olympic Games. It was during a September 2023 visit to the WorldSkills France National Finals held in Lyon that I was amazed at the similarities between a skills competition and a sports competition.   

Sport has an obvious societal role, and whether in the corporate world or in sport (or e-sport), it’s essential to showcase young talents. What do you think of the parallel between WorldSkills Competitors and athletes?     

First of all, we have the word competition in common: and for any competition, whatever the field, there is preparation, and the experience of preparation. Then there’s the day of the competition, and the competition experience. As soon as we talk about experience, we’re also talking about skills that have been mastered or tackled. Whether it’s a sporting competition or a professional competition, you come out of it with new things that will help build an individual for the rest of his or her career. When we talk about a sports competition, we talk about high standards. When we speak of a skill, we often think of productivity, and productivity is also a form of high standards. This level of excellence can be found in manual skills, where certain aspects come close to art. The WorldSkills Competition succeeds in highlighting excellence in all kinds of skills by highlighting methodologies, training, vision and approach. 

Through its values and principles of inclusion and diversity, the WorldSkills Lyon 2024 Organizing Committee is committed to highlight the importance of educating young people – through the Sports & Skills Programme, but also with other actions. You seem to share these values. Can you tell us about this?     

Alongside my professional career and experience, I’ve continued to get involved in the associative world, especially with young people, because I owe my career path and the skills I’ve acquired to structures that have enabled younger me to meet people already involved in professional fields. They attracted us through sport and eSport activities. For us, sport and e-sport are tools of attraction, pretexts that enable us to capture young people with whom we’re going to make initial contact. They enable us to speak to young people using their own codes, with things that attract them, and we use them as a support, as a tool, to convey messages on the issues of confidence, training, methodology, which are necessary in these fields, but also so that they can acquire skills that can be found in the professional world and in the various skills on the WorldSkills Competition.   

Like athletes, WorldSkills Competitors are coached to give their best in competition. As a former captain of a professional sports team, do you have a message for the Competitors who are currently undergoing their physical and mental preparations for the WorldSkills Competition in September?     

I’m just going to tell them something I said to myself when I was an Olympic coach: sometimes you think you’ve got no right to make mistakes, because there’s only one gold medal. I was constantly trying to see if I had pulled all the levers I could, asking myself in what areas I had room to maneuver that I hadn’t gone looking for. It can be physical preparation, mental preparation, or a specific aspect of the skill… The so-called grey areas that we prefer to leave in the shadows because we don’t necessarily feel confident enough. Well, I’d like to tell them that there’s still time to leave no grey areas!